
Muslim Law Board Condemns Pahalgam Terror Attack, Pauses Waqf Bill Protests
The All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) on Wednesday condemned the Pahalgam terror attack and decided to pause its ongoing protests against the new Waqf law for three days in solidarity with the families of victims.
The terror attack at a prime tourist location in Pahalgam in south Kashmir's Anantnag district on Tuesday left 26 people, mostly tourists, dead and several injured.
The AIMPLB has issued a condolence statement and decided to temporarily pause its ongoing protest programmes, a statement issued by the Muslim organisation said.
As a mark of solidarity with the bereaved families, the Board has suspended its campaign against the "controversial amendments" to the Waqf Act for three days starting April 23, the statement said.
SQR Ilyas, national convener of the Majlis-e-Amal for the protection of Waqf under the AIMPLB, said in a statement that the terrorist attack in Pahalgam is deeply tragic and strongly condemnable.
Therefore, the Board has decided to suspend its protest programmes under the Waqf Protection Campaign for three days as an expression of mourning and sympathy for the victims' families.
Ilyas issued a circular to the campaign's state and district conveners, instructing them to immediately pause all campaign activities for the three days.
However, he clarified that the campaign will resume after this period.
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Scroll.in
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This book studies gender in Bengal's nationalist policies (and the evolution of the ‘bhadramahila')
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By the late 1920s, Muslim men came to be perceived as the main threat to the 'chastity' of Hindu women. Newspapers and pamphlets cautioned Hindus not to allow their women and children to have any dealings with Muslim traders, teachers, and servants. Implicit here was also the fear of Hindu women losing control of their sexuality and falling prey to the desires of Muslim men. In northern India, this even led to an economic and social boycott, intended to facilitate the isolation of Hindu women from all Muslims and thus reduce the anxieties of the Hindu patriarchy (Gupta 2000). But Bengal followed not far behind. The upper-caste bhadralok paranoia about abductions led to the establishment of the Women's Protection League in 1924 and a meeting of the League was held in Calcutta's Albert Hall, which was attended by at least a thousand people. The record of the organisation in physically mobilising people was not impressive. 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Both implied a strictly regulated code of conduct for women. Many stories were circulated around this period about abductions and conversions of Hindu women by Muslim goondas, and such tales became a significant tool in the mobilisation of Hindus. The propaganda campaign against 'abductions', often fed into the creation of the image of the sexually charged, lustful Muslim male, keen on violating the 'pure' body of the Hindu woman. An obsession with numbers added a further dimension to this logic. The numerically-defined strength of the community became a significant component of communal consciousness, helping to stabilise Hindu identities around these new orientations. All Hindu women, including widows, came to be perceived as potential wombs, capable of producing 'strong' Hindu progeny as an antidote to the numerical threat posed by the Muslims. This paranoid concern over numbers therefore, increased control over the sexuality and reproductive capacity of Hindu women. Thus, in this period of heightened communalism, Hindu publicists were able to use the woman's body as a key element in an increasingly polarising and paranoid discourse. The creation of this looming spectre of a physical violation, unleashed by the forced entry of the Muslim 'outsider' into the innermost realm of the Hindu household marked a crucial shift from the earlier century, with the colonial 'Other' replaced largely by the Muslims in the machinery of Hindu communalist propaganda. With the increasing communalisation of politics and rising complexity over lower-caste assertions and their accommodation within the high Hindu fold, a reorientation of the politics of gender took place in the first few decades of the 20th-century Bengal. 'The woman question' – the centrepiece of a discursive struggle between colonialism and nationalism in the 19th century and coming to focus on the figure of the 'New Woman' in the last quarter of that century – lost its pre-eminence inasmuch as the question had earlier tended to revolve round didactic elements of education and demeanour. In the new scenario, 'the woman question' got inseparably linked with the demarcation of communal cultural identities. In a curious shift, Hindu women now needed to be 'protected' from the communal 'Other' – that is, Muslims – and no longer from the coloniser's intrusive reach into the 'private sphere'. This turn in the nationalist cultural politics of gender produced a communally charged politics of the body, witnessed during the bloody years of the Partition. A similar kind of communalisation can be seen in the reinvention of the 'quintessential Hindu/Indian womanhood' in the cultural politics of Hindu fundamentalism in more recent times. 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Hindustan Times
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