Paara

It seems the conventions in Albany and Las Vegas will be grand successes. Both Fokana and Fomaa are getting good response for registration and sponsorship.
Paul Karukappallil and John Titus have proved their leadership qualities. But after them who and what?
Already four people have publicly announced their candidacy for Fomaa presidentship: Baby Uralil, Sunny Paulose and Roy Chengannoor from New York and Raju Varghese from Philadelphia.
Fokana leaders are supporting GK Pillai from Houston as the next president. They termed him as the next president at the kick off held in New York. So far no one else has announced his candidacy for Fokana leadership publicly.
Let us discuss about the future of the organizations.

Some Indians Find It Tough to Go Home Again
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/28/business/global/28return.html?_r=5&pagewanted=all

When 7-year-old Shiva Ayyadurai left Mumbai with his family nearly 40 years ago, he promised himself he would return to India someday to help his country.
In June, Mr. Ayyadurai, now 45, moved from Boston to New Delhi hoping to make good on that promise. An entrepreneur and lecturer at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology, with a fistful of American degrees, he was the first recruit of an ambitious government program to lure talented scientists of the so-called desi diaspora back to their homeland.

“It seemed perfect,” he said recently of the job opportunity.

It wasn’t.

As Mr. Ayyadurai sees it now, his Western business education met India’s notoriously inefficient, opaque government, and things went downhill from there. Within weeks, he and his boss were at loggerheads. Last month, his job offer was withdrawn. Mr. Ayyadurai has moved back to Boston.

In recent years, Mother India has welcomed back tens of thousands of former emigrants and their offspring. When he visited the United States this week, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh personally extended an invitation “to all Indian-Americans and nonresident Indians who wish to return home.” But, like Mr. Ayyadurai, many Indians who spent most of their lives in North America and Europe are finding they can’t go home again.

About 100,000 “returnees” will move from the United States to India in the next five years, estimates Vivek Wadhwa, a research associate at Harvard University who has studied the topic. These repats, as they are known, are drawn by India’s booming economic growth, the chance to wrestle with complex problems and the opportunity to learn more about their heritage. They are joining multinational companies, starting new businesses and even becoming part of India’s sleepy government bureaucracy.

But a study by Mr. Wadhwa and other academics found that 34 percent of repats found it difficult to return to India — compared to just 13 percent of Indian immigrants who found it difficult to settle in the United States. The repats complained about traffic, lack of infrastructure, bureaucracy and pollution.

For many returnees the cultural ties and chance to do good that drew them back are overshadowed by workplace cultures that feel unexpectedly foreign, and can be frustrating. Sometimes returnees discover that they share more in their attitudes and perspectives with other Americans or with the British than with other Indians. Some stay just a few months, some return to the West after a few years.

Returnees run into trouble when they “look Indian but think American,” said Anjali Bansal, managing partner in India for Spencer Stuart, the global executive search firm. People expect them to know the country because of how they look, but they may not be familiar with the way things run, she said. Similarly, when things don’t operate the way they do in the United States or Britain, the repats sometimes complain.

“India can seem to have a fairly ambiguous and chaotic way of working, but it works,” Ms. Bansal said. “I’ve heard people say things like ‘It is so inefficient or it is so unprofessional.’ ” She said it was more constructive to just accept customs as being different.

Sometimes, the better fit for a job in India is an expatriate who has experience working in emerging markets, rather than someone born in India who has only worked in the United States, she said.

While several Indian-origin authors have penned soul-searching tomes about their return to India, and dozens of business books exist for Western expatriates trying to do business here, the guidelines for the returning Indian manager or entrepreneur are still being drawn.

“Some very simple practices that you often take for granted, such as being ethical in day to day situations, or believing in the rule of law in everyday behavior, are surprisingly absent in many situations,” said Raju Narisetti, who was born in Hyderabad and returned to India in 2006 to found a business newspaper called Mint, which is now the country’s second-biggest business paper by readership.

He said he left earlier than he expected because of a “troubling nexus” of business, politics and publishing that he called “draining on body and soul.” He returned to the United States this year to join The Washington Post.

There are no shortcuts to spending lots of time working in the country, returnees say. “There are so many things that are tricky about doing business in India that it takes years to figure it out,” said Sanjay Kamlani, the co-chief executive of Pangea3, a legal outsourcing firm with offices in New York and Mumbai. Mr. Kamlani was born in Miami, where his parents emigrated from Mumbai, but he has started two businesses with Indian operations.

When Mr. Kamlani started hiring in India, he met with a completely unexpected phenomena: some new recruits would not show up for work on their first day. Then, their mothers would call and say they were sick for days in a row. They never intended to come at all, he realized, but “there’s a cultural desire to avoid confrontation,” he said.

The case of Mr. Ayyadurai, the M.I.T. lecturer, illustrates just how frustrating the experience can be for someone schooled in more direct, American-style management. After a long meeting with a top bureaucrat, who gave him a handwritten job offer, Mr. Ayyadurai signed on to the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, or C.S.I.R., a government-financed agency that reports to the ministry of science.

The agency is responsible for creating a new company, called C.S.I.R.-Tech, to spin off profitable businesses from India’s dozens of public laboratories. Currently, the agency, which oversees 4,500 scientists, generates just $80 million in cash flow a year, even though its annual budget is the equivalent of half a billion dollars.

Mr. Ayyadurai said he spent weeks trying to get answers and responses to e-mail messages, particularly from the person who hired him, the C.S.I.R. director general, Samir K. Brahmachari. After several months of trying to set up a business plan for the new company with no input from his boss, he said, he distributed a draft plan to C.S.I.R.’s scientists asking for feedback, and criticizing the agency’s management.

Four days later, Mr. Ayyadurai was forbidden from communicating with other scientists. Later, he received an official letter saying his job offer was withdrawn.

The complaints in Mr. Ayyadurai’s paper could be an outline for what many inside and outside India say could be improved in some workplaces here: disorganization, intimidation, a culture where top directors’ decisions are rarely challenged and a lack of respect for promptness that means meetings start hours late and sometimes go on for hours with no clear agenda.

But going public with such accusations is highly unusual. Mr. Ayyadurai circulated his paper not just to the agency’s scientists but to journalists, and wrote about his situation to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. India is “sitting on a huge opportunity” to create new businesses and tap into thousands of science and technology experts, Mr. Ayyadurai said, but a “feudal culture” is holding the country back.

Mr. Brahmachari said in an interview that Mr. Ayyadurai had misunderstood nearly everything — from his handwritten job offer, which he said was only meant to suggest what Mr. Ayyadurai could receive were he to be hired, to the way Mr. Ayyadurai asked scientists for their feedback on what the C.S.I.R. spinoff should look like.

To prove his point, Mr. Brahmachari, who was two hours late for an interview scheduled by his office, read from a government guide about decision-making in the organization. Mr. Ayyadurai didn’t follow protocol, he said. “As long as your language is positive for the organization I have no problem,” he added.

As the interview was closing, Mr. Brahmachari questioned why anyone would be interested in the situation, and then said he would complain to a reporter’s bosses in New York if she continued to pursue the story.

The Dangerous Idea of Protecting Religions from “Defamation”
A Threat to Universal Human Rights Standards
In advance of the upcoming vote on this issue in the UN General Assembly, USCIRF issued the following Policy Focus explaining the problems with the idea that religions should be protected from “defamation.”

Executive Summary

Over the past decade, countries from the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) have been working through the United Nations system to advance the problematic idea that there should be laws against the so-called “defamation of religions.” Although touted as a solution to the very real problems of religious persecution and discrimination, the OIC-sponsored UN resolutions on this issue instead provide justification for governments to restrict religious freedom and free expression. They also provide international legitimacy for existing national laws that punish blasphemy or otherwise ban criticism of a religion, which often have resulted in gross human rights violations. These resolutions deviate sharply from universal human rights standards by seeking to protect religious institutions and interpretations, rather than individuals, and could help create a new international anti-blasphemy norm.

In addition to seeking a new norm through these resolutions, OIC countries have argued in various UN contexts that existing international standards prohibiting advocacy of hatred and incitement already outlaw “defamation of religions.” However, the provisions on which they rely—Article 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and Article 4 of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD)—provide only limited exceptions to the fundamental freedoms of expression and religion. These provisions were intended to protect individuals from violence or discrimination, not to protect religious institutions or ideas from criticism, and they should not be expanded to cover allegedly religiously defamatory speech. Such an expansion, which unfortunately may have been lent support by new language on negative religious stereotyping and incitement in a recent UN Human Rights Council freedom of expression resolution, would undermine international human rights guarantees, including the freedom of religion. It also would undermine the institutions that protect universal human rights worldwide.

Please click here to download USCIRF Policy Focus - The Dangerous Idea of Protecting Religions from “Defamation”

http://www.uscirf.gov/images/stories/pdf/uscrif_policy_focus_final.pdf

USCIRF is an independent, bipartisan U.S. federal government commission. USCIRF Commissioners are appointed by the President and the leadership of both political parties in the Senate and the House of Representatives. USCIRF’s principal responsibilities are to review the facts and circumstances of violations of religious freedom internationally and to make policy recommendations to the President, the Secretary of State and Congress.

By Yoginder Sikand, TwoCircles.net
The furore stoked by the media over a recent declaration by a faction of the Jamiatul-Ulema- e Hind declaring the singing of the song Vande Matram to be un-Islamic has, not unexpectedly, been seized upon by vociferously anti-Muslim elements to press their claim of Muslims being ‘anti-national’. The fact that this song is undeniably Hindu and polytheistic, and that the novel of which it forms a part is unabashedly anti-Muslim is well-known, making the reservations that many Muslims (along with other monotheistic Indians) about it quite understandable. What many Muslims are asking, a legitimate question that the media has failed to seriously raise, is why one’s attitude to a song (and that too in a language that few Indians understand) should be made the litmus test of Indian patriotism. What many Muslims also demand to know is how long they must continue to be forced by Hindu communalists to bear the burden of being compelled to prove their patriotic credentials.

At the same time, however, many Muslims are also asking why the Jamiat decided to rake a controversy about the Vande Mataram at this particular juncture. Was it to do with the ongoing rivalry within various factions of the Jamiat leadership of late that has delivered a major blow to the image of the organization among Muslims? Was it a clever ploy on the part of Mahmood Madani, the head of the Jamiat faction that passed the resolution, to grab media attention and to present himself as spokesperson for the Muslims of India? Was it a reflection of how out-of-tune the Jamiat’s diehard mullahs are with contemporary social realities?
The Deobandi mullahs of the Jamiat may be irredeemably conservative, even obscurantist, on a whole host of issues, but one thing that they cannot be accused of is disloyalty to India. The role of leading ulema of the Jamiat in the anti-colonial struggle and in opposing the creation of Pakistan is a story of which the Jamiat is justly proud of, and one that should serve to silence critics who are now raising questions about its patriotic credentials. The pro-Hindu slant of our education system has, lamentably, led to this glorious story being wiped out of our school textbooks, leaving the vast majority of Indians completely ignorant of a very vital chapter in the country’s history.
A recently-reprinted Urdu booklet published by the Jamiat provides the best guide to the Jamiat’s committed patriotic stance since pre-1947 times. Those who, ignorant of the Jamiat’s history, charge it for being allegedly anti-national simply for its position on Vande Mataram would do well to read it (Sadly, the Jamiat, despite the massive funds at its disposal, has not translated it into English or various other Indian languages). The booklet’s title ‘Hamara Hindustan Aur Uske Fazail’ (’Our India and Its Glories’), brilliantly encapsulates the Jamiat’s firm commitment to Indian patriotism.
The booklet consists of two essays, one by the late Maulana Hussain Ahmad Madani, former Jamiat President (and, incidentally, paternal grandfather of Mahmood Madani, head of the faction of the Jamiat that recently issued the statement about Vande Mataram), and the other by the late Maulana Syed Muhammad Miyan, one-time General-Secretary of the Jamiat. The essays were first published sometime in the early 1940s, in opposition to the Muslim League’s demand for Pakistan and to rebut the claim (one that continues to be made today by Hindu chauvinists) that Indian nationalism is necessarily synonymous with ‘Hindu nationalism’ and that the Indian Muslims simply cannot not be loyal to their country.
Maulana Madani begins by arguing that India has a special place in Muslim tradition. Hence, he stresses, the Muslims of the country should consider themselves ‘particularly honoured to have been born in India’, and that they must also work for the welfare and unity of the country. Contrarily, to demand the partition of India, he argues, would be to defy the Divine Will itself. He writes that Muslim tradition has it that God directed Adam, the first man and the first prophet, to be sent down to earth to India. It was thus from India that the human race sprang from Adam’s progeny. This implies, he writes, that the Indian Muslims must consider India as their ‘ancient home’ (watan al-qadim). In addition, he refers to the Quran as mentioning that God has sent prophets to every nation, taking this to mean that prophets must have also been sent to India as well. This, he says, is further suggested by the fact the numerous Muslim saints have ‘discovered’, through ‘spiritual encounters’, the graves of various prophets in India. Since, as the Quran says, the primal religion taught by all the prophets of God, including those who were possibly sent to India, was one and the same—al-Islam (’The Surrender’)—it is obvious, he suggests, that from ancient times onwards, even prior to the advent of the last prophet, Muhammad, Islam has been present in India. In fact, Maulana Madani argues, ‘it is an unchallengeable fact that from the very beginning India has been the land of Islam (islam ka watan)’.
India, Maulana Madani insists, is as much the motherland of the Muslims as it is of other communities in the country. He goes so far as to claim that Muslims do, or at least should, display an even greater concern for India’s welfare than other communities because while many Hindus burn their dead and throw their ashes into rivers, and the Parsis let vultures feed on their dead, the Muslims bury their dead in the bosom of the earth, in the very soil of their motherland. In contrast to the Hindus and the Parsis of the country, the mortal remains of the Muslims remain in India in their graves and shall remain so till the Day of Judgment. The Hindus believe in reincarnation of the dead, and there is no guarantee that their dead would be reborn in India, while the Muslims believe they shall remain in their graves till the Day of Judgment. Hence, Maulana Madani argues, it is only the Muslims who remain faithful to India even after their death. This itself means, he writes, that Muslims are, or should be, even more attached to India and concerned about its welfare than people of other communities.
No community can, therefore, claim a monopoly of Indian patriotism, Maulana Madani insists, challenging Hindu assertions to the contrary. Just as the Aryans, the Huns and the Greeks came to India and settled here and made this their home, he writes, so did the early Muslims. The only difference between the Muslims and the others is that the former arrived in India earlier. In fact, Maulana Madani argues, the Muslims, as a whole, can be more legitimately said to be the original inhabitants of India, since the vast majority of the Indian Muslims are descendants of converts from India’s pre-Aryan aboriginal people. Hence, he asserts, it is completely misleading to claim that India is not the land of the Muslims or that it belongs to the Hindus alone. The welfare of all the communities of India, including the Muslims, depends on the overall welfare of the country, and this is yet another reason why the Indian Muslims must love and serve their country, he argues.
Maulana Miyan’s piece, titled ‘Sarzamin-e Hindustan Ke Fazail’ (‘The Blessings of India’), echoes the same views as Madani’s, stressing the claim that the Indian Muslims are bound to ‘love’ and ‘serve’ India primarily because Islam commands them to do so. Like Madani, Miyan claims that India has been accorded a special status by God Himself. He bases his thesis on an Arabic text written by the eighteenth-century Indian Muslim scholar, Ghulam Azad Bilgrami, which puts together reports attributed to the Prophet Muhammad that are said to refer to the ‘glories’ of India.
Quoting Bilgrami, Miyan writes that while Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem are, undoubtedly, the ‘most holy’ places in the world, Muslim tradition has it that India, too, is a ‘blessed land’. According to narrations from such several early Muslim figures as Imam Ali (cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet) and Ayesha (one of the Prophet’s wives), Adam was sent down to earth to India, to the island of Serendib or modern-day Sri Lanka, while Eve was sent to Jeddah. Adam then travelled to Arabia, where he met Eve at a place near Mecca. After building the Kaaba at Mecca, Adam took Eve with him and returned to India, where they settled down and had children. The incident involving the sons of Adam, Cain (Qabil) and Abel (Habil), occurred, or so Miyan says, in India. After Abel was killed by Cain,Adam had another son, Sheesh, who, according to some accounts, is buried in the town of Ayodhya, which is sacred to many Hindus today. Adam is said to have undertaken forty pilgrimages (haj) from India to Mecca on foot. He is also said, some ulema claim, so Miyan tells us, to have died in India and to have been buried here.
This close connection between Adam and India points to what Miyan claims to be the obvious fact that Muslim tradition accords to India the status of a ‘blessed land’. This suggests, Miyan writes, that India had a special place in God’s scheme of things for the world, which Muslims living in the country need to recognise. The fact that Adam first appeared in the world in India means that the world’s first dar ul-khilafa (’abode of the Caliphate’) was India, because this was where God’s first khalifa or deputy was sent down. The island of Serendib or modern-day Sri Lanka, which can be said to be, in some sense, part of ‘greater India’, was the first place in the world where God sent his revelation. Adam, the first man and the first prophet, was made out of ‘Indian soil’. Since Adam is the father of all human beings, including all the other prophets and the saints, the rest of humanity was also fashioned out of the ‘mud of India’, or so Miyan claims.
To reinforce his argument of India being accorded the status of a ‘blessed land’ in the Islamic tradition itself, Miyan notes that some Muslim scholars believe that the oath of ‘alast’, which the Quran refers to, also took place in India. On that occasion, God gathered all the souls of men who would appear in the world till the Day of Judgment and addressed them, asking them if He was not their Lord. All the souls answered that He indeed was. This shows, Miyan writes, that India was the country where the ‘slaves’ of God first acknowledged Him as Sustainer, from which started the long chain of spiritual advancement of humanity. Through this incident the land of India was ‘brightened by the light of all the prophets’, Miyan writes.
According to the Quran, Miyan adds, at the time of taking the above-mentioned oath, another oath was taken from all the prophets, in which each prophet testified to the prophet who would succeed him.Since the chain of prophets ended with Muhammad, every other prophet testified on that occasion to Muhammad being a prophet, reposing faith in him and promising to help him. This second oath, too, was taken in India, Miyan claims. Hence, Miyan writes, ‘India is that holy (muqaddas) land where the chain of religious instruction (rashd-o-hidayat) , and knowledge of the closeness of God (ma‘arif-e qurb-e ilahi) and salvation in the hereafter (nijat-e akhiravi)’ had their origins.
The claim of God having chosen India to send Adam to has other crucial implications, Miyan suggests, which reinforce the special place that India is said to occupy in the Muslim tradition. Miyan writes,echoing a view held by many Sufis, that the first thing God created was the noor-e muhammadi or the ‘light of Muhammad’. This light was first put into Adam and was then transferred through all the prophets till it reached the Prophet Muhammad when he appeared in Mecca. Because Adam lived in India, the first time that the noor-e muhammadi appeared on earth was in India, and the last time that it appeared was in Arabia, this establishing a firm spiritual link between the two lands.
All these ‘facts’, Miyan argues, stresses the need for the Indian Muslims to recognise that ‘it is our good fortune that this India is our beloved country’. Because India is said to have held a special place in God’s plan for the world, Miyan argues, God has blessed it with numerous assets. The source of all good things is heaven,and whatever good things are found on earth are a limited reflection of their heavenly counterparts. All good things that are found in the world were first brought by Adam to India, from where they spread to the rest of the world, or so Miyan claims.
Besides the alleged Adam connection, Miyan marshals other ‘evidence’to put forward his claim of India’s special status in Islamic terms.Thus, he writes that some Muslim scholars believe that Noah built his ark in India, and that India was unaffected by the Great Flood in Noah’s time. In addition, several companions of the prophet, thousands of Muslim saints, martyrs and pious ulema made India their home and died and were buried here. All these facts clearly suggest, Miyan contends, that from the Islamic point of view the ‘greatness’ of India is ‘undeniable’. Hence, he stresses, it is the religious duty of the Muslims of India to work for the sake of the unity and prosperity of the country as a whole. Hence, too, he suggests, the claim of Hindu chauvinists that only Hindus can be genuine Indian patriots and that Muslims, by definition, cannot, must be challenged and countered.
Not being a national chauvinist, I do not agree with all that Maulanas Madani and Miyan wrote in fulsome praise of India. Nor do I share all of their interpretations of alleged Muslim traditions about India. Some of them I find, to put it mildly, completely outlandish. Be that as it may, they certainly serve as a resounding answer to those who have now pounced upon the Jamiat’s resolution on the Vande Mataram song to brand the Jamiat, and, with it, the entire Indian Muslim community, as ‘unpatriotic’ and ‘anti-nationalist’.

Yoginder Sikand works with the Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Social Policy at the National Law School, Bangalore

Allah, Farid, juhdi hamesha
Au Shaikh Farid, juhdi Allah Allah.

Acquiring Allah’s grace is the aim of my jihad, 0 Farid!
Come Shaikh Farid! Allah, Allah’s grace alone is ever the aim of my jihad

(Baba Guru Nanak Sahib to Baba Shaikh Farid Sahib)

Ram Puniyani
At a point of time there was a slogan by RSS combine, Pehle Kasai Phir Isai (First the Muslims then the Christians). And lo and behold that was the pattern of communal violence. First it began against Muslims and in the decade of 1990s Christians were also put on the chopping block. It must be a real ingenuity of RSS combine, popularly called Sangh Parivar to rope in the Kerala Bishops Council to fight against the Love-Jihad, a word coined by their propaganda mill, a word which combines two words and converts them in to a tool to torment the lovers, in case the boy happens to be a Muslim and the girl a non Muslim. It is the latest tool to launch attack against Muslim minorities.
The level of communalization of society and institutions can be gauzed from the fact that this ‘love-Jihad’ was taken to be something real not only by a section of society but also by the High courts. In its ruling the Karnataka High court, in the case of Sijalraj and Azghar, said that the facts had “national ramifications… concern security, besides the question of unlawful trafficking of women,”! So it ordered the Director-General and Inspector-General of Police to hold a thorough investigation into to ‘love jihad’. Pending that, the girl was asked to stay with her parents. Nothing can be more illegal and influenced by the propaganda prevailing in the society. How can the court ask the adult married girl to separate from her husband just because the disapproving parents have complained against the choice of husband made by her, a citizen of the country?
In a similar case earlier the Kerala High court while hearing the appeal from two parents passed a similar order. Two Hindu girls had eloped and got converted to Islam and planned to get married. The court stated that this marriage of girls to Muslims smacks of a systematic plan, related to trafficking of Hindu women. Kerala court also ordered the Police authorities to investigate this phenomenon. The police investigation showed that there is no such phenomenon as Love Jihad. The Karnataka state PUCL enraged by the decision of the court to send the girl to her parents is planning to knock the doors of Supreme Court.
The propaganda began by organizations like Shri Ram Sene etc. They spread the word that over 4000 Hindu girls have been lured into conversions. The propaganda was that the Muslim youth are receiving money to lure Hindu-Christian girls to convert them to Islam. As per this propaganda the Muslim youth are given a brief to lure the girls for which, they are provided with a lakh of rupees to buy mobile and a two wheeler. They are made to pretend to fall in love, to elope, to convert the girl to marry and to produce four children. This concoction has been aggressively propagated through various mechanisms.
This laughable, figment of imagination spread like wild fire and frightened the parents. Shri Ram Sene associates helped couple of girl’s parents to go to court. In one such case the girl was made to stay with her parents by the court order. The trajectory of many of these girls who initially state about their love for the boy and voluntary conversion, changes after they are forced to stay with here parents. Under a sort of emotional blackmail, some girls give in and later say that they were brain washed, shown a Jihadi CD and what not.
We have witnessed such inhuman acts in the form of propaganda in Gujarat in the wake of carnage, that Muslim boys are luring Adivasi girls. There Babu Bajarangi, who was also a major participant in carnage, formed a goon-gang. This gang attacked couples and forced them to separate if they belonged to different religions. All this is presented as defense of religion! We have the case of Rijwan Ur Rehman where Priyanka Todi, daughter of an affluent and powerful business magnate also turned around under emotional blackmail from parents and relatives. Later Rijwan Ur Rehman was forced to commit suicide. In all such cases the role of police, state machinery, has been totally against the spirit and provisions of law, the protectors of law acting to support the things totally against the law.
Such campaigns against inter-religion, inter-caste marriages are not only against the spirit of national integration they also aim to control the lives of girls in the patriarchal mode. In addition the bogey against a minority is whipped up to aid the divisive politics. It is a double bonus for divisive politics. Since in patriarchal norms women are regarded as property of man and are made to live in the control structure defined by men, such an issue rouses high emotions. Communal politics targets to subjugate Muslims and to promote patriarchal norms. And for achieving this they have succeeded in roping in another victim minority to ally in the communal project. It kills so many birds in one stone.
The committed social organizations have a long list of issues related to women. In Kerala in particular the psychological problems of women are immense. Women all around are victims of gender discrimination. The social organizations falling under the trap in the name of Love Jihad need to wake up and address the real issues of women rather than becoming an ally in a communal project.
It is a pity that the courts rather than clamping on Khap Panchayats, which are taking arbitrary decisions to separate the couples marrying in the same gotra, rather than clamping on Shri Ram Sene’s and Babu Bajrangis, they are snubbing the girls for their choices and letting the anti Muslim tirade grow through another of a make believe myth, a falsity with dangerous portents.
One recalls that it was during the freedom movement, that different communities started interacting more and inter-religion, inter-caste, inter-region marriages started taking place. These are the cement for Indian nationalism. The propagators of Religion based nationalism, any way are against the Secular Indian Nation so this one more fabrication to intimidate the society!