New Delhi: A master’s degree in management did not prepare 24-year-old Sara Khan* for the routine bigotry at her first job in Hyderabad, at one of the Big Four companies.
Recently, a senior executive said they wished hardline Hindutva leaders succeed two-time Prime Minister Narendra Modi. They will “put [some] people in place,” she was told, referring to minorities like Muslims.
Education is offered as a silver bullet to help marginalised communities but it doesn’t help end the discrimination they face. Although the forms of discrimination change, it still persists. Like Khan, Muslim women with jobs in India’s booming corporate sectors are grappling with increasing Islamophobia at their workplaces and frequently encounter snide remarks and systemic discrimination.
Several women from the minority community have underlined that they experience hiring bias, toxic bosses and harassment because of their religion. “An Indian Muslim woman faces challenges with each of the three things that make up this phrase,” explains Ruha Shadab, founder and director of Led By Foundation.
Community members and programme participants of the LedBy Foundation at an event in New Delhi. Photo: Led By Foundation
India is battling three socio-economic and political issues. First, millions of workers are clamouring for the same jobs. The unemployment was 9.2% in late 2023, and only 73 million out of the 150 million strong urban workforce had full-time jobs, Reuters reported.
Second, Islamophobia is at an all-time high. In 2019, Michelle Bachelet, the former United Nations Human Rights chief noted that increasing “harassment and targeting of minorities” such as Muslims, Dalits and Adivasis will undermine India’s economic growth story. She said “divisive policies” and “narrow political agenda” are driving the further marginalisation of people.
Third, while Muslim women comprise 6.9% of India’s population, only 4.9% of Muslim women have formal employment. Close to 48% of Muslim women, the highest in any religious group, were illiterate as per the 2011 Census. According to experts, lack of education and patriarchy have been two key factors for Muslim women’s poor workforce participation. But beyond these educational and socio-cultural factors, some of which are common to several other Indian minorities, there are several issues at play which haven’t been investigated.
Even as Indian women’s workforce participation has increased according to the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS), an analysis by the Centre for Data and Analysis reveals that over a fifth of Indian women with 15 or more years of education were unemployed in 2022-23.
Shadab points to a systematic bias in the hiring process. In 2022, Led By, a leadership incubator focusing on the professional development of Muslim women, conducted a research project in which it applied for a thousand entry-level jobs with the same resume under two different names – Priyanka Sharma and Habiba Ali – of a Hindu and a Muslim woman. For every two personal callbacks that Sharma received, Ali got one. Ali also received fewer offer letters. Shadab says similar studies in other countries have shown that Muslim women’s chances of landing a job would plummet if the resumes had a hijab-wearing woman.
When there aren’t enough jobs, Shadab says their study shows “it’s more likely that the Muslim woman is left behind.”
Most diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives focus on improving women’s participation, with limited attention on intersectionality with identity.
Nisha Shah*, a human resources (HR) executive and manager in her late thirties, has worked for more than a decade in recruitment and placements. She was the lone Muslim woman in a team of over 80 people in the HR department at a large telecom firm in the late 2000s.
Shah recalls it wasn’t uncommon for senior executives to reject candidates who were Muslim women or young mothers.
For some, problems even arise after being hired. Khan was devastated to learn none of the managers wanted to take her on their team. She was told she only got the position because a senior Muslim manager hired her for her religion.
Prayers and hijab
Nisha Abdullah*, 30, currently an assistant manager at a quasi-government firm in New Delhi, stopped offering prayers on office premises. She dropped the habit when colleagues at her former workplace, a multinational corporation, expressed their displeasure. She says most young people in her office have an ignorant view of Islam and Muslim culture.
The seeds of hatred were always there, Shah says. When the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won a string of state elections leading up to the Parliamentary win in 2014, one of her colleagues had commented: “I think it’s time for you to find another place to go to.”
Shah, who prays five times a day, says such Islamophobia at the workplace – amongst highly educated Indian youth – has become more audacious. She says her two-three prayer breaks are shorter than the frequent smoke and tea breaks her colleagues take. But she was asked to leave her religion out of the office. There was no holiday for Eid and no concessions to her schedule during the month of Ramzan. But when the Hindu festival of Diwali came around, the company organised pujas at work.
One male colleague verbally abused her for months for offering namaz. It was only after she filed a complaint a half-year-long internal investigation was launched. He was eventually fired.
“There is this very strong sense of being, at best, the token minority and, at worst, ‘the other’ in the office space. You are made acutely aware of that,” Shah lamented.
Shah rose through the ranks to become manager at the telecom firm, but quit after 12 years of work. She says she was taunted for her religion and her mannerisms.
“I started getting panic attacks when I was often told: ‘for God sake, why don’t you people get out of this place,’” she recalled. She realised she couldn’t change the system, and it left her hopeless.
Whitewashing
Shadab says Muslim women have begun to “whitewash” their identities by making sacrifices. Like Khan, they keep their head low and try to fit in by hiding parts of themselves and their lives.
Several Muslim women from across India have shared their experiences of subtle as well as overt discrimination with the reporter. Nearly all sources requested anonymity as they were afraid of backlash and trolling. Notably, in 2021 personal details and photographs of 100 Muslim women were auctioned on black-market apps.
Others said their colleagues targeted their food habits or sartorial choices. Shah was asked to not wear salwar-kameez. A bureaucrat questioned one woman for wearing a bindi, one was shunned for being a teetotaler and another was ridiculed for being a vegetarian. Almost all said they were asked to denounce terrorism.
The ultimate whitewash is to pass off as a Hindu person, Khan says. While her parents didn’t intentionally give her a religiously ambiguous name, it has been beneficial. She says it may be a reality that Muslim parents are choosing religiously ambiguous names [like Aisha, Sara, Nisha or Neelima] to avoid attracting attention to their identity. Khan also mentions that it’s an option she may even consider if she has children.
Similarly, food writer Aysha Tanya recalls being mistaken as a Hindu by a landlord when she moved to Bengaluru for a job. When he figured she was a Muslim, he denied her the apartment.
The aftermath of communal riots
Forty-something Afreen* lives on a porch on the threshold of her landlord’s house in Shiv Vihar, New Delhi. This home can barely contain her five-member family, but often also doubles up as her work space.
In this confine, the widow and her four children handcraft thousands of rakhi – sacred threads sisters tie around their brothers’ wrists during the Hindu festival of Raksha Bandhan – and upcycled envelopes for use as cash-bearing covers gifted during festivals.
For decades, a contractor comes by in March or April and commissions an order of rakhis. She makes less than Rs 9,000 a month for her work.
In February 2020, Afreen and her children fled when communal violence engulfed their neighbourhood. She recalls that a Hindu mob passed by her house, followed by looting and mass destruction around her neighbourhood.
She says there was barely anything to loot in her house. But the months-long displacement followed by the pandemic lockdown hit her sustenance.
In India, the pandemic was accompanied by anti-Muslim disinformation.
That summer, Afreen barely earned anything.
A Muslim woman who witnessed the Delhi riots in 2020 said her small house and goods were destroyed. Experts say destruction of property and the lack of access to capital is crippling because these women lack the means to restart. Photo: Mahima Jain
Rising communal tensions in the country – in the form of communal violence and everyday experiences of Islamophobia – are further marginalising Muslim women like her, who eke out a living in an unorganised sector that employs 439.9 million. Hate crimes against religious minorities increased by 544% in states where the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party had secured the largest vote share in 2014, a 2019 working paper found.
“Even though there is no specific data that points to a lack of security in the social sense affecting jobs, … this is one reason why we have low levels of participation from women, particularly Muslim women,” Aakar Patel, journalist, activist and author formerly with human rights group Amnesty International, says.
There are 50 million Muslim women in India. Only 15% of them are employed, versus 26% of Hindu women, according to 2021-2022 labour force data. Of this, around nine of ten Muslim workers get by through the informal economy, as craftspersons, tailors, weavers, domestic workers, hawkers, etc.
Many Muslim workers are employed in the informal sector as craftspersons, tailors, weavers, domestic workers, hawkers, etc. Photo: Mahima Jain
Patel says conservative social norms, while historically suppressing Muslim women’s workforce participation, tend to erode over time. But in India, new barriers took the place of old ones.
In the winter of 2019-2020, Muslim women led peaceful sit-ins protesting India’s plan to amend its citizenship laws. Critics of the law say it makes faith a condition for citizenship, despite the Constitution prohibiting religious discrimination.
Under the law, citizenship can be granted to all religious minorities from neighbouring countries, but it excludes Muslims. Commentators like Mukul Kesavan have noted that “its main purpose is the delegitimisation of Muslims’ citizenship.” The law was passed in 2019, but this March the government announced that it will be implemented. The path to this has been marked by peaceful protests that often turned violent due to clashes.
In February 2020, ahead of elections in Delhi, several politicians delivered hateful speeches against the women who were protesting the CAA.
Communal clashes broke out in northwest Delhi, first affecting both Hindus and Muslims. But Amnesty later found Muslims “bore the brunt of loss of business and property”. Ultimately, it claimed 53 lives and affected thousands.
As the mob entered her street, Ruksar*, 40, locked her house in Shiv Vihar, a crowded neighbourhood of working class Hindus and Muslims. She fled with her children and ill husband. When she returned days later, she found the 64-sq. ft house had been torched. Her few possessions, including her savings, were either gutted or looted.
Ruksar makes around Rs 9,000 a month a day for odd jobs like sticking sequins on fabrics and punching holes in faux leather belts, from her home. In February 2020, the goods she was working on were destroyed during the riots, she says, costing her thousands of rupees. She hasn’t been compensated.
The destruction of property and the lack of access to capital is crippling because these women lack the means to restart, Archana Prasad, professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University’s Centre for Informal Sector and Labour Studies, says.
Muslims are among India’s poorest religious groups and least upwardly mobile, surveys have found. Data from 2010 show around 31% of Muslims live below the poverty line. But recent labour force data also indicates a decline in the number of Muslims looking for work.
Prasad found that the impact on people engaged in home-based work and the informal sector was significant. In a 2020 paper, she wrote that such forms of employment are hard to compensate for and are often neglected in state rehabilitation schemes.
The incidence of hate crimes and “bulldozer drives”– where the state or Hindutva groups demolish Muslim-owned property – has risen across the country.
Such attacks, often with political support by the Hindutva rightwing and no compensation, deny Muslim families an opportunity to rebuild, she noted. The polarisation and social and economic boycotts of Muslim workers and Muslim-owned businesses further push them into poverty.
Communal violence affects marriage outcomes too, a 2023 study found. Women’s age of marriage fell after the 2002 Gujarat riots, one of the worst episodes of Hindu-Muslim violence in India’s history. Of this, Muslim women, who were also victims of sexual violence in the riots, were more likely to get married before they turned 18. The authors noted this “potentially adversely affects their socioeconomic well-being.”
Researchers have also found poor Muslim women struggle to navigate the bureaucracy to access social benefits.
Afeena, who heads the Domestic Workers Union in Bengaluru, says homeowners and families often don’t want to hire Muslim women as domestic workers. At union meetings, Muslim women have told her some of them change their names to hide their identities.
Studies show young women from poor Muslim and marginalised caste households are less socially mobile than those from other groups.
Shabnam Nafisa Kalim, 25, says she had a tough time getting out of her conservative neighbourhood in New Delhi. Her parents migrated from Bihar to a cramped locality. She was surrounded by small factory units or home-based workers who blasted music as they worked through the day, undercut by the ceaseless whirring of the sewing machine. Like Ruksar, she was a garment worker through her teens.
“Where we grew up, there was hardly any place to study,” Kalim recalls.
But with her parents’ support she managed to get a masters degree. Today, Kalim runs a nonprofit to help Muslim women and operates the Mashaal Library in Mustafabad where students from impoverished homes have a quiet place to study. A similar space will open in Khajuri in April.
Shabnam Nafisa Kalim, 25, saw bloodshed and petrol bombs during the 2020 Delhi riots. She escaped by the skin of her teeth. But she couldn’t call any of her friends to help her. Photo: Mahima Jain
Kalim also runs the Khair Foundation, which helps Muslim women secure a livelihood. Few such women-run organisations for other Muslim women exist. She helped Ruksar get back on her feet, yet her own journey as a Muslim working woman has been lonelier. Over the years, Kalim’s Hindu classmates and friends have turned their backs on her. She is frequently trolled and harassed online.
During the 2020 riots, Kalim saw bloodshed and petrol bombs. She escaped by the skin of her teeth. But she couldn’t call any of her friends to help her. She wishes the hatred didn’t run so deep. “None of my Hindu friends called to check if I am alive or dead.”
*Names of some sources are changed to protect their identities.
Mahima Jain is an independent editor and journalist.
The reporting for this story was supported by the IWMF Kim Wall Memorial Fund.
