How Women Are Used as Tools for Communal Conflict

When we talk about communal violence – clashes between religious or ethnic groups – we often focus on the political and economic drivers. But there is another dimension that remains deeply underexamined: the systematic targeting of women. Across South Asian history, from the Partition of 1947 to the Gujarat riots of 2002, women’s bodies have been treated not merely as casualties of conflict, but as its very instruments. Their violation becomes a message – sent by one community to another, written in the most intimate and brutal terms. Understanding this pattern is not just an exercise in historical analysis; it is essential to understanding how communal identity, patriarchy, and violence interlock to produce a specific, gendered form of harm.

Women as symbols of community honor 🔗

In patriarchal social structures across South Asia, a woman’s body is rarely understood as belonging to her alone. Within patriarchal frameworks, women are regarded as the embodiment of their community’s honor, so that an attack on a woman becomes, by extension, an assault on the family and community she represents. This logic is not incidental – it is the foundational mechanism that makes women targets in communal conflict.

Communal honor is a concept that ties the purity, chastity, and bodily integrity of women to the prestige and identity of the group. When a woman from a rival community is raped, abducted, or forcibly converted, the act is intended to communicate humiliation to the entire opposing group – to signal its powerlessness and dishonor. This aspect of gender-based violence is frequently exploited in times of communal conflict, where attacking a woman’s person – especially her body – is treated as an act of collective shaming.

The implications run even deeper when we consider how this logic turns women into what scholars call sites of territorial conquest. The rape or forced conversion of a woman from the “other” group is not just symbolic – it is territorial. It asserts dominance over a community’s most “protected” resource and forces that community to live with the visible consequences of its defeat. As researchers on Partition violence have noted, women’s bodies became a battlefield for national honor, with the shame consistently placed on victims rather than perpetrators.

The nation as a woman: political symbolism and its violent consequences 🔗

This logic did not emerge in a vacuum. During the Indian independence movement, nationalist imagery frequently represented the nation as a female body – as Bharat Mata, or Mother India. This imagery, while rooted in reverence, created a dangerous template. Nationalist symbolism of the nation as a feminine entity meant that violations of the “other” community’s women could be framed as acts of territorial reclamation. The woman’s body and the nation’s territory became interchangeable in the political imagination, making her vulnerability both a cause and a consequence of communal mobilization.

Historical context: the Partition of 1947 🔗

No event in South Asian history illustrates the weaponization of women more starkly than the Partition of British India in 1947. The division of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan triggered one of the largest mass migrations in human history, displacing between 12 and 18 million people and killing hundreds of thousands. Women paid a particular price.

Rival communities targeted women to humiliate each other, with actions that included rape, abduction, and forcible conversion. In Amritsar, Sikhs paraded naked Punjabi Muslim women, who were then publicly raped. In retaliation, similar atrocities were carried out against Sikh and Hindu women in Sialkot and Sheikhupura. These were not random acts of individual violence – they were organized, communally sanctioned, and strategically motivated.

Historian Urvashi Butalia documented accounts of women being stripped naked and paraded down streets, of religious symbols carved onto their bodies, of breasts being mutilated. In the village of Thoa Khalsa in Punjab, around ninety women jumped into a well rather than face capture – for some a personal choice, but for many, a decision made under the crushing weight of community expectation that death was preferable to dishonor.

Estimates of the total scale of abduction vary widely. Scholar Urvashi Butalia estimated that anywhere from 25,000 to 29,000 Hindu and Sikh women and 12,000 to 15,000 Muslim women were abducted, though other figures place the total as high as 75,000 to 100,000 across both sides of the border.

Rape as a weapon of genocide 🔗

The sexual violence during Partition was not merely opportunistic – it was embedded in communal strategy. Scholar Andrew Major documented how large-scale abduction and rape of girls appeared to be part of systematic ethnic cleansing in the Gurgaon region on the outskirts of Delhi. Author Yasmin Khan has written that tens of thousands of women were not simply raped and abandoned – they were retained as permanent hostages, captives, or forced wives, in what she describes as an impulse to consume, transform, or eradicate the remnants of the rival community.

What compounded the trauma was the state’s own response. Under the Central Recovery Operation (1948-1956), both India and Pakistan agreed to return abducted women to their families. But the operation denied women agency entirely – the 1947 Inter-Dominion Treaty stipulated that the wishes of the women themselves were irrelevant and that no statements from them should be recorded before magistrates. Women were, in the state’s own framing, objects to be returned to their “owners.” Survivors of abduction who were raped and forcibly converted faced severe social ostracism upon recovery, as families viewed them as ritually polluted – rendering them ineligible for reintegration into their natal homes.

The Gujarat riots of 2002: sexual violence as communal terror 🔗

More than five decades after Partition, the same logic of sexualized communal violence surfaced in the 2002 riots in Gujarat. Following the burning of a train carrying Hindu pilgrims at Godhra – in which 58 people died – retaliatory violence against Muslims spread across the state for months. Scores of Muslim girls and women were raped in Gujarat before being mutilated and burned to death. Many women interviewed in relief camps reported sexual violence including rape and gang rape.

A long-running hate campaign had projected Muslims as the “hated other,” effectively dehumanizing them in advance of the riots and serving to justify the sexual assaults on Muslim women when the violence broke out. According to Human Rights Watch, the attacks on Muslims across Gujarat were planned well in advance and organized with extensive police participation and in close cooperation with officials of the then-ruling Bharatiya Janata Party state government.

The Bilkis Bano case became the most publicly known example of this violence. Bilkis Bano, a 19-year-old pregnant woman, was gang raped and 14 members of her family were murdered. She waged a historic legal battle that resulted in the first conviction ever secured for rape during communal violence in independent India, upheld by the Bombay High Court in 2017. Her case illustrated both the extremity of the violence and the near-total impunity that perpetrators expected.

In the wake of the riots, women survivors did not only bear the brunt of gendered violence – many led the struggle for accountability, documenting atrocities and seeking justice. Their testimonies became part of a movement demanding reforms in how gender-based violence was prosecuted in mass crimes, submitting reports to bodies including the United Nations and the Supreme Court of India.

The role of women in communal violence: victims, agents, and perpetrators 🔗

One of the most analytically complex dimensions of women’s relationship to communal conflict is that their role cannot be reduced to victimhood alone. Women also act as agents of communal mobilization, sometimes as perpetrators. This complicates any straightforward narrative of women simply as the innocent “collateral damage” of male-driven violence.

Women as mobilizers of communal violence 🔗

During the Mumbai riots of 1992-93, women rioters aligned with the Mahila Aghadi – the women’s wing of the Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena party – were actively involved in communally charged protests, street fights, and looting, bringing their organization to the forefront of nationalist politics. In the Gujarat riots of 2002, the Sangh Parivar ran a propaganda campaign projecting Hindus as victims of Muslim aggression, which motivated both men and women to participate in the violence.

In the context of Partition, too, the rape of women was at times also documented with women being complicit in attacks. Feminist historians and scholars have noted this as an uncomfortable truth: women’s participation in communal violence, while not equivalent to male perpetration, is real and must be accounted for.

Why women participate: ideology, survival, and coercion 🔗

The participation of women in communal violence is rarely simple. It is shaped by the same patriarchal ideology that makes them targets. Research by anthropologists Atreyee Sen and Rubina Jasani, based on long-term fieldwork in Mumbai and Ahmedabad slums, reveals that poor women’s recruitment into Hindu nationalist organizations was shaped by their socio-economic position within urban ghettos, their domestic circumstances, and their disillusionment with the state – not simply by ideological conviction. Women who became perpetrators were themselves embedded in structures of violence and deprivation.

This dual positioning – women as both victim and agent – is central to feminist analyses of communal conflict. It does not excuse women’s participation in violence, but it demands that we understand these roles as produced by, not separate from, the broader systems of patriarchy and communal mobilization that define these conflicts.

The aftermath: silence, stigma, and the denial of justice 🔗

Across both the Partition and more recent episodes of communal violence, survivors of sexual violence faced a second layer of harm in the aftermath: social stigma, family rejection, and state indifference. Partition-era women who had been abducted often found that their families were reluctant to take them back, and many preferred to remain in rehabilitation homes rather than face rejection in their natal communities. The “purity” demanded of them – and denied them through violence – was held against the survivors rather than their attackers.

In Gujarat, the reluctance of women to report rape stemmed from fear of ostracism in a society that looked down on survivors, compounded by the near-total impunity for perpetrators and women’s lack of confidence in a police force that had actively participated in the violence against them. Muslim women who were targeted in communal contexts also had to contend with the additional burden of navigating violence from within their own community and from the state simultaneously.

Despite these systemic barriers, women survivors of communal violence in India – from the 1984 anti-Sikh riots to the 2002 Gujarat carnage – have consistently fought against a state machinery that sought to erase their suffering, a legal system designed to delay and deny, and a society that treated them as collateral damage. Their resistance, testimonies, and legal battles remain the most powerful challenge to the erasure of gendered communal violence from public memory.

What do you think? When women’s bodies are systematically targeted to shame entire communities during communal violence, can this ever be addressed adequately through legal prosecution alone – or does it require a deeper dismantling of the patriarchal logic that makes such targeting possible in the first place? And how should we reckon with the fact that women can simultaneously be the primary victims and, in some cases, active participants in communal violence?

References

1. https://wiscomp.org/peaceprints/4-1/4.1.9.pdf
2. https://www.orfonline.org/research/the-case-for-a-feminist-approach-to-gender-based-violence-policymaking-in-india
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5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_against_women_during_the_Partition_of_India
6. https://daily.jstor.org/women-partition-and-violence/
7. https://womensmediacenter.com/women-under-siege/rape-accounts-still-surface-from-indias-partition-65-years-on
8. https://www.hrw.org/reports/2002/india/gujarat.pdf
9. https://caravanmagazine.in/vantage/rape-2002-gujarat-bilkis-bano
10. https://www.genocidewatch.com/single-post/the-2002-gujarat-genocidal-massacres
11. https://cjp.org.in/survivors-who-became-warriors-women-who-have-defied-the-silence-and-demanded-accountability-from-the-state/
12. https://allegralaboratory.net/mumbai-1992-93-and-ahmedabad-2002-a-tale-of-two-cities-narratives-of-violent-and-victimized-women-enduring-urban-riots-in-india/
13. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:2b06b4e0-afac-4571-ab46-44968d36b17c/files/m3c38039b5192276bd90cb8e2cb390987
14. https://cjp.org.in/mapping-gender-based-violence-in-india-trends-determinants-and-institutional-frameworks/