Policing Autonomy: Women become the first casualty of religious extremism Online campaigns increasingly target women—for exercising autonomy, policing dress, inter-faith interaction, and social freedom, in clear violation of constitutional rights
01, Oct 2025 | CJP Team
All aggressively orthodox moves, especially influenced by the politico-religious, undermine women’s autonomy. In present day India, online and offline trends to divide observe these singular patterns. Regardless of whether it is framed with religious conservatism, cultural nationalism, or community honour, a woman’s personal choice is posited as a threat to tradition, she is marked and targeted, often aggressively. The CJP Team has noted and analysed these tendencies that have also become aggressive and violent against Muslim women.
Recent activity on X (previously Twitter), once again, showcases this mode of policing. Accounts such as Team Falcon and Muslim IT Cell have employed shaming and ridicule to condemn Muslim women for entering temples, forming friendships with men outside their faith, or celebrating their autonomy. Hindu supremacist organizations have found ways of employing the same tactics to marginalize a woman’s choice to marry a man outside of their faith or community, or choose clothing outside the boundaries of permissible attire. Despite presenting opposing principles, the toolbox is strikingly similar to “police” online, to “publicly shame”, and to socially “humiliate” someone into submission and compliance. Be it ‘love jihad’ or ‘bhagwa jihad’ the perpetrators mind-set is strikingly similar.
Common ground: Shaming, justification, surveillance
What is notable about these campaigns is their use of public shaming. Women are marked and shamed for exercising personal agency.
An example: a post by Team Falcon post showed a photo of Muslim women at a temple, with the caption sneering this as “shameful conduct of Muslim women.” Another post demonstrated how a woman was shamed for holding arms with her Hindu friends—that is to say, ordinary social situations were framed as shameful. By publicising women’s names, images, and voicing their social interactions, these accounts have made private behaviour into a public spectacle of communal shaming.
One post shared a photo of two Muslim women, who reportedly were turned away from a Garba event organised at a local mosque. Instead of holding the organisers accountable, the post went after the women specifically, trying to accuse them morally for attending, despite their faith.
Shaming is almost always accompanied by an explanation that the conduct is ideologically wrong. In fact, the rhetoric goes beyond objection of personal conduct to suggesting that women’s choices are a threat to the community. In one post, visiting a temple was framed as evidence of “Bhagwa Jihad,” a term meant to suggest that religious fluidity is part of a conspiracy to transform the community.
When I saw his video, I suspected whether he was a victim of Bhagwa love trap, and see, it is true.
The girl’s name is Zainab Shaikh, her father’s name is Salman Shaikh, her boyfriend’s name is Praveen Verma, she is a resident of Kota.#BhgwaLoveTrap https://t.co/ADvAkrwwLb pic.twitter.com/RWHkPTIJ4F
— Team Rising Falcon (@TheRFTeam) September 28, 2025
Another example stated that Muslim women were “diluting our culture by mixing with Hindus,” which reduces friendship or interfaith marriage to a ‘betrayal of the community’. This discursive leap from personal agency to community traitor inspires politicized agency and turns it into a conflict of identity.
These stories are preserved by a social surveillance system that invites followers and supporters to act as its enforcers, magnifying and prolonging the policing effect. For example, a Muslim IT Cell post asked supporters to “expose Muslim women who befriend Hindus and betray their deen.”
Dear Muslims, Wake Up!🚨
Shabreen Bano converted to Hinduism and married a Hindu boy. This is a wake-up call for all Muslim families, protect your daughters, their faith, and identity.
Silence is dangerous. Act now. 🙏 pic.twitter.com/L0CO2JszgW
— Muslim IT Cell (@Muslim_ITCell) September 24, 2025
Such posts act as crowdsourced surveillance, where every choice – what to wear, who to be with – may be subject to scrutiny in the public domain. The result is a constant sense of being watched – an online panopticon in which women are made to second-guess their choices.
Taken together, these practices represent informal yet deeply felt regulations of women’s lives. The coercion is not just in the explicit threats, but also in the fear they produce. Women who are targeted suffer reputational damage, harassment, and ostracism; women who are not targeted come to feel the threat, and, ultimately, censor themselves and withdraw from public life. Hashtags like “Bhagwa Jihad” and posts calling women’s autonomy “disgraceful” function in this same way as a means of ideological control based on obedience brought about from fearing discovery and humiliation.
Constitutional protections undermined
Monitoring women’s decisions online fundamentally contradicts the guarantees in the Constitution of India. These posts constitute a breach of Articles 14, 15, and 19(1)(a) of the Constitution. Article 14 guarantees equality before the law, yet what does it matter when a post describes a woman’s behaviour as “shameful conduct of Muslim women,” only to post another opinion claiming disloyalty for visiting a temple? Article 15 prohibits discrimination on grounds of sex and religion, yet these online campaigns are based on precisely these grounds. Article 19(1) (a) guarantees us freedom of expression, which is broadly interpreted in the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence to encompass choices of dress, associations, and beliefs.
At the heart of all these violations lies Article 21. It guards against any violation of the right to life and personal liberty, which has been gradually expanded in case law to include dignity, privacy, and autonomy. Yet, the monitoring and invading of a woman’s private behaviors essentially negates these liberties. When a public social interaction or a photograph can be subclassed or reframed into a documentation of “immorality” or “betrayal,” any assurances of dignity and private space, as contemplated by Article 21, disappear.
When women are demeaned for either entering a temple or upholding interfaith friendships/relationships by being vilified with derogatory and vile terms like “Bhagwa Jihad,” their rights guaranteed in the Constitution become hollowed-out rights. Public degradation dissuades them from expressing themselves, chilling their speech and removing their agency. These case studies expose the inconsistency: constitutional guarantees and judicial pronouncements declare autonomy, dignity, and equality, but the social narrative and digital age conflict with these values every day. Women are free in principle, but the fact-checking hashtags like “Bhagwa Jihad” and public campaigns or calls to “expose” them erode the rights guaranteed to them in the Constitution.
From online narratives to real-world consequences
Online shaming is not limited to timelines or hashtags; it invades women’s daily lives. Women are often shamed through posts and subjected to abuse, harassment, trolling, and stalking. Comments online like, “shameful behaviour of Muslim women,” go beyond disapproval and serve as a way to justify policing women on the street, at school, or at work. On top of this, the damage extends to reputational damage. “Bhagwa Jihad,” and “betrayal of faith” are screen-shotted, shared in WhatsApp groups, and saved, creating a digital footprint that follows women around. Whether true or not, the stigma sticks to women — impacting lives, jobs, education, and relationships.
Furthermore, shaming online leads to community ostracisation. Families often pressure women to leave friendships, jobs, and in some cases, marriages, due to a fear of social stigma. This has deep psychological harm, resulting in self-censorship, withdrawal from public spaces, and anxiety for what could happen if they exercise their autonomy.
Narratives of extremism, whether Muslim or Hindu, utilize the same logic of patriarchal control. In some Muslim extremist narratives, having a friendship with an interfaith person or visiting their place of worship may be viewed as a “betrayal of the deen” — an expectation that women should always carry the burden of safeguarding religious purity. Similarly, Hindu supremacist narratives present a threat of “love jihad” in interfaith marriage, while insisting that women should employ prescribed dress codes to preserve “cultural purity.” The terms may differ, but the strategy is the same: reduce women to instruments of ideological reproduction and limit women’s freedoms to protect the imagined community.
The counter voices as an act of resistance
In the current context of online shaming and moral policing, we have begun to see, from both public figures and ordinary users, a push back against the misogyny present both in Hindu and Muslim extremist narratives. Historian Ruchika Sharma has been particularly vocal, using her X account to explicitly call out Muslim men for hypocritically excluding women from public and religious spaces, while also criticising Hindu supremacy for their almost violent moral policing of women’s dress, marriage, and friendships.
By not allowing either side the luxury of moral high ground, Sharma demonstrates how patriarchy traverses ideological boundaries. These interventions are far from simply rhetorical and create important counter-spaces of resistance, wherein women’s choices become reframed as matters of constitutional rights, rather than communal loyalty. The assertion by Sharma that women’s freedom cannot be bartered away because of any anxieties concerning faith or culture reflects the guarantees embedded in Articles 14 (equality), 19 (freedom of association), and 21 (the right to dignity). Her voice, in fact, shows how social media, notoriously a tool of harassment against women and gender non-conforming persons, can be reclaimed as a space for accountability and counter-narrative.
These instances of resistance signal to us that the digital space is not only a realm of control but also a site of struggle. Resistance voices undermine the legitimacy of an extremist tongue, and in doing so, disrupt the cycle of shaming and surveillance, and offer women and allies a shared vocabulary of solidarity.
In a similar vein, feminist groups, journalists, and student activists condemn moral policing on the internet, provide targeted women with legal and psychological support, and educate the public on constitutional protections. These alternative voices reclaim social media as a public space of accountability and solidarity, demonstrating that resistance is indeed possible and effective.
Women’s autonomy as first casualty
Patterns traced across ideological lines reveal an unsettling truth: women are the first and primary victims of extremist strategies because controlling women constitutes an effective means of enforcement and compliance with extremism. Public shaming, ideological justification, and social surveillance follow women from digital spaces into families, workplaces, and communities, exposing women to reputational, psychological, and social harms.
These practices violate Articles 14, 15, 19, and 21, undermine the aspirations of Vishaka and Shafin Jahan, and erode dignity, freedoms, and the equality of living. Social media and public discourse are vehicles of cultural policing that further amplify exposure to threats and surveillance.
Women’s autonomy is not a negotiable cultural or religious project; it is foundational to democratic society. Maintaining women’s autonomy is non-negotiable and requires platform accountability, legal protections, institutional fortitude, and proactive counter-speech, all stemming from an understanding that gender is to be the first fault line along which extremist ideologies seek to exert control.
(The legal research team of CJP consists of lawyers and interns; this community resource has been worked on by Preksha Bothara)
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