VIEW FROM THE RIGHT

TALAQ TALK

THE COVER STORY in Organiser gives “voice to some of the voiceless” Muslim women who have been victims of triple talaq. It quotes a 31-year-old woman who says her husband divorced her because she failed to “give him a son”. The article says, “Year after year she continued to conceive to fulfill the dream of Shahid and his family but she failed” before she received the “punishment for the fault of not providing a son”. “I gave birth to four daughters... he left me with my four daughters when I needed him the most,” the article quotes her. A 24-year-old woman is quoted saying that her husband’s family abused her. Once after she had finished namaz in the “holy month of Ramazan”, “Gulzar started beating me without any reason,” she says, adding that one day, without any reason, “he told me that I am giving you talaq”. The husband of another woman “used to drink regularly”. “Once he came at night and started beating me and said talaq talaq talaq,” the woman says. “You move around any Muslim-dominated locality and you will find a number of such cases,” the article says, underlining the “resentment among Muslim women about this gender discrimination”. It also quotes a “national study” that claims “more than 90 per cent Muslim women want triple talaq to be abolished”.

“The failure of the Muslim religious clergy to address the issue from a woman’s perspective is also a major problem,” it says, noting that the “time has come for Muslim women” to “raise (their) voice against these practices”.

BLAME IT ON NGOS

IT IS A matter of concern, the editorial in Panchjanya says, that the credibility of NGOS has been depleted due to the “bad deeds of some institutions”. “Unkempt beard, big bindi, kurta or a fairly costly jhola with Adivasi print —- none of these now reflect social service,” the editorial argues. “The society now views such persons with suspicion,” it says, noting that the sources of their funding are being discussed. “This simplicity has enough money,” it notes. It quotes a study by the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies saying “if all NGOS are to be clubbed together and seen as a country, then their economy would be the fifth (largest) in the world”. Surprisingly, “India has an NGO for every 400 persons”. “Around 33 lakh NGOS! The biggest democracy of the world does not have even these many pooling booths,” it says. Not all NGOS, according to the editorial, are involved in suspicious tasks. The responsibility of this “mess in the sector”, says the editorial, lies on “those spineless” activists, who “gleam in Page 3 parties and TV debates”. They are mere “tools to meet the agendas of others”. In the name of service, they are involved in a conspiracy, the editorial concludes.

BULLISH ON JALLIKATTU

AN EDITORIAL IN Organiser on the Jallikattu protests says that “many tried to interpret it as Tamil Spring”, “some even tried to equate it with the anti-hindi movement of the 1960s and attempted to give it a secessionist colour”, but it was not so. “It was not about just a sport or Tamil pride,” it says, underlining that “similar celebrations are there all over Bharat closely associated with the agrarian ecosystem, whether it is Kambala (buffalo race) in Karnataka or bullock cart competition in other states”. It slams “progressive and anti-liberalisation people”, who “forget that these traditions” are “important in holding the rural economies together”. “Occupy Marina Beach was more about reclaiming the Bharatiya thought process,” it says.

The Cauvery water sharing issue and the death of J. Jayalalithaa, it says, “has provided enough fodder to destabilise established norms in Tamil Nadu’s polity”. The ban on Jallikattu “provided a golden opportunity to play the regional identity card” as “secessionists along with jihadists immediately tried to exploit the situation and reignite the artificial Aryan-dravidian divide”. The RSS has always stood by “the indigenous sport”, it notes. The editorial slams “organisations like PETA that are working for the agenda driven from outside Bharat”.

Compiled by Ashutosh Bhardwaj