4 PM News: Why Muslim Women Journalists Questioning Power Disrupt More Than Patriarchy

When authoritarian regimes begin to shake or face challenge, their claws grow sharper, and their attacks become more violent, uncontrolled, and desperate. The recent attack and detention involving two women journalists in a Delhi police station after seeking answers from political authority tells a story larger than the fate of two citizens.That this should unfold in Delhi, India's political capital, turns the incident into a disturbing portrait of the fragility of Indian democracy itself: an unashamed patriarchy determined to put questioning women back in their place; the fanning of communal embers whenever power needs an old fire to regain control; and, caught in this quagmire, the uniformed police the institution entrusted with protecting citizens, pulled between constitutional duty and obedience to those who command it. The women's actions to raise questions become inconvenient, and the regime recasts citizens as the problem. Moreover, the institutions created to protect citizens are taught instead to discipline them, and whether women, minorities, journalists, ordinary citizens and conscientious officers will consent to that transformation.Authoritarian power likes to appear invincible. Yet, somewhere beyond the barricades, the citizen forest is already gathering. And when the forest begins to move, even the fortress must wonder how close it has come.Harassed, Yet Resilient: Muslim Women Journalists Fight Gendered DisinformationJournalists and victims Shaheen Khan and Nafisa Khan have given a vivid account of being stopped, detained, taken to Saket Police Station, and assaulted while covering an event at Max Hospital in Saket, attended by Delhi Chief Minister Rekha Gupta and Union Home Minister Amit Shah. They say the violence found a sharper edge once their Muslim identity became known.Denial cannot outweigh truth. Digital evidence challenges the police account that the journalists obstructed a VVIP route with their scooter, ignored directions to move it and were brought to the station for enquiry. Such words travel a twisted path, attempting to serve as defence counsel, witness and judge.The dispensation is cornered further by the more forceful demand for an independent investigation from the Press Club of India, the Indian Women's Press Corps, the Delhi Union of Journalists, and other press bodies. The fog has thickened around urgent questions: who stopped the journalists, who detained them, who stood inside the police station, whether medical aid was offered, whether religious identity sharpened the violence and, above all, who gave the order and whose hands carried it out.Protest Surveillance: What Database is Delhi Police Matching Your Face Against?India stands 176th among 177 countries in the 2026 Environmental Performance Index, near the bottom of a measure of environmental performance. Yet, as physical forests vanish, another forest is taking root, one aspiring to outgrow and move the regime.The Indian citizen forest is growing and is dynamic. Made of women in patriarchal society who stand to speak, of minorities who refuse permanent placement in the dock of public suspicion, of journalists who continue to ask questions after questioning has been renamed provocation; and officers who still remember that a uniform does not suspend conscience.The image summons the 17th-century play by Shakespeare, Macbeth, a tragedy of blinded ambition and the grotesque stupidity that power acquires when it believes its own propaganda. 'King' Macbeth had climbed to power through murder, but the fog of his mind echoed the witches' prophecy: he would remain invincible until Birnam Wood moved towards his palace-fortress on Dunsinane Hill. Macbeth treated this as an impossibility. A forest could not march; trees could not walk to a king's door. Yet, the forest did move, because dissenters carried its branches in their hands.So, as Indian students continue to march and journalists join many other groups, each carrying a branch, the prophecy becomes real for authoritarian power in India, not through magic, but through organised human action. Power mistakes managed headlines for consent, televised applause for loyalty and public silence for surrender. But silence was only the pause before people began carrying the branches. A forest needs no legs to walk. It needs hands.Must Rahul Gandhi be a 'Perfect' Feminist Before We Listen to Him?The account given by the women allegedly assaulted at Saket Police Station is not a small administrative scuffle wrapped in the language of VVIP security. It reflects an older arrangement that presumes authority has the right to decide which women or citizens may speak, who may be heard, and which citizens must be taught the cost of public speech.The dispensation's order is one in which hierarchy is called order, obedience a virtue and control "culture". The quiet citizen is praised as dignified; a quiet woman, especially, is deemed virtuous—sanskari. But the woman who asks a question becomes an inconvenience. A journalist who dares is an even greater irritation, entering the protected corridors of power carrying neither deference nor permission, but a question.The archaic legal text, the 'Manusmriti' from the Hindu world, furnished patriarchy with a durable vocabulary, one that the regime perhaps venerates more than the Republic's Constitution. Its ancient world is a household of rules in which women's autonomy is treated as disorder and male guardianship as civilisation. Its shadow survives whenever a woman's body, voice or mobility becomes the first site upon which authority demonstrates its strength.The targeting and the violence of the journalists after their Muslim identity became known went increasingly brutal. Gender, minority identity and journalism would then converge in one police station, producing not one vulnerability but several.A Muslim woman journalist does not merely ask a question; in the imagination of insecure power, she disturbs a hierarchy that requires her silence.Communal polarisation is often the regime's oldest smoke-screen. Whenever the wall begins to crack, the smoke is released. But a smoke-screen cannot repair a wall. It can only conceal the damage until the wind changes.Beyond the Burqa: The Muslim Woman You Can’t SeeHope rests on the assumption that not every officer in that police room was coloured by an ideology that dresses cruelty as service. Yet, for some, a superior's approval may have weighed more heavily than a citizen's dignity or protection.Another difficult side of that room exists. Some officers may have dissented and refused the regime's orders; such refusal may bring transfer, suspension, salary cuts, family insecurity, and the daily fear of being marked disobedient by those who control the career ladder. The mechanics of obedience are designed to make conscience costly.And still, there is yet another thought: can the fear of dissent justify subverting an institution's purpose, turning the duty to protect citizens into violence against them, while claiming that the striking hand merely followed "orders from above"?After murdering for power, Shakespeare's Macbeth asks whether "all great Neptune's ocean" can wash the blood clean from his hands. But it is more about the moral knowledge that violence committed in the name of duty cannot be rinsed away, rewritten in a report or buried under an official press note.The police station chamber, where frightened citizens seek protection, changes and becomes where power is masculinity against women, minorities and the press and all those who question the regime. The chamber where authority rests must be restrained by patience and law. Without these, khaki becomes another costume in the theatre of fear.The Union Home Minister's presence at the Max Hospital event, followed by police action, raises concern because Delhi Police falls directly under the same ministry. Reports of the attack on the journalists, therefore, cannot be swept aside as a minor inconvenience at the edge of a VVIP route.An independent inquiry is urgently required. It is not a favour to the press, a pillar of democracy, but a safeguard ensuring that the law can still look power in the eye without lowering its own. That was the ordinary work of democracy undertaken by the two assaulted women journalists: asking questions of power.The loyalty of police officers on duty lay not in obedience to political authority, but in the Constitution, the law, and the citizen. Refusal to defy an unlawful order could cost a career, income, transfer or other consequences. Yet, the failure to dissent reveals an institutional failure. A democratic State cannot demand courage from citizens in public while making conscience dangerous within its own ranks. Officers who refuse illegal commands require protection, not punishment.A constitutional democracy cannot survive when it turns its agents into machines and its citizens into obstacles to be moved aside.'Starved, Abused': Lawyer Alleges Police Brutality in Patna Amid CJP ProtestsThe citizen forest demands the return of order in its true sense. In this case, the walking forest calls for inquiry instead of denial, restraint instead of intimidation, law instead of spectacle, and accountability instead of carefully rehearsed silence.The rise of authoritarian politics has, in hindsight, exposed the sediment beneath the democratic surface of caste imbalances, of patriarchal surge, of communal energies and of official impunity.The exposure is painful because the sediment is deep and keeps revealing itself, layer after layer. Yet, exposure is also the beginning of cleansing. The hidden wound beneath a bandage rots and heals when opened to air. Just as Birnam Wood moved in Macbeth, the Indian citizens have begun to move as a forest. Their branches come as recording testimonies on phones, sharing them on social media, making visible what was once kept invisible; journalists asking what power does not want answered; women continuing to speak after being told to be silent; and officers recognising that obedience without conscience is merely cowardice in a well-pressed uniform.The forest has begun gathering slowly: one question, one witness, one refusal, one record, one act of courage at a time. Its strength lies not in rage alone, but in the patient discipline of refusing to retreat. Each hand carries testimony. Where questions remain alive, and conscience refuses to bow, the republic has not disappeared; it is waiting to rise.(Dr Navina Jafa is Vice President, Centre for New Perspectives. She can be reached @navinajafa. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)

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Assaulted, Not Silenced: Muslim Women Journalists Who Refused to Be Intimidated

The women alleged that the violence found a sharper edge once their Muslim identity became known.

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Topics: Journalism Women