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By:

Quaid Najmi

4 January 2025 at 8:56:24 pm

‘Save Sharia’ campaign feeds Hindutva politics

Mumbai: Prominent Muslims and others have slammed the All India Muslim Personal Law Board’s ‘Save India, Save Sharia’ nationwide campaign, alleging that it could deepen polarization while willy-nilly supporting the very forces the AIMPLB claims to oppose. Launched on Sep. 17 – coinciding with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 76th birthday – the AIMPLB’s 3-month-long campaign is aimed at mobilizing public opinion around protecting the Constitutional rights, preserving the Muslim Personal Law...

‘Save Sharia’ campaign feeds Hindutva politics

Mumbai: Prominent Muslims and others have slammed the All India Muslim Personal Law Board’s ‘Save India, Save Sharia’ nationwide campaign, alleging that it could deepen polarization while willy-nilly supporting the very forces the AIMPLB claims to oppose. Launched on Sep. 17 – coinciding with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 76th birthday – the AIMPLB’s 3-month-long campaign is aimed at mobilizing public opinion around protecting the Constitutional rights, preserving the Muslim Personal Law within the framework of safeguarding India’s pluralistic and democratic character. The AIMPLB leaders said they are soliciting support of people, intellectuals, activists, social and religious organisations who value justice, democracy, peace and the Constitution, to strengthen constitutional supremacy, the rule of law, justice and equality, religious freedom, social harmony and national unity. Around 100 progressive Muslim and non-Muslim intellectuals, activists, organisations and supporters have warned that what the AIMPLB presents as a defence of constitutional rights, religious freedom and Muslim identity "could deepen divisions, and may provide political ammunition to right-wing forces". The progressive have accused AIMPLB of selectively invoking Art. 25-30 of the Constitution related to Religious Freedom, while ignoring that these rights are explicitly subject to public order, morality, and health. Moreover, they conveniently bypass Articles 14 and 15, which guarantee equality before the law and prohibit sex or religion-based discrimination. “Following the 2024 Lok Sabha elections where civil society and opposition parties rallied under 'Save the Constitution', the AIMPLB's campaign inadvertently gave the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Sangh Parivar a platform to posture as defenders of constitutional norms. Ahead of crucial state assembly elections, this campaign reinforces false narratives and fuels propaganda that Indian Muslims reject the law of the land,” said the intellectuals. They pointed out how the so-called ‘God-given Shariat Law’ in India is nothing but man-made personal laws and ‘male interpreted patriarchal interpretations’, defended by the AIMPLB. In its September 2016 Supreme Court affidavit in the Triple Talaq case (Sayara Bano v/s. Union of India), the AIMPLB’s affidavit claimed divorce rights belong primarily to husbands because men allegedly possess ‘greater power of decision-making’ and ‘control emotions’. It even argued that without a quick separation option, a husband ‘may resort to illegal, criminal ways of murdering or burning her alive’ - a disturbing rationalization of domestic violence. Claiming these laws are divine, the AIMPLB admitted that “India is a patriarchal society, and therefore personal laws of all communities are aligned with the patriarchal notion...” The progressives countered that Muslim-majority nations globally including Pakistan, Bangladesh, Tunisia and Morocco have codified and reformed personal laws to protect women's rights. “Millions of Muslims live in secular democratic nations with uniform family codes without putting ‘Islam in danger’. The Muslim community’s current legal predicament in India is the direct result of the AIMPLB and conservative leaders failing to proactively reform and codify Muslim Personal Law,” said the progressives sharply. They said that genuine family law reform must guarantee Muslim women equal rights regarding minimum marriage age, abolition of polygamy, mutual divorce, equal inheritance, child custody, adoption, and a ban on female genital mutilation and halala. While secular political parties rarely support the rights of Muslim women, the BJP and the Hindu Right wing do so with an obvious motive: ‘communal polarization’, said the progressives. “The sangh parivar sheds crocodile tears for Muslim women while ignoring relentless hate speech (Love Jihad, Land Jihad…) and hate crimes like mob lynching, bulldozing homes, demolishing mosques or economic boycotts, with chants of ‘Jai Shri Ram’ to intimidate and strike fear. This accompanies state actions targeting Muslims: Waqf Amendment Act, draconian anti-conversion laws, and a weaponised SIR (Special Intensive Revision of Electoral Rolls) to disenfranchise vast sections of the electorate,” they averred. The progressives have sought the active involvement of all enlightened forces, civil society organisations and secular political parties to ensure that the demand for a gender-just, religion-neutral Uniform Civil Code is rooted in equality and human rights, rather than weaponized for communal division. Among the signatories to the appeal are: Naseeruddin Shah, Amol Palekar, Zeenat Shaukat Ali, Anand Patwardhan, Sultan Shaheen, Teesta Setalvad, Ram Puniyani, Tushar Gandhi, Mallika Sarabhai, Ratna Pathak, Feroze Mithiborwala, Anita Cheria, Zakia Soman, Jyothi Yedulla, Noorjehan S. Niaz, Madhu Bhaduri, et al.

American Hellhole

Correspondent
Apr 27
2 min read

US President’s Donald Trump’s latest lapse of judgment wherein he amplified a post that branded India a “hellhole” might have been dismissed as yet another crude flourish in a career built on provocation. But the timing renders it something darker. Even as he recycled insults about foreign lands, gunfire echoed once again in the heart of his own.


Secret Service agents again rushed the President to safety as shots rang out near the Washington Hilton during the correspondents’ dinner. The suspected gunman, Cole Tomas Allen, arrived with multiple weapons and a manifesto sent to his family minutes before the attack, laying out his intent to target senior administration officials.


This echoed the July 2024 campaign rally shooting in Pennsylvania, when an assailant opened fire at Trump, wounding him. In America, even its most guarded spaces are not immune. The country and the world have now become inured to such episodes.


Gun culture is so rampant that anyone can build a small arsenal and rain fire in American schools, churches or political gatherings, that are routinely transformed into theatres of violence. While certain bigoted American citizens casually dub countries with a civilization and culture they can scarcely comprehend as a ‘hellhole,’ their own country – touted the world’s most powerful democracy cannot imagine itself without the constant hum of gunfire in the background.


And yet Trump chooses to endorse such offending remarks, which were originally made by a conservative radio host and casually relayed by the President on his Truth Social account. Trump’s retweeting of the anti-India post is supremely ironic while America struggles with dysfunction that is both visible and visceral.


America has normalised a peculiar blend of ultra-permissiveness and institutional paralysis: a culture where firearms circulate with ease, opioids ravage communities and an of consumption has become a civic condition. America’s deeper malaise is embedded in its culture of consumption. This is a society that has elevated acquisition into identity. The result is material plenty paired with dire social fragmentation. It is a country that prides itself on liberty, yet seems increasingly captive to its own extremes.


The hypocrisy deepens in its foreign policy. Trump leans on Pakistan, a failed state that harbours and enables extremist networks, while sermonising to others about order and civility.


The irony is sharpened by the diplomatic context as Trump once boasted of warm ties with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Those ties have since cooled, frayed by tariffs Trump imposed on India, only to be tentatively rewoven through ongoing trade negotiations. At this delicate moment, rhetorical recklessness on Trump’s part is not merely impolite but strategically foolish. Great powers do not build alliances by insulting each other’s dignity.


But Trump has long treated language as a blunt instrument. From branding Somali immigrants “garbage” to deriding entire nations, his vocabulary is one long performance of disdain.


Ultimately, the crudest insults often tell us less about their targets than about those who utter them.

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