New Delhi: A training module for Congress workers on the rights of minorities questions the intent of the Modi government behind the criminalisation of instant triple talaq, saying it was “amusing that the person projecting himself as the champion of Muslim women himself abandoned his wife without any divorce”.
The eight-page booklet, which deals with the various standpoints of Indian political parties on the rights of minorities in the country, is a part of the module followed by the Congress Seva Dal in the camps held by it to train the party’s grassroots workers. Seva Dal, founded in 1923, is a frontal organisation of the Congress.
“It is important to understand that out of 6.5 lakh cases of divorce among Muslims, instant triple talaq account for 0.3 percent of the cases, or less than 3,000 of the total. Seen against the figure of over two lakh eighty thousand Muslim women abandoned without any form of divorce, this is a small number,” states the booklet, accessed by ThePrint.
“One must also note that among Hindus, the number of such abandoned women is above 20 lakh. It’s also amusing that the person who is claiming to be the champion of those Muslim women himself abandoned his wife without any divorce. The BJP has no proposal for women like them,” it adds.
While the Seva Dal booklet does not name anyone in this regard, the Congress has in the past taken swipes at the marital status of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The Congress had walked out of the Lok Sabha in 2019 when the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Bill was passed that made instant triple talaq a criminal offence.
Congress leader and senior lawyer Abhishek Manu Singhvi had told reporters at the time that while the party “fundamentally supported this bill”, there was no need to criminalise an “imaginary thing” when the Supreme Court had, in 2017, already declared instant triple talaq as unlawful, holding the practice as un-Islamic and arbitrary.
“We also wanted an amendment for the provision of support to Muslim women…Triple talaq does not have any legal standpoint, then what was the need to criminalise it? Even if the woman does not want it, her relative can get the husband arrested. Bail will be very difficult. What is the relevance for this?” Singhvi had said.
In its training module too, the Congress maintained that the decision to criminalise instant triple talaq was not required.
“The idea behind the triple talaq law is to get the support of the Hindus blinded by religion by harassing Muslim men. It would have been enough to declare the act of triple talaq unlawful. The provision of strict punishment is not just against Muslim men but also against those women who are already going through pain and anguish,” the module added.
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‘BJP, RSS believe in Manusmriti’
The booklet underlines that the BJP and RSS, which “believe in Manusmriti as the governing law”, cannot accept India as a pluralist and secular republic. It cites “Bunch of Thoughts” and “We or Our Nationhood Defined”—the authored works of MS Golwalkar, who was known as the second Sarsanghchalak of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)—to argue that the ideas articulated by him were at odds with the idea of India as a democratic, diverse, tolerant, equal and secular nation.
During the ongoing Winter Session of the Parliament, senior Congress leader Rahul Gandhi also invoked Manusmriti, the controversial Sanskrit text composed centuries ago, to attack the BJP and the RSS. The two competing visions for India, he said, are represented by the Indian Constitution on one hand and texts like Manusmriti and Hindutva ideologues such as Vinayak Damodar Savarkar on the other.
The Congress Seva Dal training module is also designed along similar lines, as it seeks to align party workers with the thought process of the party’s top leadership. Apart from a dedicated section on Savarkar, nearly every sub-theme that the curriculum touches is replete with references to the Hindutva icon.
For instance, the section dealing with triple talaq also states: “This is a party (BJP) which considers Savarkar as its idol. Savarkar had described the use of the instrument of rape of minority women as legitimate revenge in his book, ‘Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History’. They can’t be the protectors of the rights of minority women.”
ThePrint previously reported how another training booklet of the Seva Dal put US President-elect Donald Trump in the same league as Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, founder of Italian fascism Benito Mussolini and Savarkar.
