Muslim Women in Modi's India
- Genocide Watch
- Jul 1, 2025
- 1 min read
Muslim Women in Modi’s India: Hindutva’s Weaponization of Gender-based Violence against India’s Muslim women, 2002 to Today
July 2025
By Olivia Cash
Muslim women in India today face a significant genocidal threat from the rise of Hindu Nationalism. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi's leadership, patriarchy and religious discrimination intersect to drive sexual violence against India’s minority ethnic women. While the use of women’s bodies as battlegrounds is neither new nor unique to India, it is a fundamental characteristic of India’s communal violence.
This sad reality is explored in Megha Kumar’s doctoral dissertation, Communal Riots, Sexual Violence and Hindu Nationalism in Post-Independence Gujarat (1969-2002). Her research was later published as a book, Communalism and Sexual Violence in India: The Politics of Gender, Ethnicity and Conflict (2016 and reissued by Bloomsbury in 2022). Kumar’s work identifies the critical facilitators of sexual violence in India’s communal conflicts by addressing three major pogroms that took place in Gujarat in 1969, 1985, and 2002.
Taking up from where Kumar left off, this report draws comparison between riots in Gujarat 2002, those in Muzaffarnagar in 2013, and the current culture of Modi’s India, including the riots in Delhi in 2020. Three key conditions for religiously-motivated sexual attacks against Muslim women within these riots are presented: Hindutva ideology, political coordination, and impunity for violent attacks. These three factors also manifest in rising levels of hate speech, social media abuse, and conspiracies like “Love Jihad.” Together, these conditions create fertile ground for future sexual violence against Muslim women.
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