by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Politics
New Delhi : The BJP on Monday questioned the intention of Congress President Rahul Gandhi’s letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeking support for the passage of the Women’s Reservation Bill in the Lok Sabha. Raising the women’s quota issue now is nothing but an attempt to divert public attention from his remark that ‘Congress a party of Muslims, the BJP said.
Addressing the media here, Union Minister Prakash Javadekar said: “Why did he raise this issue today? It is an attempt to divert the people’s attention from his remark that the Congress is a party of Muslims…This is the double standards of the Congress.”
Javadekar sought to know from the Congress chief whether he would also ensure the support of parties that were opposed to the bill in the past.
“The Congress has alliances with parties opposed to this bill. Will they come out of the alliance? Will they ask for letters of support from parties opposed to the bill,” Javadekar asked when questioned on Gandhi’s letter to Modi on Monday. However, he did not name the Samajwadi Party or the Rashtriya Janata Dal which had opposed the Bill and are now allies of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.
The BJP leader’s response came soon after Rahul Gandhi wrote to the Prime Minister to seek his support for the passage of the Women’s Reservation Bill in Parliament’s monsoon session. Gandhi said the BJP appears to have had second thoughts on the proposed law even though it was a key promise in its 2014 manifesto.
The Congress leader said the bill, passed by the Rajya Sabha in March 2010 during the UPA II government headed by Manmohan Singh, has been stalled in the Lok Sabha on one pretext or the other.
Gandhi said the bill holds the potential to transform the country’s governance and any further delay will make it impossible to implement it before the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
The monsoon session will be held from July 18 till August 10.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Politics
Azamgarh (Uttar Pradesh) : Raking up the controversy over the reported remarks of Rahul Gandhi that the Congress is a party for Muslims, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday accused the Congress and other parties of wanting continuance of practices like triple talaq.
He also wondered whether the Congress was interested only in the welfare of Muslim men and not women.
“For the last two days I am hearing that a naamdar leader (a sarcastic reference to Rahul Gandhi) recently said that the Congress is a party of Muslims. I’m not surprised. Even former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh once said that Muslims have the first right over nation’s natural resources.
“But I want to ask the naamdar of Congress, congratulations to them. But please tell us whether the Congress is only for Muslim men? Or does it have space for Muslim women too because they don’t stand with Muslim women on issues of triple talaq and nikah halala,” he said addressing a public meeting after inaugurating the Purvanchal Expressway in a speech aimed at the next Lok Sabha polls in the battle ground state.
Modi said all the parties have been exposed on the issue of triple talaq. It concerns the lives of lakhs and crores of Muslim women. Even in Islamic countries, there is a ban on triple talaq, he said.
The Prime Minister’s attack on Gandhi and the Congress on the issue of Muslims came a day after Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman accused the Congress of dividing the country on communal lines and playing a dangerous game before 2019 general elections.
Citing a report in an Urdu daily which claimed that Gandhi told a meeting of Muslim intellectuals earlier this week that the Congress is a party for Muslims, she had demanded an apology from the Congress President.
The Prime Minister also accused the opposition parties of not allowing Parliament to function. “They don’t allow the Parliament to function. They stall the proceedings. I would like all anti-Modi leaders to go and meet these women who have been affected by triple talaq and nikah halala and then come to Parliament. People have to be alert about such parties.
“These parties want triple talaq to continue. I will try to make them understand and bring them together for the sake of Muslim women so that they get freedom,” he alleged.
He said these are 18th century parties in the 21st century and cannot do any good for the country.
Modi said that Purvanchal Expressway will take Uttar Pradesh to greater heights. “More than Rs 23,000 crore will be spent on the project. All cities, towns between Lucknow and Ghazipur, that fall on this route will witness a change.”
The Prime Minister also said the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government under Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath had changed perception about Uttar Pradesh.
“The Yogi Adityanath government has been able to control crime rate, corruption in Uttar Pradesh. He has contributed immensely in the state’s development,” Modi said.
He also said besides highways, work was also on relating to waterways and airways.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Books, News, Politics
New Delhi : Poorly informed Muslim clerics are often to blame for the plight of women in the community, particularly when it comes to triple talaq, the Muslim practice of instant divorce that has been declared illegal, says a new book.
The state of affairs is more pronounced in small towns, particularly in northern India, says Ziya us Salam in “Till Talaq Do Us Part” (Penguin).
In just a month after the Supreme Court set aside instant triple talaq, three Muslim women — one each in Hazaribagh (Jharkhand), Jodhpur (Rajasthan) and Rajkot (Gujarat) — were thrown out by their husbands by uttering “talaq” thrice, the book says.
“The three incidents do not merely prove the limitations of the judicial order in a society where ignorance renders the best of laws ineffective,” the book says, adding, “They relate a story of local maulanas unable to give the right advice at the right time, and men and women, even educated ones, not sure of their rights and duties in Islam.
“It is drilled into almost every other man that instant triple talaq is the best, or maybe the only, way to end a marriage. And the maulanas seldom rise to the occasion to save a marriage.
“The (three) incidents also speak eloquently of the failure of Muslim society to instil in its men the teachings of the Quran; instead, they end up relying on the Quran’s interpretation by the local maulanas.”
The book says that the most common Muslim families in small town India depend on the local imam to interpret the Quran for them, or even advise them on any issue pertaining to religion.
The book adds: “Unfortunately, the local imams are often not well versed with the Quran. Probably all of them are hafiz, that is, they have memorised the Quran from the surah, Fateha, to the last sura, Naas.
“But they know not what they read or recite. They have no knowledge of Arabic or of Arab society at the time of the revelation of the Quran. Hence, they read the Quran, even commit it to memory, without understanding it…
“Worse, most of these imams are not reliably conversant with the Hadith either. They usually come from poor families and join a madrasa at least partly because it offers affordable-to-free food and accommodation.”
According to Salam, the ignorance of boys who become imams in smaller towns and villages across India, particularly in the Hindi-speaking belt, often impedes the community’s development.
“The ignorance of the local imam or maulana often has disastrous consequences for many marriages…”
“They never, ever, pull up an errant husband or even suggest that the woman can leave such a man through khula, a women’s inalienable right to divorce, where she is not even expected to disclose the reasons for her decision.”
According to the book, there is zero tolerance towards dowry in Islam. In fact, it is considered a sin to ask the bride’s father to host the wedding feast. A Muslim man is not supposed to receive any dowry and is not allowed to bring another woman home, even as a legally married wife, without the permission of his first wife.
“The way forward lies in a better understanding of the Quran,” says the book. “No judgement of the Supreme Court has gone against the Quran… It is time somebody started a crash course in understanding the Quran for many maulanas.”
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Politics
New Delhi : The Supreme Court on Monday sought the Central government’s response on a plea challenging the constitutional validity of the practice of polygamy, nikah halala (a requirement for a divorced couple to remarry), nikah mutah (temporary marriage in the Shias) and nikah misyar (short-term marriage among Sunnis) amongst the Muslim community.
A bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra, Justice A.M. Khanwilkar and Justice D.Y. Chandrachud said the matter would be heard by the constitution bench, and directed that the matter be placed before the Chief Justice for setting up of an appropriate bench.
In addition to the notice missed to the Central government and others, the court ordered that a copy of the petitions be served on a Central agency so that it can apprise the office of Attorney General.
The court also permitted advocate V.K.Biju appearing for Kolkata based Muslim Women Resistance Committee to move an impleadment application in the case. He was permitted to be associated with any of the four petitions before the court.
Seeking response from the Central government and other respondents, the court did not include Law Commission as one of the respondents which was made a party by petitioner Nafisa Khan.
Issuing notice, the court noted the grounds stating that though these practices, which come within the domain of Muslim personal law, were not immune from judicial review under the Constitution.
The court has been moved by Sameena Begum, Nafisa Khan, Moullium Mohsin and BJP leader and advocate Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay challenging the practice of polygamy, nikah halala, nikah mutah and nikah misyar on the grounds of these being violative of Article 14, Article 15 and Article 21 of the Constitution.
Article 14 guarantees equality before law, Article 15 prohibits discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth and Article 21 guarantees protection of life and personal liberty.
Telling the court that different religious communities are governed by different personal laws, Upadhyay has contended that “there could be no dispute, that different religious communities can have different laws, but personal laws must meet the test of constitutional validity and constitutional morality, in as much as, they cannot be violative of Articles 14, 15,21 of the Constitution”.
Pointing to the “appalling” affect of polygamy and nikah halala and other practices on the Muslim women, senior counsel Mohan Parasaran told the court that the 2017 judgement which had held instant triple talaq as unconstitutional had left these two issues open and did not address them.
The five judge constitution bench headed by Chief Justice J.S.Khehar (since retired) by majority judgment in 2017 had said: “Keeping in view the factual aspect in the present case, as also, the complicated questions that arise for consideration in this case (and, in the other connected cases), at the very outset, it was decided to limit the instant consideration, to ‘talaq-e-biddat’ – triple talaq.”
“Other questions raised in the connected writ petitions, such as, polygamy and nikah halala (-and other allied matters), would be dealt with separately. The determination of the present controversy, may however, coincidentally render an answer even to the connected issues,” it has said.
A Muslim husband is allowed to have more than one wife.
Under nikah halala, if a Muslim woman after being divorced by her husband three times at different instances wants to go back to him, then she has to marry another person and then divorce the second husband to get re-married to her first husband.
—-IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Books
By Vikas Datta,
Title: A Murder on Malabar Hill; Author: Sujata Massey; Publisher: Penguin Random House India; Pages: 440; Price: Rs 399
India is modernising in the 1920s, but at its own pace. Even in Bombay, which, as one of the British Empire’s greatest ports, is open to outside influences, change is slow. Some professions are still not fully open to women, and there are situations where the law must tread carefully — especially in the brutal murder in a house full of “purdahnasheen” Muslim women.
But there is someone who can operate in such a tricky situation — due to her profession and her background. And while for feisty Parsi lawyer Perveen Mistry, Sujata Massey draws from Indian legal history, she matches it with her thorough research and a compelling plot to create a mesmerising mystery set in Raj-era Bombay, against contemporary Japan and colonial Bengal that have served in her other books.
It is February 1921, and Perveen, the city’s first woman solicitor, has been raring to show her skills after six months in her father’s law firm — the only one that will employ her. Since she cannot yet practice in court, she handles the legal paperwork for the firm – – wills, contracts and so on.
Among them is a recently-deceased Muslim businessman’s will pending for execution, but now the estate’s trustee sends a letter from his three widows, who want to donate their “mehr” (wife’s settlement agreed at the wedding time) to the family “wakf”. An intrigued and concerned — we learn why later — Perveen wonders if the women, in their cloistered existence, fully understand the consequences of their decision and obtains permission to go and ask them.
When she goes to their secluded Malabar Hill mansion, her concerns are not assuaged, rather they are exacerbated. Not only do the three wives have some secrets from each other, they also seem unaware what the estate trustee has in mind. This man also turns out to be an unpleasant character who is dominating the household with threats — express or implied.
While Perveen tries to counsel the women against leaving themselves vulnerable by signing away their wealth, she is overheard by the trustee, who turns on her and she has to leave to avoid an unpleasant and even untoward scene. However, she forgets her briefcase and when she returns to pick it as it contains some important documents, she finds him stabbed to death.
Perveen is determined to aid the women by helping catch the murderer. But even with her connections — her recently-arrived Oxford college-mate happens to be the daughter of a senior aide to the Governor — there is only so much that a woman in India then can do on her own or convince the authorities to do.
But as our heroine tries, there is danger for her personally. Will she be able to survive to unravel the mystery?
Meanwhile, a parallel story, occasioned by the sight of a strange gentleman who appears to be Bengali by his garb, and evokes in her memories of Calcutta — a city of happiness, humiliation and heartbreak — gives her background and her stress on women’s rights.
While the mystery set nearly a century back in a time with a different pace of life and governance — the colonial rulers more keen to maintain order and avoid antagonising any touchy community – – is captivating, it is the skilful evocation of an era of political and social churning that sets this far above a mere “whodunnit”, no matter how exotic in time and space.
The freedom struggle is yet to pick up pace among professional classes, but Massey intertwines it subtly into her narrative with episodes like Perveen’s telling-off of some neighbourhood activists, her father’s legal defence of a “subversive” client and an Indian policeman in a crucial role. The social aspect is more marked — though some points may surprise those who think her community largely Westernised.
Along with the range of memorably drawn characters — ranging from the widows to the policemen, British and Indian — it is an engaging read with enough matters left unresolved to create interest and anticipation for the next installment. For Massey promises it will be a series.
(Vikas Datta can be contacted at vikas.d@ians.in)
—IANS
