Ali Khan Mahmudabad's Arrest Reveals the Political Capture of Women's Rights in India

The arrest of Ashoka University professor Ali Khan Mahmudabad in May 2025, following a social media post deemed “objectionable” by the Haryana State Commission for Women has underscored a troubling trend. The institutions which were established with the aim to safeguard women’s rights are being blatantly repurposed to fulfil the state's political agenda.

One such agenda has been targeting voices which do not fall in line with the state-backed popular narrative. But, as pointed out by Mahmudabad himself, is in some sense, also an onset of a new trend. The trend is new because this time the latest addition to the list of institutions weaponised by the state to punish speech and suppress dissent is a women's commission.

While the weaponisation of the women’s commission is new, the use of women’s rights to propagate a majoritarian agenda is something which we have seen aplenty in the past decade. 

Majoritarian gender washing

Coined by feminist scholars, majoritarian gender washing is a term used often to describe how regimes, quite intelligently, adopt a language of gender justice in the garb of empowering women while fulfilling the actual intent of sanitising authoritarianism. In India, it has been quite rampant and visible through instances such as criminalisation of Muslim men under the guise of “protecting Muslim women” through moves like the triple talaq ban, or “protecting Hindu women” through "love jihad" laws, or selective invocation of women’s honour on any random day to justify majoritarian control. 

The political capture of state women’s commissions (SWCs) across India is also not very new. It has been some time since we have witnessed an alarming pattern of influence over SWCs across India which should raise concerns about the erosion of not just civil liberties but also about the shrinking of the already narrow space for gender justice in the country. 

It was only last year in November 2024 that the Uttar Pradesh State Women’s Commission made a series of “major decisions” to ensure women's safety in the state. Decisions were made to ban male tailors and trainers. This step not only defies logic and reasoning but also ignores the systemic issues that we face – workplace harassment, lack of legal protections and exploitative labour conditions to name a few. The UP Women Commission reduced “women’s safety” to a question of physical proximity to men. This not only infantilises women by implying they cannot make autonomous decisions about their bodies or professional interactions, but also reinforces deeply patriarchal and moralistic anxieties about women’s presence in public life.

But what is more troublesome is the fact that in the current socio-political climate, such proposals do not exist in a vacuum. By implicitly targeting professions that employ large numbers of Muslim men – such as tailoring and training – it furthers the ongoing vilification and otherisation of a specific community under the pretext of protecting women. This is an idea of “gender justice” where women' rights and justice are conveniently politicised, communalised and distorted. 

Constitutional legacy severely undermined

India’s constitutional commitment to women’s rights emphasises equality, autonomy, and dignity. SWCs were instituted to uphold these principles by acting as watchdogs, providing redress for violations, and advocating for structural reforms. However, over the past decade, women’s commissions have increasingly deviated from their original mandate. Leadership appointments often reflect political affiliations, leading to selective interventions and a conspicuous silence on critical issues involving state-sponsored or majority-group violence. 

Coming to the present case in particular, the Haryana Women’s Commission in a bid to fulfil its responsibility initiated a suo motu action against an educator. This was taken up as a proactive issue when Haryana has reported 19 crimes against women daily this year. It is unfortunate that in such times, the state’s commission seems to have considered the professor's online critique of majoritarian politics much more detrimental to the cause of women’s dignity than other cases of violence against women being reported daily. This is not only a selective and disproportionate outrage but also points to the fact that underlying political motivations have begun influencing bodies to this extent.

The erosion of institutional credibility

The ideological capture of women’s commissions has the potential to severely compromise their credibility and effectiveness in coming times. While politically expedient actions are swiftly undertaken, genuine cases of violence throughout the country frequently go unaddressed.

To name some of them:

• In Manipur, a video surfaced showing two Kuki-Zo tribal women being paraded naked and assaulted by a mob. Despite national outrage, institutional responses were delayed and inadequate. 
• Adivasi women in Bastar face rampant and routine sexual violence in militarised zones, with their testimonies often either dismissed or discredited. 
• In Burari, sanitation workers have reported sexual harassment by contractors for years, yet their complaints remain unaddressed.
• The 2022 Mundka factory fire in Delhi resulted in the deaths of numerous migrant women workers from villages of eastern UP but such factories still remain unsafe with women working for Rs 5,000 to Rs 7,000 a month under illegal conditions. Significant institutional action for their protection is yet to be taken . 

These are just a few recent instances that highlight a pattern where the response of women’s commissions is tepid at best and complicit at worst, especially when victims are women belonging to marginalised communities. 

BJP’s model of 'mahila sashaktikaran'

Symbolic representation has become a convenient facade for regression under the present regime. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has spoken of believing in “mahila shashaktikaran" or empowering women. Therefore, we now have a woman president who is from a tribal community, a woman chief minister ruling Delhi, and recently, Colonel Sofiya Qureshi, a woman from the Muslim community delivering the public briefings.

But are women’s rights only about the seats at the top? What about the lakhs of working women from these very communities – Dalit, Adivasi, Muslim or queer? Why do they remain increasingly vulnerable and disturbingly invisible in national discourse?

Be it any government in power, women’s issues have been consistently reduced to nothing but a potent prop used for theatrics in the election game or conveniently remembered to co-opt and reframe a bourgeois party’s political narratives. 

Will the commission which hastened to make sure it took cognisance by misconstruing a post against Colonel Qureshi, show the same proactiveness to pressurise the Ministry of Labour and Employment, which still relies on outdated data to calculate women labour force participation in India?

The Economist’s 2022 piece titled 'The Mystery of India’s Female Labour Force Participation Rate' shows that the female labour force participation rate has not just stagnated in India but has declined in several parts of the country, with estimates placing it closer to 20% or even lower by some independent studies. This is not merely a data issue – it signals a systemic erasure of women’s work from the national consciousness. And yet, when women’s dignity is finally being cited, it is to stifle dissenting voices rather than addressing daily structural violence that we are compelled to face. 

Mahmudabad's arrest has illustrated the manner in which the rhetoric of protection can be twisted to criminalise dissent.

We need the depoliticisation of appointments to the commission so that they can function independently and can be saved from political interference. Equally vital is the restrengthening of accountability frameworks with renewed focus on addressing systemic violence – especially against women from marginalised communities. 

Vertika Mani is a human rights lawyer and activist working with Defenders Bureau on prisoners rights at Supreme Court, currently serving as secretary, People’s Union for Civil Liberties, Delhi.

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