(Warning: If you possess religious sensibilities and they are easily offended, I advise you to refrain from reading further. And especially if you think the following quote from Voltaire is a bunch of bullshit: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to death your right to say it.”)
There are very few things I strongly hate in this world and one of them has got to be the moral police. Two stories in today’s news caught my eye and both are related to this issue – one a severe, disturbing example, the other a far more light-hearted, even ridiculous but nonetheless disturbing – one in Pakistan, the other in India.
Apart from the fact that
“they did this brutality just on suspicion. There was no trial. No evidence, no witness was produced.”
lies a very fundamental question, what is exactly an affair with reference to a 17 year old girl? Is she married? If she is, in my humble opinion that is a far greater crime than the one she has purportedly committed, assuming that a 17 year old married girl was probably married off against her informed will or decision. If she did make an informed choice and decided to commit adultery, then as an individual she has every right to. I am truly unaware of her circumstances, of her relationship with her husband and hence cannot make an unbiased judgement.
The real rationale of punishing an adulterous woman, it seems to me is the ingrained jealousy of a man when a better man comes along and steals his woman. The problem with this approach is the implication that a woman, once married is the property of her husband. But we are not talking about non-living assets here, or even a living asset such as a cow or a dog, we are talking about a thinking human being, who is capable of judgement, no matter how flawed.
This is one of my problems with religion. Most religions relegate a married woman to the status of an
asset. Just yesterday I saw
this web comic, which talks about the status of women according to the Bible, and this is the New Testament, not even the controversial Old Testament. The comic is reproduced below.
To come back to the 17 year old girl in question, if she is unmarried then an
affair would probably just mean a harmless teenage romance. And to view that as a crime worthy of a public flogging is beyond my normally vast comprehension. When we were growing up, the most conservative of parents would at the most admonish their daughters in the privacy of their homes for such a
crime, impressing upon them to concentrate on their studies. But I forgot, in Swat valley, after the Taliban took over,
girls are not allowed to go to schools!
I find it frankly ridiculous that the Pakistan government so steadfastly hangs on to its claims of control over extra territories (read K-a-s-h-m-i-r) when it can’t even control the territories it already possesses! Don’t get me wrong – I am all for a Kashmiri plebiscite. But that is the subject of a separate post.
To diffuse the tension of the last few paragraphs, let me move on to the
next story. Akshay Kumar, the Bollywood star, who I am not a big fan of, asked his
wife, Twinkle Khanna
to unbutton the top button of his jeans, which belongs to the Levi’s ‘Unbuttoned’ range of which he is a brand ambassador, in a fashion show in India. This offended a certain
social worker, Mr. Anil P Nayar, who promptly filed a case against him with the police in Mumbai/Bombay.
As if there is not enough social work to be done in India, not enough backlog of court cases, not enough unsolved crimes, terrorism and what-have-you, Mr. Nayar has all the time in the world to waste his own time and the courts’ time and the police’s time for this. I strongly believe that such people need to be flogged in public and not a 17 year old girl accused of having an affair!
