Saviour of Indian Muslim Women

Indian women have come of age and in the last seventy years their might has gradually increased as they surged up breaking many glass ceilings of gender injustice and inequality. The Indian women can certainly claim that they are on their way towards ‘total empowerment’ in the years to come.

Congress has built a solid wedge between the women in India since their first term in 1947 led by the then PM Jawaharlal Nehru. Through the conceptualisation and implementation of religious personal law in India, Nehru exhibited his signature style divisive politics, which he possibly learnt from his British masters and colonial colleagues through the years of British education and participation in the freedom movement.

Congress party through successive regimes has only strengthened religious personal laws in India, which resulted in Muslim women silently suffering the denial of basic human rights, marital rights and gender justice through a prolonged and painful 70-year timeline. Muslim women today are still stuck in 1940s in regard to their degree of empowerment, gender justice and equality, while the rest of the women in India utilised the rights provided by the Indian Constitution to surge ahead. The Congress party must own up this conscious criminal injustice meted out of their actions to Muslim women, for its selfish, petty vote-bank politics of appeasement.

At the cusp of independence to India, the two-nation theory thrust on Indians forcefully by wicked British Empire and power-hungry Jawaharlal Nehru has not just resulted in severing of this great nation into three pieces but also resulted in mammoth proportion of murder and rape on either side during the bloody partition in 1947. Even before the grief and deep injury caused by a meaningless partition on the basis of religious identity healed, PM Jawaharlal Nehru proposed and executed religious personal law in India. What kind of a selfish and heartless leader would further balkanise a nation already split once physically on religious grounds?

Why did Nehru want to still identify and classify the left over nation and its nationals on the basis of a religion after a religious partition had already occurred? If it’s not for sheer political expediency, what else could be the reason? Any real and functional democracy will have one law for all nationals. Laws in a democracy cannot discriminate on the basis of religion, caste, gender or any other identity.

If a nation’s law discriminates, it’s essentially not a functional democracy. Democracies like United Kingdom, USA, France and Germany have one law for all; they don’t have religious personal laws overriding their constitution. These nations also have diverse religious demographics just like India; however, their politics did not stoop so low, that they could undermine their nation and constitution for political expediency.

The Congress party and its dynastic leaders divided this great nation further on religious and caste lines since 1947 for their sheer survival and their greed to stay in power for eternity in India. They actually succeeded and were unchallenged for over 60 years with just one short-lived Janata party government in between. BJP in entirety had been only in power for 9 years – 6 years under the leadership of Vajpayee and 3 years currently under the leadership of Narendra Modi. The methodic attack over decades to paint BJP as a divisive party by Congress is baseless and shaky with the all the aforementioned facts that speak for themselves. Congress party survives on British political ideology of ‘Divide & Rule.’

PM Narendra Modi is the savior of Indian Muslim women. The initiative to propose and execute the ‘Protection of Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce)’ is a path-breaking bill. Once approved as an act of law, this law will transform the lives of Indian Muslim women and lead them towards further empowerment and give them courage to demand more rights due to them.

This legislation is historic, as it will protect the Muslim women from further exploitation and pain caused due to unjustified and unsecure divorce. While this bill is not an end to all the woes that Muslim women face under Muslim personal law, it can be a good beginning to empower them to challenge more laws which are limiting their potential and denying them the rights provided by Indian Constitution.

In one stroke, PM Narendra Modi and his government demolished the wall that the Congress party has built between Muslim women and the rest of Indian women. With the passage of this bill into an act of law, Muslim women will for the first time enjoy the rights like other Indian women. It’s heart-breaking to think that while being Indians, Muslim women had to suffer the pain and plight of inequality, intimidation, gender injustice and ‘stone age treatment’ through a cruel divorce system of Muslim personal law for the last 70 years.

BJP considers the national identity is above any other identities. All Indians despite their subsidiary identities should have equal access to constitutionally provided rights and responsibilities. Religious personal laws have no place in a secular democracy. Congress has divided and deprived millions of Indian nationals their constitutional rights in the name of religious personal laws in India. It considers and views Indians as vote-banks and purely as electoral currency – they sort and classify Indians accordingly. This infamous party has neither considered the fundamental emotions of their vote-banks, nor has it ever sincerely worked towards their empowerment and development.

BJP has a few straight questions to Congress party and its newly crowned president Rahul Gandhi. Why does the Congress party’s decades-old vote-bank, Muslims, continue to remain at the bottom of development graph even after 70 years of independence, during which Congress ruled India for over 60 years? What are the major steps taken by Congress to empower Indian Muslims? Why are Muslims at the rock bottom in education and enterprise? Why did Congress not bother about the pain and plight of Muslim women over triple talaq in the last 70 years?

Why is the Congress trying to stall and kill the Muslim Women Protection Bill proposed by the Modi government, even after majority Muslim community welcomed it?

It’s about time the Congress ‘vote-banks’ start understanding the real motives of this party. It’s time they understand BJP is the only party which can free them of all strings and mainstream them into empowerment and development. Under the leadership of PM Narendra Modi, the Indian government has initiated a massive exercise of ‘Empowering the Underpowered’ with no identity strings attached.