JOIN USMaharashtra's morality police: Big brother is watching
It was not the lack of family support that killed Shraddha Walkar, as Maharashtra Minister Mangal Prabhat Lodha would have us believe. Both friends and family kept telling her to leave her violent live-in partner Aftab Poonawala, but she chose to keep going back to him - a common pattern in victims of domestic violence. If at all, some of the blame for Shraddha's death can be laid on the Mumbai Police, who didn't act promptly on her complaint against Poonawala.
But police indifference to women facing domestic abuse is a problem as old as the women's movement, and fixing it is not part of the agenda of the committee that has just been constituted by Lodha, Minister for Women's Development. The anomaly of a man holding this post is easily explained – in Sangh Parivar's worldview, Hindu women are too guileless to protect themselves from Muslim predators; they need the protection of Hindu men. The Women's Development portfolio is thus just right for Lodha, whose RSS moorings go back to his childhood.
When the Congress-NCP coalition ruled Maharashtra, Lodha would stage dharnas with his followers outside police stations in Mumbai's Muslim areas to prevent the sacrifice of bulls on Bakri Eid. It would take all the tact of mohalla committee members to prevent communal clashes from breaking out. With that bugbear having been resolved by the beef ban imposed by the BJP-Shiv Sena government in 2014, Lodha became active again after the BJP was upstaged by the MVA coalition after the 2019 Assembly polls. He then devoted himself to the other Hindutva bogey of "illegal immigrants", crying wolf over "a Hindu exodus" from one particular Muslim-dominated slum. Was it just a coincidence that the slum fell in the constituency of a Muslim Congress MLA, who was then the guardian minister of Mumbai?
Last week, a senior RSS member told this writer that "thousands of Rohingyas and Bangladeshis" were entering Mumbai daily to fan out in slums and fulfil their agenda of "love-jihad". The solution, he said, lay in instilling Hindutva beliefs in daughters from childhood so that they would instinctively be averse to mixing with Muslims. Until that long-term goal is accomplished, Lodha seems to have decided to save those who can be saved now, i.e., the "unfortunate" Hindu daughters who've escaped such
parental indoctrination and chosen to marry Muslims.
Interestingly, the committee set up to do this is not just exclusively Hindu, but also stacked with professionals ready to spend their precious time on this pursuit, free of charge. And why not? Theirs isn't a very difficult task. The Sangh Parivar, with which most of these professionals are associated, already boasts of an efficient network which keeps track of Hindu women needing to be "rescued". Now, the State's enormous resources will be aiding them.
The committee's job has been defined as checking the status of the woman's relationship with her parents, and repairing any estrangement that her interfaith marriage may have caused. So Maharashtra, the birthplace of 14th-century poet Janabai, Pandita Ramabai, Savitribai Phule, Fatima Shaikh, Madame Cama and a host of pioneering women, will now have morality police entering the homes of its women, authorised by the State to interfere in their private lives.
Interestingly, within two days of its formation, the government removed intercaste marriages from its purview. Perhaps someone drew its attention to the embarrassing fact that there exists a government scheme since 1999 to promote such marriages with an award of Rs 50,000. The Committee had been asked to reexamine it; now, it can go after interfaith marriages with single-minded devotion.
For more than a decade, Lodha has been among Mumbai's most powerful, not because he's a four-term MLA from the city's poshest area, but because of his real estate empire. As a minister, his power has expanded manifold. Yet, not all his clout can mask the fact that his committee violates the Constitution. "The right to marry the person of one's choice is integral to Article 21 (right to life and liberty)," said the Supreme Court in 2018, upholding the marriage of Hadiya, the Hindu convert who married a Muslim.
Already, the "love-jihad" laws passed by BJP governments to prevent Hindu girls marrying Muslims are under legal challenge. Lodha's committee goes beyond them, by interfering in marriages that have already taken place.
In 2017, the Bombay High Court struck down the provision of Maharashtra's beef ban, which prevented citizens from stocking beef procured from outside the state. "A citizen has a right to lead a meaningful life within the four corners of his house as well as outside his house," said the court. As citizens, Maharashtra's women are entitled to the same right.
(Jyoti Punwani is a journalist)
Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.