The Politics of Rescue: Femonationalism, Surveillance, and the Governance of Indian Muslim Women

This paper explores how the current Indian government, under Hindutva influence, regulates Muslim women through policies such as the Triple Talaq and Hijab bans. These measures exemplify a hybrid form of imperialism that fuses liberal feminist rhetoric with carceral governance, intensifying regimes of surveillance and control. Additionally, the use of digital technologies plays a significant role in enforcing and shaping these regulatory practices, creating a multifaceted and layered form of social and political domination. Using Sara Farris’s framework of femonationalism (2017), it argues that these bans operate as mechanisms of control rather than emancipation, positioning the Muslim woman as an object of rescue within Hindutva’s state project. By closely analyzing parliamentary debates, court rulings, media campaigns, and patterns of digital content moderation, the paper demonstrates how gender justice is used to justify Islamophobia within the Hindutva governance framework. The analysis identifies three overlapping registers of domination. The juridical register transforms feminist rhetoric into punitive legalism, criminalizing Muslim men and recasting care as carcerality. The affective-digital register uses algorithmic visibility to highlight state feminism on social media while downplaying Muslim women’s dissent. The developmental register redefines religious and educational autonomy, like the right to wear the hijab, as a threat to national progress. Through the use of algorithmic governance, surveillance, and humanitarian narratives, femonationalism helps create and reinforce compliant feminist subjects. These subjects then uphold and legitimize the values of nationalist security and development regimes, thus intertwining feminist rhetoric with imperialistic agendas and strengthening broader systems of control and dominance. By situating the Indian case within broader shifts across the Global South, this paper illustrates how digital and legal systems together construct the Muslim woman's identity as governable, while simultaneously diminishing her political agency. It argues that gender theory needs to be reevaluated by integrating peripheral epistemologies that consider algorithmic impacts, religious viewpoints, and forms of governance akin to occupation. This reexamination encourages feminist scholarship to critically address how rights, recognition, and visibility are often tailored for hyper-imperial displays rather than true liberation.