I was on a train by myself on a warm summer day, wearing a knee-length skirt. An Asian male guard in his 50s was walking down the train. “You shouldn’t sit like that, I can see everything,” he hissed at me. The implication was that I was some kind of hussy for sitting in a skirt, legs bare and uncrossed. It’s far from my only run-in with rank misogyny, but I bawled when I got home. I knew the guard wouldn’t have said that to me had I been white, that he felt he had the right to police me because of our shared skin colour. It made my sense of disgust at his behaviour more acute.

I was reminded of this last week when I read Labour MP Naz Shah’s powerful account of Salma Yaqoob’s complicity in the toxic misogyny directed at her by a vocal minority of Muslim men in the 2017 Bradford West election. Yaqoob, the former leader of the Respect party, has just been shortlisted by Labour as a candidate for West Midlands mayor. “Her campaign created a platform which allowed men to literally slut shame me,” Shah says, leaving her feeling suicidal.

It takes an understanding of the biraderi, or clan, politics that have historically dominated some south Asian communities to fully grasp why the actions of Yaqoob, who ran as an independent against Shah, were so insidious. From the 1960s onwards in places such as east London, Birmingham and Bradford, local Labour politicians developed mutually beneficial relationships with self-appointed “community leaders” from Asian immigrant communities.

Labour councils funded their organisations to provide services as a way of managing growing diversity and became increasingly dependent on community leaders for electoral support, relying on kinship bloc voting, in which older men ensured everyone in their extended network voted the same way. The effect has been to give huge power to those men while marginalising women and young people. A Newsnight investigation in 2016 interviewed a number of Muslim women who said their attempts to get involved in Labour politics were thwarted by men within their community.

The sense of disenchantment this engendered among young Muslims was one factor behind George Galloway’s victory for Respect in the Bradford West byelection of 2012. After that, Labour decided its next candidate would be from an all-women shortlist. But any woman fighting that seat was bound to face a hostile ride. The first to be selected withdrew just days afterwards.

Enter Naz Shah, bravest of feminists. Her story is extraordinary. She was propelled into the role of domestic violence campaigner as a teenager after her mother was jailed for 15 years for killing the man who sexually enslaved her (the mother). A few years earlier, her mother had sent 12-year-old Shah to Pakistan to protect her from her abuser. Shah was forced to marry a much older cousin, whom she later divorced. A woman for these reasons considered “dishonoured” by a small number of toxic men in her community, Shah had a tough time fighting Galloway in 2015 and has spoken about the nasty attempts to smear her. But she found the 2017 campaign even worse after Yaqoob entered the race, even though Shah says Yaqoob had previously agreed to stay out of it after she spoke to her about the patriarchal abuse she faced.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Naz Shah, left, and her sister Fozia after their mother’s appeal was rejected. Photograph: Ben Curtis/PA Archive/PA Images

According to Shah, Yaqoob shipped in more toxicity to Bradford: Yaqoob campaigners from the West Midlands told voters they had come there to campaign because Shah was the daughter of a prostitute. At one of Yaqoob’s rallies, she applauded a speaker who said in Urdu “when we buy a dog we look at its pedigree… What do Naz Shah’s characteristics or her appearance tell us?” (Yaqoob later claimed she did not understand the dialect.) In another video, Yaqoob is seen saying to Shah: “When you make a chapati you may need to flip flop, but if you can’t stick to your position get out of the kitchen, love”, to male hooting and cheering.

My train incident pales in comparison, but it would have felt worse had there been another Asian woman of my generation cheering the conductor on. Yaqoob’s complicity is devastating, not least because she has spoken out about biraderi politics on numerous occasions as “a corrupting influence on politics”. But the truth is that her former party, Respect, attracted votes by railing against clan politics even as it benefited from it: for instance, Galloway visited the Bangladeshi province of Sylhet to canvas for support when he ran in Bethnal Green and Bow in 2005.

In the context of rising Islamophobia, it can be immensely difficult for women to call this out for fear of stigmatising their own communities. And of course, misogyny exists everywhere in society: just look at the revolting revelations about the Presidents Club dinner.

But “sexism everywhere” cannot be used as a foil to hide behind when women like Shah have the courage to speak out about their treatment at the hands of men who share their skin colour and heritage but not their values. Not only was Yaqoob – who also stands accused of homophobic and antisemitic remarks – allowed to join Labour a few months ago despite being formally admonished by the party for putting out leaflets in 2017 saying a vote for her was a vote for Jeremy Corbyn, she was waved through to the mayoral shortlist. (Labour says it was because she was the only BAME candidate to put herself forward, a sorry indictment of its efforts to encourage people of colour to stand for office.)

No one is beyond redemption, and that includes Yaqoob. Shah herself provides a model for that: after it came to light in 2016 that she had shared an antisemitic Facebook post before she became an MP, she issued an unreserved apology for the hurt she caused and has since been widely praised by the Jewish community for her efforts to make amends and educate others about antisemitism. All Yaqoob has issued are denials that her campaign was complicit in patriarchy and clan politics, a tweeted apology for standing against Shah and an appeal to move on. The minimum we should expect is a sincere apology and a temporary withdrawal from public life to honestly reflect on her actions.

If a white man had run a campaign like Yaqoob’s, he would not have escaped consequence as she has. That tells us that society is complicit in the double oppression of women of colour: caught between the intersectionality of gender and race, we are not only more likely to face sexism from people of all colours, but less likely to be heard when we call out misogyny from within our own communities.

• Sonia Sodha is an Observer columnist