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The humble aim of this Article is to provide a fresh analysis of recent legislative and jurisprudential developments relating to the so-called counterattack on love jihad through the lens of nationhood and the control and conquest of the female body. This Article argues that the instrumentalization of the Hindu woman’s marriage as the territory for Hindutva prosperity serves to cast out non-Hindu communities, notably Muslims, as non-Indian, while further entrenching the patriarchal notions of sexuality and paternalism that have enabled the enactment of anti-love jihad laws in the first place. The remainder of the Article is structured as follows. Part II provides a brief overview of the purported preoccupations behind the anti–love jihad campaign. Part III lays out notable legislative initiatives in India aiming to combat coerced conversion through marriage as a response to the love jihad conspiracy. It also highlights important ideological similarities between such laws and the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019 (CAA). Part IV dissects the seminal Hadiya case, while setting out a feminist constitutionalist analysis of Justice Chandrachud’s, as he was then, judgment. Finally, Part V concludes the Article with the contention that more political and academic attention must be given to the politicization of women for supremacist goals in today’s India.

INTRODUCTION On January 2, 2019, at 3:45 AM, Bindu Ammini and Kanaka Durga undertook a three-mile hike up the Sabarimala Hill in Kerala, southern India, to enter the Sabarimala Temple. [...]

The constitutional contradiction between public equality and private inequality has profoundly disadvantaged Muslim women who are located at the intersection of gender, religion, and community and experience multiple axes of discrimination. The Indian Constitution guarantees equality and freedom from discrimination on the basis of gender and religion. Yet, this equality stops short at the family, where Muslim women are explicitly disadvantaged under religious personal law. Applying to individuals on the basis of religious affiliation, the personal law system regulates all family relations; Muslim women, who are governed by Muslim personal law, are subject to discriminatory laws in matters including marriage and divorce, custody and guardianship, and inheritance and succession. Together with this disadvantage in legal status, as members of a religious minority, Muslim women are at the margins of citizenship and democracy with regard to political participation and representation, and socio-economic status. Historically, the neglect of gender and its relevance to the constitutional canon has served to marginalise substantive gender equality. Muslim women's substantive equality has traditionally been constructed as oppositional to minority rights and religious freedom. This article examines the potential of constitutionalising Muslim women's equality rights through the lens of Shayara Bano, a landmark judgment in which the Supreme Court struck down the practice of instantaneous triple talaq for violating the constitutional guarantee of equality. Drawing from the insights of feminist constitutionalism, the objective of this article is to analyse the transformative potential of the Indian Constitution for Muslim women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The introductory note sets the scene for this special issue, by outlining the significance of analysing constitutions at the intersections of gender, religion, and political ideology. Utilising a feminist constitutionalist approach, this introductory note highlights the impact of women's historical underrepresentation in constitutional drafting processes and discussions across the globe, as well as recent feminist interventions to address legislative processes that take into account women's needs and interests. Introducing the contributions made by authors in this special issue, this note reflects on the role of Islam in politics and governance, and the varied ways in which different Muslim-majority countries have sought to define citizenship rights according to gender, personal freedoms, and human rights from within or outside of a religious framework. This note ends with a call for more inclusive constitutional drafting processes that also take into account diverse cultural contexts, political history and legal and institutional developments from a gendered lens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On October 18, 2017, Bill 62, whose full English title is "An Act to foster adherence to state religious neutrality and, in particular, to provide a framework for religious accommodation requests in certain bodies," came into force in the Canadian province of Quebec. In effect, Bill 62 prohibits niqab-wearing women from giving or receiving public services. It reflects anxiety about religious minorities' illiberal practices and discomfort with the accommodation of religious difference--the "hypervisibility" of Islamic differences in particular. Bill 62 constructs the multiculturalism and reasonable accommodation debates in a way that erases race and replaces it with culture and religion. In turn, the politics of reasonable accommodation in Quebec conceptualize racialized minorities as threats to Canadian and Quebecois national identity and casts them aside as illegitimate citizens unless they assimilate. State multiculturalism and the reasonable accommodation discourse reinforce the racial status quo by setting the terms of the debate and the limits of tolerance--the "epistemic conditions" that dissuade a close scrutiny of the state's management of diversity. This Article offers a close analysis of Bill 62 by following a framework that is built on four pillars: (1) interrogating secularism and state neutrality; (2) foregrounding structural difference to achieve systemic equality; (3) theorizing reasonable accommodation; and (4) combatting persisting colonial and Orientalist tropes of racialized Muslim women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates the potential of the framework of reasonable accommodation under Canadian human rights legislation to respond adequately to the workplace discrimination claims of minorities, particularly racialized Muslim women. Developing the premise that religious freedom and gender equality are not mutually exclusive, the author considers the legislative and judicial context of multiculturalism in Canada, as exemplified by the R. v. NS case (dealing with whether a witness in legal proceedings may wear a niqab while testifying) and by certain legislative initiatives (such as the federal Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act and the Quebec Charter of Values) that reflect a climate of growing xenophobia and islamophobia and that reinforce the "otherness" of minority racialized women under the pretext of secularism and gender equality. The paper then examines more closely the existing legal framework for reasonable accommodation in the workplace, arguing that the rigorous standard adopted by the Supreme Court in Meiorin was weakened and devalued in subsequent decisions such as McGill and Hydro-Québec. Ultimately, the author contends, state multiculturalism should be challenged and reconceptualized through the prism of critical multiculturalism, in order to move away from a simplistic emphasis on cultural difference and to address the underlying systemic issues of racism and discrimination. Furthermore, she argues, the notion of reasonable accommodation should be reformulated to shift the focus away from accommodation of minority women as tolerated exceptions to the norm, and towards the achievement of substantive equality through structural change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the transformative postcolonial constitutionalism for the rights of women's in India and mentions complexities and contradictions associated with it. Topics discussed include constitutional framework for justice of women's as guaranteed by constitution of India, examining the transformation in the light of Vishaka v. Rajasthan court case decision, and evaluating postcolonial constitutionalism's emancipatory promise for the development of women's in India.