Over four years after Ahmed passed away in 1977, Abida Ahmed agreed to fight a Lok Sabha by-election from Bareilly, Uttar Pradesh, in 1981 and won, becoming the first and only First Lady of India to have entered the competitive arena of politics.She won again in 1984, making it two in a row from Bareilly.Begum Noor Bano, originally Mahatab Zamani and the widow of the former ruler of Rampur, was royalty who was a key figure in the political landscape of that area and fought many battles with Azam Khan of the Samajwadi Party and Jaya Prada, who also contested on an SP ticket.Her husband, Nawab Syed Zulfikar Ali Khan Bahadur, belonged to the Rohilla dynasty and was popularly addressed as ‘Mickey Mian’.He was killed in a freak road accident in 1992 while returning from New Delhi to Rampur.Noor Bano won the 1996 and 1999 Lok Sabha polls, but her electoral battles with Jaya Prada in 2004 and 2009 ended in defeats.Among the 18 Muslim women, Bengali actress Nusrat Jahan Ruhi also broke a number of glass ceilings as she went on to win the Lok Sabha polls on a TMC ticket in 2019.The book says that in politics, Nusrat’s contribution was significant.While she identified with the Muslim community, she was equally admired by all other communities.She was often seen celebrating Durga Puja and taking part in rath yatras with the same enthusiasm and fervour with which would celebrate Eid, it says.In the current Lok Sabha, there is just one Muslim woman MP, and that is SP’s Iqra Hasan Choudhury.From earning the distinction of being one of the youngest MPs after defeating a veteran leader from the BJP to becoming the centre of social media discussion as a young, London-educated Muslim woman leader, Iqra Hasan has appeared to have carved out a space for herself in the public imagination.In his foreword to the book, Congress MP Shashi Tharoor writes, “Nearly seventy-eight years have passed since that portentous stroke of midnight on 15 August 1947, when Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru proclaimed a ‘tryst with destiny’ and India awakened to ‘life and freedom… Yet even after almost eight decades, a shameful reality, which should deflate our self-congratulatory fervour over our democratic track record, still haunts us.””Not everyone has found ‘utterance’ in the world’s largest democracy, many of whose towering leaders eulogize it as the ‘Mother of Democracy.’ This self-serving description is enabled, in part, by a too-pliant news media, an ineffectual civil society and a menaced academic class, so that no one dares point out the irony inherent in the claim,” Tharoor says.”Although we depict India as a doting mother nurturing and nourishing a clamorous, combative and chaotic republic, corrupt and inefficient, perhaps, but nonetheless flourishing, the truth is that throughout our democratic history, we have consistently failed our women citizens: failed to afford them, in the thoroughfares of our country, a life of dignity and decency,” he says.
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