By New Age Islam Edit
Desk
10 November
2020
• She's Hindu, He's Muslim And They Faced
Online Hate
By Rohini Mohan
• Laws Banning Hindu-Muslim Marriages To Fight
‘Love Jihad’ Gain Steam In India
By Anna Harnes
• Myanmar Elections Reflect A Fractured Society
By Shuprova Tasneem
• US Elections: Toxic Populism Challenges
Democracy
By Manzoor Ahmed
• The Joe Biden I Knew Has Been Humbled
By Frank Bruni
-----
She's Hindu, He's Muslim And They Faced Online
Hate
By Rohini Mohan
09-11-2020
Ms
Athira Sujatha Radhakrishnan and Mr Shameem P. at their wedding last December.
The couple's application for a civil union was posted online by a stranger and
drew hateful comments because she is a Hindu and he a Muslim.PHOTO: COURTESY OF
ATHIRA SUJATHA RADHAKRISHNAN
------
All Athira
Sujatha Radhakrishnan, 33, and Shameem P., 34, wanted for their wedding
reception last December was a fun party with friends and family. After all,
following some initial reservations, Ms Radhakrishnan's Hindu parents and Mr
Shameem's Muslim parents had eventually supported the couple's decision to
marry.
Both Ms
Radhakrishnan, a public policy professional, and Mr Shameem, a start-up
consultant, are not religious "so there was no conversation about
conversion", Ms Radhakrishnan said.
But because
they were from different faiths, the couple had to apply for a civil union
under India's Special Marriage Act. In accordance with the law, their
application was put on the local marriage registrar office's notice board for
30 days.
A week
later, a stranger tagged Mr Shameem in a Facebook post on their application,
which also included their photos and home addresses. The post attracted hateful
comments and, in half an hour, it was shared 150 times.
"Two
weeks later, my mum sent me a (forwarded) WhatsApp (message) in Malayalam which
read, 'In this month, around 108 Hindu women have been trapped by Love
Jihadis.' It was a document with around 125 applications filed in Kerala under
the Special Marriage Act, including mine," said Ms Radhakrishnan.
Although
upset and scared, the couple focused on planning for their wedding. They
registered their marriage without trouble and had a reception with 250 guests
on Dec 26 last year.
She said:
"If even the minister's daughter is not spared, what about less-privileged
women? I decided to speak up against this nauseating hate and venom."
She wrote
about her experience on Facebook and received messages from many other couples
about how their personal details had also been shared online.
Ms
Radhakrishnan tagged Kerala's state legislators in her post, demanding action.
Finally, Public Works minister G. Sudhakaran instructed all inter-faith
marriage applications to be removed from the government website.
"Those
who talk about 'love jihad' think all Muslim men are potential frauds or
terrorists. They think a woman is too stupid to decide for herself and needs
saving. Enough of this Islamophobia and misogyny," Ms Radhakrishnan added.
In the
middle of last month, she petitioned the country's Supreme Court to have the
"discriminatory" 30-day rule removed as a violation of privacy.
She said:
"Hindu marriage laws and Muslim marriage laws allow two consenting adults
to marry. So why should two consenting adults who want to continue in their
separate religions be put through so much trouble?"
https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/south-asia/shes-hindu-hes-muslim-and-they-faced-online-hate
----
Laws Banning Hindu-Muslim Marriages To Fight
‘Love Jihad’ Gain Steam In India
By Anna Harnes
November 8,
2020
Several
states in India have proposed a new ban on marriages between Hindus and
Muslims. The suggested laws come as many in the nation have been gripped by
fears that Muslim men are forcing Hindu women to convert in a strategy deemed
“love jihad.”
According
to The Straits Times, several politicians have spoken out about the practice as
the relationship between the two religious communities remain strained.
“The
government is taking a decision to stop love jihad… I warn those who conceal
their identities and disrespect our sisters. If you don’t mend your ways, your
funerals will begin soon,” stated Yogi Adityanath, the Hindu cleric who is
chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. Uttar Pradesh is India’s most populous state
and boasts a population of 166 million, and so an inter-faith ban would have a
wide-reaching effect.
“There will
be no jihad in the name of love, whoever does such an act will be set right,”
proclaimed Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, who heads the central Indian
state of Madhya Pradesh.
CT Ravi,
the head of tourism in Karnataka, tweeted that the southwestern state was also
hoping to enact “a law banning religious conversions for the sake of marriage.”
Manohar Lal Khattar, the chief minister of Haryana, similarly voiced his
support for the measure. Haryana is home to over 25 million people and neighbors
India’s capital city of New Delhi.
But despite
the strong rhetoric, experts have warned that there is little evidence that
“love jihad” commonly occurs. In fact, multiple investigations conducted by
Indian authorities have come to similar conclusions, with some deeming it
nothing more than a conspiracy theory seeped in Islamophobia. In truth,
investigators said that most of the accusations of forced conversion came from
families who did not approve of consensual inter-faith marriages.
However,
while there is no widespread evidence for “love jihad,” there have been
anecdotal instances that have fueled the conspiracy theories. For example,
Pakistani human rights campaigners claimed that a 13-year-old Christian girl
was kidnapped from her home in Karachi and forced to marry a 44-year-old man
who made her convert to Islam, per The Daily Mail.
The case
gained headlines and sparked protests after the courts upheld that the
13-year-old had both gotten married and converted to Islam by her own free will
— despite the fact that the minor tried to run to her mother in the courtroom
and was physically restrained by her husband.
While the
actual threat of love jihad remains up for debate, human rights campaigners are
warning that a very real danger for Indian girls and women is the increase of
trafficking and child marriages due to COVID-19 related lockdowns. As was
previously reported by The Inquisitr, the practice is on the rise, partially
due to economic anxiety sparked by the pandemic.
https://www.inquisitr.com/6375068/india-ban-marriages-love-jihad/
-----
Myanmar Elections Reflect A Fractured Society
By Shuprova Tasneem
November
10, 2020
This past
week, the world has been transfixed by the high-drama US elections and the
soon-to-be ex-President Trump's temper tantrums, as his opponent Joe Biden
slowly overtook him to become the President elect of the United States.
Overshadowed by the fiercely contested US polls, the November 8 general
elections in our neighbouring country Myanmar may have slipped under the radar
for many.
However
there were, surprisingly, certain similarities between the two countries'
national ballots—both elections took place against the backdrop of a global
pandemic with massive economic repercussions in increasingly polarised
societies, and were considered to be historically significant. The US elections
represented a nation-wide pushback against Trump's brand of right-wing
populism, and the Myanmar elections represented a new era of democratic reforms
that were ushered in after the 2015 elections, where a landslide victory by
Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) established her as the
State Counsellor of Myanmar and ended outright military rule. Or so it was
hoped.
Unfortunately,
the similarities between the two nations' ballots turned out to be
skin-deep—while the US elections, despite many attempts by President Trump and
his supporters to undermine the process, proved itself to be a free and fair
exercise in a functional democracy, the Myanmar elections could hardly make the
same claim.
At this
point, one must acknowledge that a democratic process, no matter how flawed, is
infinitely preferable to a country ruled by a military dictatorship, as had
been the case for Myanmar since the early 60s until the historic 2015 elections.
However, the fact that a quarter of the seats in parliament are still reserved
for the military sticks out like a sore thumb—if Myanmar is ever to truly
function as a democracy, the privileged position of the military, not only in
security concerns but in national governance, must become a thing of the past.
At the time
of writing this, Suu Kyi's NLD is favoured to come out on top in the Myanmar
general elections, despite the fact that the NLD needs at least 322 seats to
form a government whilst the army-backed opposition Union Solidarity and
Development Party (USDP) needs only 156. Early on in the day yesterday, NLD
spokesperson Dr Myo Nyunt told Frontier Myanmar that the party's internal
results showed it had won enough seats to form government—saying "We have
won almost every seat in the (Bamar-majority) regions." This was
corroborated as results trickled in throughout the day, showing quite a few NLD
gains in former USDP-stronghold constituencies, such as in Bago and southern
Mandalay. However, the fact that these "centres of Buddhist
nationalism" are now voting for NLD and not USDP reflects the dark
undercurrent of racial tensions that have marked Myanmar's polls.
It is
estimated that a total of 5,643 candidates stood for elections across 1,119
constituencies in national and regional legislatures, with around 20 to 30
million people casting votes across 50,000 polling stations. What's missing
from this calculation are the number of voters who were stripped of their right
to vote, either due to Myanmar's highly controversial citizenship laws that
have excluded the entire Rohingya population by denying them citizenship, or as
a result of polling centres being shut down in almost all of Rakhine, as well
as in townships in Kachin, Karen and Shan—all states with significant ethnic
minorities who are likely to vote against the ruling NLD. Overall, Human Rights
Watch estimates that at least 1.5 million voters have been disenfranchised in
Myanmar itself, and that is without counting the close to 1.1 million Rohingya
who have fled genocide in Rakhine and are now trapped in refugee camps in
Bangladesh.
The
marginalisation of minority groups in the electoral process, especially while
Myanmar is engaged in the worst civil conflict in decades with the Rakhine
armed group Arakan Army (AA), raises many red flags. There have also been
reports of members of different ethnic groups being denied the opportunity to
vote for their specific ethnic affairs minister. According to Myanmar
journalist Aye Min Thant, voter suppression can get codified in Myanmar
law—"The way "race" is created through Myanmar's law and is then
tied to unequal rights mean that huge portions of the population end up in
strange limbos".
This
division of Myanmar society along racial lines, with the NLD also exacerbating
and encouraging these tensions and tapping into Buddhist nationalist sentiments
to expand their voter base, despite being the party that spearheaded the
democratic movement in Myanmar, is worrying indeed. As journalist and
researcher Ben Dunant writes in The Diplomat—"The suffering of these
minority groups is not evidence of Myanmar "backsliding" into
dictatorship, but of its evolution into an illiberal, majoritarian democracy,
in which the government is increasingly responsive to majority demands, but
where the only protected minority interest is the military, which still
controls key security ministries and retains a quarter of all parliamentary
seats."
What do
these elections mean for Bangladesh? So far, our government has been
inordinately patient with the Myanmar authorities, hoping against hope that a
sustainable solution will be reached regarding the repatriation of Rohingya
refugees in Bangladesh. However, the total erasure of the Rohingya from the
electoral process and the continued demonisation of the minority group, with
anti-Muslim hate speech actually being used as a tactic to gain voters, gives
us every cause for concern. It seems almost like Bangladesh is being taken for
a ride here—the carrot of safe and dignified repatriation of Rohingya refugees
is being dangled in front of us, while within Myanmar, the anti-refugee,
anti-Muslim rhetoric of electoral campaigns and the mass disenfranchisement of
Rohingya voters are only further entrenching apartheid conditions and
demonstrating there is still no place for the Rohingya in Myanmar.
Than Htay,
leader of the USDP, recently told AFP "I cannot accept useless people in
our country" about the stateless Rohingya, and USDP supporters even
created a parody of an NLD anthem, claiming Suu Kyi's party had welcomed
"Bengali Muslims as if they were gods". The fact that this political
mud-slinging entailed accusations of being too accepting of other races and
religions, in an attempt to gain support from the majority Bamar population, is
very telling of a deep-rooted and insidious culture of assimilation within
Myanmar, where different races, languages and cultures are routinely excluded
from mainstream society. However, the USDP's tactics do not seem to have
worked—NLD is projected to gain an even bigger victory compared to 2015,
although the USDP is refusing to concede losses in certain townships.
NLD's
return to power, despite the USDP being backed by the military, would be a win
for democracy in Myanmar. However, its soaring popularity at home, despite its
reputation collapsing in the international community due to Suu Kyi's defence
of the Myanmar military at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and her
denial of the Rohingya genocide, is an indication of a society that is
fractured along communal and racial divides.
Will the
newly elected government of Myanmar push for a more democratic and inclusive
society, with civic spaces that allow dissenting voices to hold those in power
to account? While we hope democratic institutions will continue to evolve and
become stronger, it is difficult for us to keep the faith in Myanmar's
fledgling democracy while minorities continue to be denied their democratic
rights, ethnic conflict continues to escalate within its borders and the armed
forces continue to exert their political and economic influence across the
country. As the cases of genocide and war crimes against its military at the
ICJ and the International Criminal Court progress, the treatment of the
country's persecuted Rohingya population will ultimately be the litmus test for
democracy in Myanmar.
-----
Shuprova Tasneem is a member of the editorial
team at The Daily Star.
https://www.thedailystar.net/opinion/news/myanmar-elections-reflect-fractured-society-1992189
-----
US Elections: Toxic Populism Challenges
Democracy
By Manzoor Ahmed
November
10, 2020
Mark Twain
reputedly said that God created wars to teach Americans geography. It can be
said that God put Donald Trump in the White House to teach America how to
protect democracy. Whether the lessons are being learned remains an open
question. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have now been declared the winners of the
46th Presidential race. Biden received over 74 million votes, the highest ever
in a presidential election in the US.
Trump had
announced himself the victor on the election night, demanded that counting of
mailed-in votes should be stopped (claiming this to be illegal or fraudulent
without any evidence), complained about the election being stolen, and mounted
legal battles to press his claim.
Biden, in
contrast, had called for calm, unity and patience, and expressed confidence
about victory when the counting was done.
Trump had
beaten the opinion polls and predictions in 2016 for a surprise win of the
presidency. He had run as the candidate against the political establishment of
Washington, vowing to "drain the swamp," make America great again
(whatever that meant), reduce immigration and build a wall on the southern
border with Mexico. He derided international trade agreements and embarked on a
trade war with China, the second largest economy in the world.
He pulled
out of the Paris Climate Accord, calling climate change a hoax. He mismanaged
the Covid-19 pandemic abysmally, causing over 240,000 deaths and still
counting, with the highest death and infection numbers in the world. He blamed
China for causing the pandemic and stopped US funding to the WHO, the agency
coordinating the global response to the pandemic.
Trump kept
trying to dismantle the Obama-initiated national healthcare plan that offered
health insurance to all citizens and coverage of pre-existing conditions,
calling it "socialised medicine." He promised a better health plan
but failed to come up with any, while risking the loss of insurance coverage of
millions.
Trump's
misogyny and behaviour towards women resulted in lawsuits. His administration
notoriously separated young children of asylum seekers from parents and placed
them in cages. Now, parents of hundreds of them cannot be traced.
Trump's
lies in public statements and his tweets (his favourite means of public
communication) spawned a fact-checking industry and obliged Twitter to post
warnings about misleading information from the President. He declared the press
and electronic media to be the enemy of the people.
Trump
branded the Black Lives Matter supporters as rioters and looters, refused to
condemn white supremacists, declared himself a staunch promoter of law and
order and boasted of unanimous police union support from across the country.
He stood by
Israeli PM Netanyahu in his aggressive policy of annexing Palestinian neighbourhoods
and shifted the US embassy to Jerusalem, shedding all pretence of neutrality in
the Arab-Israeli dispute. He boasted of friendship with autocratic rulers such
as Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammad-bin-Salman and North Korea's Kim
Jong-Un. He claimed a special relationship with Russia's President Vladimir
Putin when US intelligence agencies were concerned about Russia's interference
in the US election process.
Amazingly,
Trump garnered over 64 million votes, more than he won in 2016. He built a
loyal support base of older, less educated whites and evangelical Christians,
bolstered by all kinds of people disaffected with the prevailing system,
including a proportion of Blacks and Latinos. The Latino votes handed the
critical Florida electoral college to Trump and almost 20 percent of Black
voters supported Trump.
Trump has
so far refused to concede the election and vows to continue court battles,
hoping to bring it to the Supreme Court, where conservative justices appointed
by him hold a strong majority. He will try to obstruct the succession process
and urges his supporters to take their protests to the streets.
Conservative
populism as a threat to liberal democracy is a global phenomenon that has
emerged in the beginning of the 21st century. I had written in a column in this
daily earlier, "Donald Trump managed to create a support base among the
electorate by invoking white male working class resentments and real or
imagined fears about various things—non-whites over-running the country, global
trade taking away American jobs, hordes of illegal immigrants depressing job
markets and causing crime and violence, and Muslims waging a war on Western
Christian civilisation."
Politicians
everywhere appear to be taking cue and are trying to apply this populist
formula to gain political advantage. Playing on people's fears and prejudices
is an old populist trick. A populist support base, once created, is not easily
shaken by logic or evidence. Outrageous words, actions and policy or non-policy
are the stock in trade for populist leaders.
Cases in
point are Brazil's Bolsonaro, Europe (including Austria, Hungary, Poland and
even France's Macron and UK's post-Brexit Boris Johnson), Philippine's Duterte,
and closer to home, India's Narendra Modi and his BJP-led ruling coalition. The
good news is that the nail-biting finish in the US has shown that the electoral
system there works smoothly, thanks to tens of thousands of election officials
and workers in the states and local counties under both Republican and Democratic
state administrations.
Demography
is another reason for hope. The Republican support in the "red"
states such as Texas, Arizona, North Carolina and Georgia has dwindled in 2020
and this trend will continue. The Black population and other minorities, women
and urban-suburban educated people are growing; diversity of the population
will prevail in the political voice. Kamala Harris, the first woman to be
elected as the Vice President, a child of immigrant parents of Indian and
Jamaican origin, is an iconic part of this wave of the future.
Trumpism
will, however, not disappear quietly into the setting sun. As Kamala Harris
said in her victory speech on Saturday night, "America's democracy is not
guaranteed, it is as strong as our willingness to fight for it; it takes
struggle and sacrifice to protect it." And Biden said, it is time to build
and heal, root out systemic racism and restore America's soul with compassion,
empathy and concern. The new administration has a big job cut out for it.
There are
two major and obvious lessons here for nurturing democracy in Bangladesh.
First, the electoral machinery has to be made independent and functional,
enforcing its rules and mandates. Second, those who want to be major political
forces and steer the country to the future must cultivate and earn the trust of
the youth, women and the ordinary citizens; they must rebuild the organisation
and structure of the respective political parties from the grassroots, giving
all a genuine voice.
----
Manzoor Ahmed is Professor Emeritus at Brac
University.
https://www.thedailystar.net/opinion/news/us-elections-toxic-populism-challenges-democracy-1992181
------
The Joe Biden I Knew Has Been Humbled
By Frank Bruni
Nov. 9,
2020
You no
doubt saw or heard at least some of Joe Biden’s pitch-perfect victory speech
last weekend, but what about the victory video that his campaign released hours
earlier, just after CNN and other networks declared him the president-elect?
It’s a
gorgeous two minutes of music (a rendition of “America the Beautiful” by Ray
Charles) and images, precisely none of which show Biden. He cedes the frame and
the moment entirely to Americans themselves — to Black Americans, white
Americans, Native Americans, disabled Americans, young Americans, old Americans
— and to the landscapes in the lyrics of the song.
The video
made clear that we, not he, were the focus, the story, the point of all of
this. His speech hours later similarly elevated the first person plural over
the first person singular, which was singularly transcendent under Donald
Trump.
Largely to
draw a contrast with Trump, Biden ran one of the humblest presidential
campaigns I can recall. He claimed victory in the presidential race last
weekend with the same radical humility. And that tonic of a tone could be
crucial to his agenda.
His
sweepingly ambitious goals include a major expansion of health care, a titanic
effort to combat climate change, yet another change in the tax code and much,
much more. But he’s wisely fashioning all of that as a public, not a personal,
quest, and he’s casting himself as servant, not lord. The best way to ask for
the moon is modestly.
That
approach — call it the New Humility — was evident in a small detail on Monday
morning. He released a written statement about Pfizer’s reported progress
toward an effective coronavirus vaccine, and its second sentence extended
congratulations to “the brilliant women and men who helped produce this
breakthrough.” He directed attention away from, not toward, himself.
He added
this: “It is also important to understand that the end of the battle against
Covid-19 is still months away.” There was none of Trump’s overreach, the
kissing cousin to his self-congratulation. Biden was giving it to us straight.
He was giving it to us humble.
It’s often
said that people aren’t capable of big change when they’re older. But Biden has
changed, in ways as poignant as they are prudent. I sometimes don’t recognize
this version of him.
He used to
have a way of sucking the oxygen out of a room. He couldn’t shut up. If you
gave him the microphone, he thrilled to it, wouldn’t surrender it, sang an aria
that turned into a whole damned opera.
A bunch of
us Times columnists had lunch with him at the Democratic National Convention in
Charlotte, N.C., in 2012 and came away commenting on how spirited, upbeat and
warm he was, but also on how he talked and talked and talked.
The
following year, he visited the Times Building in Manhattan and sat down with a
small group of editors and writers. He talked even more. We were lucky to get
in a question every 10 minutes.
But
something happened between then and now. He got older. He suffered great loss
with the death of his son Beau. And Trump happened, too, providing the country
with an example of hubris so monumental — and self-fascination so malignant —
that any sane and sensitive observer would recoil from it, look for traces of
those toxins in himself and purge them, especially if volunteering to be the
antidote to that egomania.
Biden’s
campaign verged on self-effacing even before the pandemic compelled a retreat
from the campaign trail and a shedding of all the pomp that a presidential bid
typically entails.
In those
early primary debates, while Biden’s rivals talked past their time limits, he’d
cut himself off, coloring dutifully within the lines. Technically, physically,
he was always in the center of the stage. Effectively, he was anywhere but.
He
positioned himself not as the heir to the Democratic tradition or as a messiah
charting the party’s future but as a transitional figure. What could be humbler
than that? Sure, this was strategic, but it would have rung hollow had it not
been matched by his bearing.
His
climatic remarks at the Democratic National Convention in August seemed to be
the work of a team of people who had hung the most famous line from Trump’s
boast to Republicans four years earlier — “I alone can fix it” — on the wall of
their writing room and resolved to produce its antonym.
The
convention itself was distinctive for how it kept turning the camera around so
that voters, not Biden, dominated the frame. When there were Biden-centric
testimonials, they described him not in heroic terms but simply as a decent,
honest man.
“He was
making clear that he wouldn’t rule as some self-obsessed despot,” I wrote then.
“He wouldn’t rule at all. He’d govern. It’s a different, humbler thing.”
The
assumption that Biden won’t seek a second term as president reflects more than
his age, 77. (He’ll be 78 before Inauguration Day.) It reflects his bearing,
too. There’s little greed or gluttony in it.
It reflects
an ethos that was embedded deep into this campaign, that is carrying over into
this transition and that manifests itself in all sorts of ways. Jill Biden’s
decision to continue her teaching job even as first lady: That’s part and parcel
of the New Humility.
So was
Biden’s reticence after Election Day, as he modeled and urged patience with
vote counting and steered clear of any tit-for-tat with Trump.
The New
Humility means that he and his aides aren’t trying to monopolize the headlines
by turbocharging chatter about who might get which cabinet positions but
instead sending signals that this is a process, and a sober one at that.
And the New
Humility shaped the opening stretch of Biden’s victory speech. “Folks,” he
said, “the people of this nation have spoken. They’ve delivered us a clear
victory, a convincing victory, a victory for we, the people. We’ve won with the
most votes ever cast on a presidential ticket in the history of the nation, 74
million!” We. The people.
“I’m
humbled by the trust and confidence you’ve placed in me,” he added. Humbled.
Trust. This new presidency will force us to dust off an old vocabulary.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/09/opinion/joe-biden-humility.html?
-----
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