Counting the missing: Tracing quiet history of Muslim women missing from India's democracy

In Missing from the House: Muslim Women in the Lok Sabha, Rasheed Kidwai and Ambar Kumar Ghosh undertake a unique study—one that resists polemics in favour of patient documentation and sweeping claims in favour of close, almost archival attention.

- SOUMYA BHOWMICK

They gather the stories of every Muslim woman who has ever sat in the lower house of India's Parliament (the Lok Sabha)—eighteen in more than seventy-five years of Independence—and stitch them into a narrative that is both a lament and a ledger.

The numbers themselves feel like an indictment: in a chamber of 543 members, across nearly seven and a half decades, only eighteen Muslim women have found a place. There have been five Lok Sabhas with none at all, and never more than four at a time. Contemporary political parties are often critiqued for policies that appear inattentive to Muslim concerns. However, if Muslim identity has always been central to India's politics—sometimes claimed as programme, sometimes cast as provocation—this book shows with quiet persistence that Muslim women have been missing across governments and across eras, regardless of who was in power.

The book is distinctive not because it seeks to explain everything, but because it insists on examining a narrow field in great detail. We have studies of women in politics and of Muslims in Parliament, but this is the first sustained attempt to trace Muslim women as parliamentarians, to count their numbers, and to ask what their presence—or their absence—means.

The style of the book is sometimes formal and academic, with dense archival detail and theoretical framing; yet it also slips into a more narrative, biographical tone when sketching the lives of the individual parliamentarians. The cumulative effect is powerful. The pattern emerges starkly: thirteen of the eighteen women were dynastic entrants, daughters, wives, or daughters-in-law of political families, a reminder that in India's democracy, dynasty often remains the surest door for women to walk through. And then, too, many careers were brief, a single term or two, with only a few making a longer mark.