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Excerpts Corner
M J Akbar is a well known editor and columnist and though his views on Punjab are warped and problematic, his voice on the Muslim community problems is often seen as a voice of modernity. We bring you this revealing para from hsi recent column in The Times of India.

Every week, the World Sikh News will bring you a few words excerpted from a rather revealing piece of writing in the Indian or international media which should be of some interest to the Sikh community. These excerpts are specially chosen by WSN editorial team after due deliberations, and are intended to serve as a window to keep us aware of larger characteristic strains in the wider media outside community journalism. Visitors to www.WorldSikhNews.com will be rewarded with a link to the full article wherever available. Appearance of any excerpts here is not indicative of any endorsement by the WSN of any line propagated therein. – Ed.

Jawaharlal and Rajiv were also guilty of one massive failure. Nehru refused to offer Indian Muslims the gift he had given to Indian Hindus; there was no Muslim Code Bill. It is perfectly true that social legislation in Muslim personal law was much in advance of the rights of Hindu women until Nehru altered the dynamic. But it would be self-delusional to suggest that it is perfection... The accidents that control history offered Rajiv a chance (but he) was betrayed by the same vested interests that had stopped his grandfather, a powerful class of Congress Muslims for whom the status quo is both comfort food as well as lucrative sustenance. It is entirely logical that those who used the most vituperative language against Rajiv Gandhi over the Shah Bano case should be considered stalwarts of Congress today, without having changed their views.

The price of compromise is rarely paid by the powerful. It is paid by the girl child who is thrust into the seclusion of purdah and driven into forced marriage before she has learnt to discover her social and economic potential. The visible rise of the veil in Indian Muslim communities requires little elaboration. It is a paradox of secular India that one definition of secularism has become the right of minorities to retreat into conservatism. Politicians accept the consolidation of communal identity as the inevitable antidote to insecurity, but that is a dangerous diagnosis. It implies a helplessness on the part of the State in eliminating threat and seeding educational and economic opportunity.

3 June 2009

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