Triple talaq: Prime Minister’s touching concern for Muslim women

The Government and its drum beaters in the media are gloating over the fact that this one move-- the passage of the Bill to criminalise the regressive and inhuman practice of triple talaq prevalent among a section of Muslims--has left the Opposition and largely all its critics tongue tied.

There is no doubt that triple talaq practice is regressive and an attempt to delegalise it is certainly welcome, though criminalise, I can’t say, provided it were to be done by a modern and progressive government sincerely committed to the liberation of women, Muslims and others as well.

But what is the record of this Government and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)? Even as media is ecstatic about this major achievement of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his party, there is simultaneously a single column item tucked in a corner on the inside page of the newspaper announcing the impending conference of the Police chiefs of all the states barely a fortnight from now to discuss among other things “inter community marriages” in the context of the widely publicised decision of a Kerala girl Hadiya, nee Akhila whose consensual marriage with a Muslim boy became a big issue with the Kerala High Court creating a precedent by striking it down and the National Investigating Agency (NIA) probing Love Jihad angle and handing over the custody of an adult woman, much against her express will, to her Hindu parents opposed to this marriage.

Yes, believe you me, the conference of the top brass of the entire Police force of this country, addressed by none other than the venerable Prime Minister himself will sit and deliberate on how to keep gullible and vulnerable Hindu girls away from Muslim boys. So far it was only the Bajrang Dal, Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and other Hindutva vigilantes who were going around killing hacking Muslims ostensibly to fight love jihad. Shambhulal Regar barbarically hacked and burnt a Bengali labourer Afrazul Khan in Rajasthan, proudly filming the whole act and publicising the whole act through Whatsapp, a day before the first round of polling in Gujarat, who never married a Hindu woman. The Prime Minister of course surprised nobody when he maintained stoic silence as usual over these Hindu vigilante killings of innocent Muslims what is now gradually being accepted as the norm.

One could even dismiss the nationwide pouring in of financial and emotional succour not to the poor victim Afrazul but the unrepentant Shambhulal. But it’s not vigilante any more. It’s now the Police of all the states to hunt for any girl getting too close for comfort to a Muslim boy.

Can anyone imagine a leader or his party which has such a regressive and obscurantist mind set is charged by any liberal modern thought to emancipate Muslim women from the stranglehold of triple talaq? Can someone who presided over the gory dance of death as the chief minister of Gujarat while Muslim women and girls, infant, young and old were being stripped in full public view in front of their dying male members, gangraped on streets and their wombs torn open to pull out the foetus and thrown and smashed on the roads. A day before the Prime Minister and his entourage passed this so called progressive Bill to emancipate Muslim women, he broke bread with Babu Bajrangi, the man who proudly claimed on camera how he raped and killed Muslim women. The occasion was the swearing in of the re-elected Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay Rupani and his team of ministers in Gandhinagar and Bajrangi, recently out of the jail apparently on health grounds, was a special invitee to rub shoulders with another self proclaimed well wishers of Muslims, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar.

So this Bill Is not being pushed to bring any solace to Muslim women for if that were the objective, it would have been laudable. This was on the Sangh agenda since 1990. Modi’s predecessor Hindu Hriday Samrat LK Advani had stated in a Press conference that the Rajiv Gandhi government’s decision to overturn the Supreme Court decision in the Shah Bano case caused considerable heart burning among Hindus (the Saffronised variety though). Babri Masjid, Article, 370, Common Civil Code, have been on the agenda of the RSS to polarise the Hindus. Triple Talaq, he had explained in great detail then is essentially part of the same and since we now have a BJP majority government all over the country, it is incumbent upon Modi to implement the Sangh agenda.