Marrying Kashmiri women as bonded labour: A nuclear tinderbox
Amjed Jaaved
Indian opposition leader Rajiv Gandhi tried to visit occupied Kashmir to have a `feel’ of the situation there. While being `deported’ from his abortive visit, he heard a Kashmiri woman, aboard the same flight. She told Rajiv Gandhi harrowing tales of Kashmiri women under military siege.
Why `special status’ revoked: India abolished Articles 370 and 35-A of its Constitution to enable affluent Indians to buy property, or brides (as customary in other states). This step is an invasion of religious, personal, and hereditary proprietary rights of Kashmiris. To insult Kashmiri women, Uttar Pradesh BJP MLA Vikram Singh Saini announced `party workers can now go to Jammu and Kashmir and marry “fair” women there’(India Today August 10, 2019). The idea is to use Kashmiri women as bonded labour. Traditional Hindu religious code prohibits women to own family property or seek khul’a (wife-initiated divorce). Despite some amendments, a Hindu woman could still not be a coparcener. The minister’s gung-ho call is a taunt to Muslim world. His message is that Muslim world now has no Mohammad bin Qasim or al-Hajjaj bin Yousaf to console wailing Kashmiri mothers and daughters under Hindu military siege. Al-Hajjaj dispatched bin Qasim to Sind to punish Governor Deebal Partaab Raye who had imprisoned Muslim girls. He responded to a letter written by an Arab girl, Nahed, who had managed to escape from Raye’ prison.
Al Jazeera reported ‘Kashmir women are the biggest victims of this inhumane siege. Sense of fear deepens as Indian politicians stoke misogyny with talk of freedom to marry ‘white-skinned’ Kashmiri women’ (Al Jazeera dated August 21, 2019). Islam allows marriage with ahlul kitab (those believing in a prophet and a holy book) but not Hindus. Hinduism has no prophet(s) nor does any binding holy book.
No justice for poor Indian women: India claims it revoked special status of the disputed state ostensibly to ameliorate lot of the poor Kashmiris, particularly women. Why India does not do justice to Hindu women first by giving them right to divorce or to worship in any temple. Let India punish those who forced Hindu widows like Sharbati Bhai, Roop Kanwar and their ilk to commit satti partha (widow self-burning custom)? Why a `four-year-old girl, named Surjo, was boiled in a tub and then beheaded to please gods as part of a religious sacrifice’ in Muzaffarnagar (Uttar Pradesh). According to local police, “Three people, one a magician (tantric), have been charged with boiling a four-year-old girl in oil, or pouring boiled oil over her, before beheading her. We are looking for a woman who had handed over the girl to the magician after he had told her to sacrifice a child to ward off her misfortune”. “The police came to know of the incident when they recovered body of the girl, in a field. She had been beheaded, her fingers cut off and her hair burnt to a cinder. In a country where sons are sold for paisa 25 and women are thrown into fire to please sati, goddess of chastity, such events cannot be foreseen or forestalled”.
The police spokesman was referring to sale of a son for paisa 25 in Malda district’s Biddhannagar colony (Calcutta, West Bengal). Forced by hunger, the destitute parents sold their only son for food items (like rice and a little turmeric), valued at paisa 25. Having failed to get below-poverty-line ration card, the family had only two options either to kill the baby or sell him to a relatively better-off family. The incident was focused in leading Indian newspapers like Telegraph, Indian Express and Times of India).
In another incident (quoted by police), a 70-year-old woman Ramkumari was burnt alive, in accordance with Hindu custom of satti, on funeral pyre of her husband at Bahundari village, 60 km from Banda. Satti is the ancient Hindu religious custom in which a widow has to be burnt alive on the pyre on which her husband’s dead body is burnt. During the English raj the custom was discontinued. However, according to Indian Penal Code, it is no offence for a widow to burn herself on funeral pyre of her husband voluntarily. Women’s rights activists say there have been 43 cases of Sati in modern India. In Rajasthan’s drought-stricken desert , people secretly perform satti to get divine gift of rain.
Entry to temples is caste-based. Women in periods are still barred from Sabrimala Temple despite Supreme Court’s order.
Danger of Kashmir entente:
Instead of ameliorating lot of the teeming millions below poverty line in India, particularly women and baby girls, India is hysterical to fight another war with Pakistan. We desire Indo- Pak nuclear confrontation were a myth rather than a reality. But, John Thomson, in his article ‘Kashmir: the most dangerous place in the world’ thinks Kashmir is in fact a nuclear tinderbox (Waheguru Pal Singh Sidhu, Bushra Asif and Cyrus Samii (eds), ‘Kashmir: New Voices, New Approaches’). He gives cogent arguments to prove that the Kashmir issue could once again spark another Indo-Pak military confrontation with concomitant risks of a nuclear war. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, also, inter alia, points out that ‘avoiding nuclear war in South Asia will require political breakthroughs in India-Pakistan’.
India has been gearing up for a nuclear attack. It held mock exercises to withstand a nuclear attack (Washington Post, January 22, 2013). The former Indian National Security Advisor Brajesh Misra during an interview to the NDTV revealed that a letter given to President Clinton by PM Vajpayee had hinted that India was contemplating crossing the LoC as well as using the nuclear weapons, if Pakistan did not pull out the fighters from Kargil (Foreign Policy News, July 31, 2016). President Bill Clinton, on the eve of his visit to the subcontinent, called the ceasefire line that divides Kashmir “the most dangerous place in the world” (Independent, UK, March 18, 2000).
In an editorial, the Hindustan Times of January 28, commented that Indian army-chief’s statements `provided Pakistan with an excuse to build short range, nuclear-capable missiles, like Nasr, to target Indian formations undertaking conventional strikes’. `Pakistan is now flaunting Nasr’. Besides Nasr, Pakistan now has 52 Chinese Sh-15 Howitzer Guns (American equivalent M-777). These guns could fire nuclear tactical-nuclear-weapon projectiles up to distance of 53 kilometers.
India is unmindful of possibility that Kashmir siege and its belligerence could lead to a nuclear confrontation.’
Bio-page
Mr. Amjed Jaaved has been contributing free-lance for over five decades. His contributions stand published in the leading dailies and magazines at home and abroad (Nepal. Bangladesh, et. al.).
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