By Afrah Asif
The outputs mentioned in this blog post are part of the Without Fear fellowship program 2022 – 2023. The Bachchao Project started this fellowship program to bring together a cohort of talented individuals with experience and interest in the gender and development space, who could bring fresh perspectives and potential solutions to threats faced by structurally silenced women and gender minorities in the country. This cohort could learn from itself and others, and look at innovative tech based interventions and ideas. The fellows were based around three central verticals; the social and development space, tech, and art. Afrah was part of the social and development space Vertical.
“Violence seems random, and everywhere, there is no saying who would be targeted and who would be spared. Fatima, a young girl currently residing in Saudi Arabia, uses social media to stay in the loop of Indian politics and keenly follows and speaks up against atrocities committed against Muslims in India. While visiting India this year, she admitted that her ‘entire family was terrified’. When she did stay some time in India, she felt a sense of dissonance. Safety was surprising, not relieving.”
For most Muslim women interviewed for this report, social media was their window to the world. Its discursive potential had enticed them. For the first time in their lives, using social media, they learned to forge a political identity, be stakeholders in political conversations that have traditionally been dominated by men, advocate for what they believed in, and create an impact even if such impact meant changing a colleague’s ideas about something through extensive debating in the comments section. Targeted hate speech against these women then obviously harmed them much beyond their online presence.
The title of this report comes from what one of the interviewees said in response to the ‘liberal claim’ that while Muslim women are being targeted today, tomorrow, other marginalized women will be, and then all women will be. ‘Today is it us’, she had said, ‘tomorrow it will be us, and yesterday it was us’. In asserting so, she reemphasized Muslim women’s victimhood in light of the Hindutva project and drew a critical distinction missed by many- that hate and violence against Muslim women is not a way for misogyny to fulfill its agenda, but that misogyny against Muslim women is yet another way to fulfill the Hindutva agenda. Such a distinction is significant as we are confronted with political leaders and groups regularly insisting that the issues that Muslim women face are ‘women’s issues’ and not Muslim women’s issues.
Based on a series of interviews with activist-victims, this report seeks to complicate our understanding of the impact of targeted hate speech and push us to explore what meaningful solidarity and action centering Muslim women should look like. Allowing the interviewees a free-flowing space to mold their own narratives has helped this report move beyond cliches of oppression and marginalization to allow Muslim women the space to explore their hurt outside of narratives that they are socially forced to perform.
Through this report, the author has sought to contextualize the lives, work, and hurt of Muslim women who have been affected by digital hate speech. In order to convey the same, the report is divided into three distinct chapters: the first dealing with the hurt itself, the second dealing with the impact and aftermath of being subject to this hurt, and the final chapter dealing with the action and advocacy that is particularly being taken up by civil society initiatives at various levels in order to emphasize the bottom-up nature of digital hate speech.