Two flags fly over the subcontinent’s women. One says cover them. The other says protect them.
We do not think the two are equivalent in cruelty. We think they are equivalent in structure.
No Hindu Equivalent to Zia.
There is no Hindu-nationalist equivalent of Zia ul-Haq’s Hudood Ordinances of 1979, which for decades made a raped woman’s complaint the raw material of a charge against her. There is no Hindu-nationalist equivalent of the Qanun-e-Shahadat of 1984, under which, in certain documentary and financial matters, two women’s testimony is required to equal one man’s. Pakistan partially repaired the first in 2006. The second stands.
That is statutory. It is one-sided. Anyone who tells you the two flags are the same is lying to you, and we are not going to.
What follows is about something else.
I. Two Patriarchies.
By the Crescent we mean the political and clerical claim to speak for Muslims. By the Trident we mean the political project that claims to speak for Hindus, which is to say the RSS and the organisations of its family, together with the mobs and the caste panchayats that act in its idiom. We use the trishul as shorthand and we do so with a warning label, because Shiva’s weapon became a party symbol only when the VHP handed it out, and lifting a god’s iconography to name a political movement is precisely the trick this essay exists to expose. The same warning attaches to Kinder, Küche, Kirche, which we take from Wilhelmine Germany to describe the Crescent’s position and which fits it too well to be safe.
The Crescent states its position plainly. A woman’s sphere is the home, and her titles are daughter, wife, mother. Because it is stated, it can be argued with.
The Trident never states its position, and so it passes for progress. Saffron discourse does not seclude women. It claims them. In September 2013 the mahapanchayats of Muzaffarnagar mobilised under bahu-beti bachao, save our daughters-in-law and our daughters, and sixty people died and fifty thousand were displaced. The slogan is not decoration on that violence. It is the engine. Once a woman is our daughter, an injury to her is an injury to us, and the remedy belongs to us.
Consider what this produced. Bilkis Bano was twenty-one and pregnant when a Hindu mob gang-raped her and killed fourteen of her family, among them her three-year-old daughter. Eleven men were convicted. On 15 August 2022 the Gujarat government released them under its remission policy, they were met with sweets, their feet were touched, and a BJP legislator who sat on the panel that approved the release observed that some of the men were Brahmins of good sanskaar. India’s Supreme Court quashed the remission in January 2024 and sent them back.
Bano’s statement, issued through her lawyer, made one observation before it made any other. Nobody had asked her. No one had inquired about her safety or her wellbeing before the decision was taken. Then: “how can justice for any woman end like this?”
II. The Hazrat Khadija test.
The Crescent’s defenders have a list, and we will produce it ourselves rather than let it be produced against us.
Khadija was a merchant who employed the Prophet before she married him. Razia ruled Delhi from 1236. Nur Jahan’s name was struck on imperial coin. Four Begums governed Bhopal in succession for more than a century. In 1905 a Bengali Muslim woman, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, wrote Sultana’s Dream, in which the men are shut in the mardanaand the women run the state, and she wrote it in English, in Bhagalpur, while her husband was alive.
Khadija was a trader in Mecca and she died around 619, before the hijra, before there was an Islamic polity of any kind. The strongest evidence for Islam’s regard for women is a woman formed entirely by the commercial pagan society that Islam replaced.
III. The map does not match the faith.
World Bank figures put female labour force participation across North Africa and the Middle East at 18.7 percent, the lowest of any region on earth, against 28.1 percent for South Asia. That gap is real, it is enormous.
Deniz Kandiyoti’s 1988 paper on the patriarchal bargain drew the belt of what she called classic patriarchy, and it runs from North Africa through the Middle East, across North India, and into China. It does not halt at the Khyber. It crosses the Hindi heartland without slowing. It excludes Muslim Indonesia and Muslim Malaysia. If you want a map of where women in Asia are least free, religion will not draw it. Land tenure, patrilocal marriage, and the clan economics of honour will.
Then there is Bangladesh, ninety percent Muslim, whose female participation reached 44.15 percent in 2024, up from 24.08 percent in 1990. It got there through garments. Export industrialisation put women in factories and paid them.
IV. The female favour.
In 1985 the Supreme Court awarded Shah Bano maintenance from the husband who had divorced her. In 1986 Rajiv Gandhi’s government legislated the judgment away, because the clergy demanded it and Congress wanted the votes. In 2019 the BJP criminalised instant triple talaq, and Muslim women gained a protection they had not held the year before.
Read the two together and something ugly stands up. A secular party sold Muslim women to buy Muslim men. A Hindu-nationalist party defended Muslim women in order to prosecute Muslim men. In neither case was the woman the client. In both she was the instrument.
The 2019 Act was not worthless. It was real. But a right delivered as a weapon can be withdrawn as a weapon, and the woman holding it should know whose hand it is in.
V. The invisible kind.
Now the point on which we part company with almost everyone who writes about this.
Visible patriarchy has an address. Purdah, guardianship, the rule against travelling alone: these are rules, and rules can be struck out. Pakistan’s Aurat March knows exactly what it is marching at, and its placards are legislative documents. Mera jism meri marzi. Khana khud garam kar lo. Lo baith gayi sahi se. Ghar ka kaam, sab ka kaam. Every one of those names a specific man doing a specific thing, and can be answered. The clergy called the march immoral, a National Assembly panel called it the same, and two High Courts declined to ban it. That is what an argument looks like. The Crescent’s patriarchy is the ugly kind, and precisely because it declares itself, it is the kind that can be repealed.
Invisible patriarchy has no address. It lives in the second shift and the marriage market and the unpaid field. You cannot repeal a father-in-law.
Watch it operate inside a statistic. India’s female participation rate has climbed steeply, and this has been reported as an achievement. Meanwhile the share of rural women working in agriculture rose from 71.1 percent in 2018-19 to 76.9 percent in 2023-24, and the new work is largely unpaid or self-employed. The women did not enter the economy. They went back to the family plot. The number counts her. Nobody pays her.
That is why bahu-beti bachao is the more dangerous of the two slogans. Seclusion tells a woman she may not leave the house. Protection tells her there is nothing to leave it for, that the street belongs to men who will avenge her and the home belongs to men who will keep her, and it says this while calling itself her defence. There is no clause to strike down. There is no cleric to name. There is a flag, and it is held by her brother.
VI. Back to Bilks
After the eleven men walked free, Bilkis Bano said she had exhausted her reservoir of courage. She had not. She went back to the court that had freed them and she won.
A red line around misogyny is worth nothing if it is drawn only around the other side’s territory.
The Crescent tells a woman what she may not do. The Trident tells her what she is for. Both are in writing. Only one of them can be repealed.
Neither has ever asked her.