Woman in Communal Ideologies(abstract)

Concept of Woman in Communal Ideologies in India: A Study into the Ideologies of RSS and Jamat-e-Islami

Ish N. Mishra

Attack on women’s fundamental right to equality has been the common, continuing feature of the communal forces in India, of all hues irrespective of the religion from the particularly motivated interpretation of which they derive their ideological base and political support. Rape and gang rape have historically been integral part of communal pogroms, with certain exceptions.  Just like race and gender, communalism is not an attribute of biology or any eternal idea like the value of pi that has traveled to us through generations. Communalism is not an idea but an ideology like Race in the USA that is constructed, consolidated and expanded by our everyday social and political practices and discourses. It has nothing to do with the antiquity, but is the modern ideology. In fact, in India, as shall be substantiated in the proposed paper, communalism is colonial construct.  In India, there are “historians” and “Muslim historians”, in the same way that there is “beauty competition” and “black beauty competition” in the USA. This paper seeks a comparative study of the treatment of the Women’s Question in the ideological texts; social practices and political discourses of two representative organizations of Hindu and Muslim communalism founded to organize Hindu and Muslim males respectively –  RSS and  Jamat-e-Islami – for their respective goals of Hindu Rashtra (Hindu nation) and Nizam-e-Ilahi (Islamic State). The historical method, i.e. studying the origin, growth and the ideology of these organizations by placing them in the historical context, is the most appropriate methods for studying such subjects.