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Particularly Brinda Karat and Arundathi Roy have emerged as the darlings of the media. Marxist media barons who thrive on the inherited goodwill of their readers have created these images. Alas, lost among these high-pitched voices, generated by media with ideological vested interests, are the real martyrs in the field. This story is about two such.
Melapalayam is a town in Thirunelveli district, in south India's Tamil Nadu. Militant Wahabbi outfits almost run a parallel government here. The chief of these is Tamil Nadu Muslim Munnetra Kazhakam, an organization so close to the ruling coalition that police officials seldom can take any real action against its Wahabbi outlandishness.
Thirty-five-year-old Mumtaz was a laborer in a local cigar company, where she rolled tobacco in dry leaves to make cigars. In early March, as she was returning after collecting tobacco, a group of youngsters stopped her and told her not to have friendly relations with her tobacco company manager, who was a Hindu. Mumtaz, who is a divorcee, told them to mind their own business. As she finished speaking a stone hit her. She started running, but the stones kept coming. She was stoned in public -- in accordance with Islamic law -- then stabbed to death.
The district secretary of the student wing of TMMK dismissed the murder, saying that the woman deserved it. He has an easy solution to prevent such incidents -- he wants the secular government of India to introduce the practice of stoning "immoral" women to death. "Many Middle East countries follow this practice and keep women in check. That's the only way to handle such issues," the Indian Express quoted him as saying.
As for the killers of Mumtaz, it is interesting to note that all were in their twenties except two, who were eighteen. And there were two college students also. The police inaction has emboldened the Wahabbis. Barely two months after the gruesome public killing of Mumtaz another Muslim woman received a threatening letter from fundamentalists. Hairunisa, the wife of a Muslim tea vendor, was told not to assist her husband in his trade as it meant she had to serve customers who happened to be mostly Hindu laborers. She chose to ignore it and paid a heavy price for it with her own life. A four-member squad of fundamentalist killers descended on her shop and stabbed her to death.
At a milder level, it is a regular phenomenon in this Muslim town to fine women on charges of "doubtful" behavior. What is inexplicable is the utter silence of social activists and feminists -- the usual slogan-shouting brigade of the leftist kind. Those who put Gujarat in the international spotlight with their high-decibel campaign for minority rights, went into mute mode when women were killed in broad daylight in Taliban-style executions. What is more, some of these activists for women's rights do not mind sharing the dais with an organization that wants to legitimize such killings.
Brinda Karat, president of the All India Democratic Women's Association, was sharing the platform with the president of the TMMK at a rally organized by the Wahabbi group in the national capital while down south the TMMK district secretary was asking for a law to stone women to death. Karat was demanding, along with the TMMK, that religion-based reservations be set aside for Muslims by the civil administration of secular India.
When Mumtaz told her tormentors to mind their own business, and when Hairunisa decided to stand as a tea vendor in defiance of the fundamentalist threat she received, these two courageous women sent a stronger message of oppression than Arundathi Roy, Brinda Karat and the rest of their ilk put together. These two women stood defiant in the face of death and chose to become martyrs of freedom -- symbols of the real struggle of women against the spreading darkness of fundamentalism.
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(S. Aravindan Neelakandan is a social scientist working with an ecological NGO called Vivekananda Kendra -- Natural Resources Development Project in Nagercoil, India. He is also a freelance writer and author of the Tamil-language "God and 40 Hz.")
