Political Geography 83 (2020) 102257 Available online 25 September 2020 0962-6298/© 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Intervention The politics of saving Muslim women in India: Gendered geolegality, security, and territorialization Pallavi Gupta * , Banu G¨ okarıksel, Sara Smith Department of Geography, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, 27599, USA A R T I C L E INFO Keywords: Muslim women Hindu nationalism Legal geographies Law Feminist geopolitics Femonationalism feminist geolegality ABSTRACT In this paper, we critically approach the idea of “saving Muslim women” by examining two prominent judgments by the Supreme Court of India and their attendant debates: Mohammad Ahmed Khan vs. Shah Bano Begum and Others 1985 AIR 945, popularly known as the Shah Bano judgment and Shayara Bano vs. Union of India And Others WP(C) No.118 of 2016, popularly known as the Triple Talaq (divorce) judgment. Using the frameworks of feminist geopolitics, femonationalism, and feminist geolegality, we analyze the debates around the Shah Bano and Triple Talaq judgments, looking at how the state employs and often usurps the narrative of gender equality and women’s rights for its own purposes. We highlight how laws ostensibly for the protection of Muslim women (and the discourses that surround them) have the effect of strengthening the Hindu nationalist state, and furthering masculinist state building and territory making. By focusing debates on the categories of Muslim men and women, the law becomes a means to resolve the “problem” of Muslims in India. 1. Introduction In 2016, Shayara Bano, a young Muslim woman, went to the highest court in India to appeal her husband’s decision to divorce her by uttering the word talaq – divorce – three times. Other petitioners followed in Bano’s footsteps, joining her case against Triple Talaq. The government came out in support of the women and television channels were replete with debates on the state of Muslim women, describing how their religion leaves them defenseless against the cruelties of Muslim men. In media reports, it appeared as if Muslim women, led by Bano, had turned to the Indian state and secular law to defend them, not simply against their husbands, but seemingly against the entrenched orthodoxies of Islam and the patriarchal tendencies of all Muslim men. In this rendering, Islamic personal law (which governs Muslim marriage and divorce in India) failed these women and the Indian state emerged as their savior. Yet, as Muslim women’s organizations have been quick to point out, this rescuing state has long sanctioned violence against Muslim women, let Muslims live in precarity, and overlooked the generalized precarity of women (see, for example, Bebaak Collective et al. 2019). Why then were the Indian courts, political leaders, and media so interested in saving Bano? We argue that this staged rescue is a geopolitical strategy that evokes Muslim men as threat to shore up support for their securitization within India’s borders. We trace how this rescue, through court cases and press coverage, maps the Indian nation onto territory through the exclusion of those understood to be incapable of assimilation. The trope of “saving Muslim women” (Abu-Lughod, 2002) is mobilized in India in the service of geopolitical strategies and as a way of welcoming “good” Muslims (women in need of rescue) into the fold of the nation as abject subjects, while “bad” Muslims (men who may be aggressors) are further entrenched as a threat to the nation (Mamdani, 2004). We ground this analysis in two prominent Supreme Court judgments and their atten- dant debates. These are Mohammad Ahmed Khan vs. Shah Bano Begum and Others 1985 AIR 945, popularly known as the Shah Bano judgment and Shayara Bano vs. Union of India And Others WP(C) No.118 of 2016, known as the Triple Talaq (divorce) judgment. These two judgments are thirty years apart, the frst under the left-leaning Indian National Congress Party and the second under the right wing Bharatiya Janata Party. They both reveal a gendered territorial politics in which the law enmeshes external geopolitical and territorial threat with gendered representations of internal danger. The narratives about these judgments circulate beyond the courtroom, on tele- vision screens and on the pages of newspapers; therefore our analysis combines legal judgements with that of politicians’ remarks drawn from newspaper reports—from 1985 to cover the Shah Bano judgment and the more recent ones from 2017–19 for stories related to Triple Talaq judgment. We attend to the representation of Muslim women and the role of the Indian state and its courts, how they justify and legitimate decisions, and how the * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: pallavigupta@unc.edu (P. Gupta), banug@email.unc.edu (B. G¨ okarıksel), shsmith1@email.unc.edu (S. Smith). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Political Geography journal homepage: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2020.102257 Received 26 March 2019; Received in revised form 26 June 2020; Accepted 9 July 2020