of gender relations. The increase in public violence
against women and the gendered and sexualized
discourse of fundamentalist groups is in part a
response to the increasing public visibility of women,
the undermining of hegemonic masculinity in tra-
ditional patriarchal structures, and the growing
consciousness and assertion of women’s rights in
the region.
Increasing numbers of women in all three coun-
tries are entering the more visible sectors of
employment – export industries, banks, and offices –
and in some cases taking on hitherto male jobs.
Simultaneously there are reports of numerous cases
where women have started asserting their rights to
choice in marriage, property, maintenance, and
divorce. It is in this changing context of modernity
that the state and community has responded with
measures to reassert control and redefine the con-
tours of identity. State discourses and legal meas-
ures have wider implications since they sanction
the right of control over women from the family/
community to any man on the street. For instance,
in Pakistan the institutionalization of laws such as
Hudood, Evidence, and Qisas and Diyat – which
reduce women to second-class citizens – have been
primarily used against poor working-class and
destitute women, but they also expose upper- and
middle-class women to the constant threat of sur-
veillance by the police, mullahs, and the evidence of
any man. In Bangladesh community control was
asserted through fatwas against women who trans-
gressed social norms. In India the controversy
over Muslim personal laws (the Shah Bano case)
reasserted community control over Muslim women
who sought to assert independent citizenship rights.
There has been escalation in direct forms of vio-
lence against women ranging from tarring the mid-
riffs of women wearing saris in Bangladesh, acid
throwing, honor killings, to the glorification of sati
(widow immolation) as a symbol of true Indian/
Hindu womanhood. The centrality of sexual vio-
lence in the Hindutva political project was manifest
in the pogrom in Gujarat in 2003. Violation of
Muslim women’s bodies/community boundaries,
by acts of public rape and targeted attacks on their
reproductive organs functioned to eliminate/humil-
iate/violate the minority community and simulta-
neously forge a new form of Hindu hegemonic
masculinity that was virile and omnipotent.
Women have been agents as well as objects in the
discourse and practice of religious fundamentalist
movements in South Asia. The extensive mobiliza-
tion and activism of women in fundamentalist
movements in the region have raised problematic
questions about agency, activism, and empower-288 identity politics
ment. Women in fundamentalist movements have
incited, participated and justified violence against
the “other” community. Despite supporting an
agenda that curtails their rights and constructs
images of the dependent, self-sacrificing, dutiful
wife/mother, women in these movements have also
experienced freedom from traditional restrictions
on early marriage and mobility and have gained
access to physical training and participation in the
public political sphere. This feature of Hindu fun-
damentalism has been characterized as “controlled
emancipation.” The paradoxical nature of women’s
complicity and collusion in communalized identity
politics is an area for further research and political
engagement for women’s movements that stress the
significance of feminist agency.
The complexity of identity politics in the region is
reflected in the diversity of political positions
within the women’s movements of the region. There
are broadly three kinds of group: those who con-
tinue to speak on the basis of an undifferentiated
notion of women, see religion as inherently irra-
tional and patriarchal, and argue for a secular non-
sexist law that guarantees equal citizenship and
justice; those who articulate a dual identity as Mus-
lim and Christian feminists and focus on reforming
religious laws drawing on progressive reinterpreta-
tions of the Qur±àn and the Bible; and those who
propose a combined strategy of reform plus a secu-
lar code of equal rights for women. New identity
groups continue to emerge, such as the dalitfemi-
nist group in India who argue from an epistemo-
logical standpoint of the most oppressed and are
critical of the mainstream women’s movement.
Women’s groups in the region have also linked with
transnational networks such as Women Living
Under Muslim Laws as well as established regional
and cross-border alliances, such as South Asian
feminist networks and peace and democracy coali-
tions, thereby linking the issue of women/gender
and identity politics with militarism and democra-
tization in the region.Bibliography
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