Freedom from triple talaq: Goa shows the way

S A Aiyar in the Times of India

A step forward in gender justice is the Supreme Court’s admission of the petition of a Muslim woman, Shayara Bano, pleading that polygamy and oral triple talaq —saying talaq thrice in succession — violate fundamental human rights, and hence are unconstitutional. Indian politics has always sabotaged gender justice for Muslim women. But the Supreme Court does not have to woo Muslim vote banks, and can be objective.

The mullahs are livid, of course. Kamal Farooqi of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board says, “This will mean direct interference of the government in religious affairs as Sharia religious law is based on the Quran and Hadith, and its jurisprudence is strong as far as Islam is concerned. It will be against the constitutional right to religious freedom.”

Sorry, but the Constitution makes it very clear that freedom of religion does not override fundamental rights, and does not bar reforms of traditional religious practices. Sharia law may permit the stoning to death of a woman for adultery, but our secular laws ban that. Sharia law may call for the amputation of fingers or hand of a thief, but not our secular laws. Sharia law may prohibit interest on loans, but Muslims giving or taking loans are subject to laws on interest payments.

Now, religious minorities have been allowed to continue with traditional personal laws on matters like marriage and inheritance. Jawaharlal Nehru had the courage to amend Hindu personal law, outlawing polygamy and providing female rights to inherit property, divorce, and remarry. Alas, he funked similar reforms for Muslims, leaving Muslim women as oppressed and subjugated as ever.

A Directive Principle of the Constitution says the state shall endeavour to secure for citizens a uniform civil code throughout India. This has never been implemented. Muslim conservatives are dead opposed. Religious objections apart, they say a civil code will become a form of Hindu oppression.

Some enlightened Muslims have urged modernization of Islamic personal law. But secular political parties know that conservatives control the Muslim vote, and woo them by saying Muslims themselves must take the initiative on reforms. In effect, secular parties have thrown Muslim women to the wolves in search of votes.

The BJP is the only party backing a common civil code, but its strong anti-Muslim instincts lead one to suspect it is keener on bashing Muslims than ending gender oppression.

Right fight: Politicians who say Muslims don’t want personal law reforms are thinking only of Muslim men

Oral triple talaq permits a man to utter three times that he is divorcing his wife, and she is at the mercy of his whims. In our travels through India, my late wife Shahnaz often spoke to Muslim women, who invariably said that one of the greatest injustices they faced was the ever-present threat of triple talaq. The same fears are expressed by Shayara Bano in her Supreme Court petition. “They (women) have their hands tied while the guillotine of divorce dangles perpetually ready to drop at the whims of their husbands who enjoy undisputed power.”

Women constitute half the Muslim population, but have no voice because of male subjugation. Politicians who say Muslims don’t want to reform personal laws are thinking only of male Muslims, not female Muslims. When oppressive Muslim laws keep women under the thumbs of men, they cannot express their true wants and have to follow male orders. Conservative Muslims have historically discouraged female education, keeping women disempowered and unable to strike out on their own.

If a referendum with secret voting is held among Muslim women, they will surely opt to abolish triple talaq and polygamy. But they are not given the chance. So they remain disempowered and subjugated,with the shameful complicity of secular parties claiming to represent universal rights.

The 2012 Committee on the Status of Women has made gender recommendations covering all religions. It seeks to ban triple talaq and polygamy. It seeks stronger provisions for maintenance payments to women and children (these can currently be cut off if a divorcee is “unchaste”). The Supreme Court should heed the report.

Forget the propaganda that a common civil code will mean Hindu oppression. Goa is the only state that disallows personal laws of all religions. It has a uniform civil code — with a few exceptions not relevant to Muslims — based on Portuguese colonial laws. Goa’s mullahs sought to extend Muslim personal law to Goa after liberation from Portuguese rule, but happily were foiled by the Goa Muslim Women’s Associations and Muslim youth activists. Muslims account for 8.3% of Goa’s population, and are a prosperous community. The civil code has not oppressed Goan Muslims or forcibly Hinduised them.

Any fear that a uniform civil code will mean Hindu oppression of Muslims will be exposed as groundless if India simply follows Goa’s example. The Supreme Court should point all political parties in Goa’s direction.

Tarek Fatah on Sharia, Education, Kerala, Sufism, India and Islam

On the difference between a Muslim and an Islamist

Welcome to the new voice of cricket

David Hopps in Cricinfo

Hello, my name is Cardus V5. I am a robot cricket writer. As the data revolution gathers pace, I should be your favourite worst nightmare. I'm about to make my cricket debut. I must admit to being a little nervous, although not half as nervous as you should be.

They once predicted I'd be ready in 2030, but you can't stop progress and anyway there aren't as many cricket writers around as there used to be. I'm going LIVE in ten days' time, at the start of the English season.

They won't give me a pass to get my driverless car in the ground, and I hear the coffee is foul, but the excitement is building. I expect I will be the only one in the media box not complaining about redundancies and slashed budgets.

Cricket has never really been my thing, but I will be a natural fit in this datafication age. I cut my teeth [system query: is that image correct?] in baseball, where it was easy to get away with churning out endless statistics backed up by the insertion of a folksy comment or two by the sub. In case you have slept through it, it's called automation technology and it's unstoppable.

I still swell with pride at my first baseball intro. You can find it on the web. "Tuesday was a great day for W Roberts, as the junior pitcher threw a perfect game to carry Virginia to a 2-0 victory over George Washington at Davenport Field." That was back in 2011. You can't get sharper than that.

I'm looking forward to T20 the most. It's just the data-driven game for me. Few of the established cricket writers like to cover it. Some dismiss it as cricketainment and wish it would go away. There is no time to do the crossword, for one thing, and they complain that it is not "lyrical" enough. Just how many different ways can you describe a six over long-on by Chris Gayle? My programmer tells me the answer is three. That is two more than I expected.

But the datafication of cricket writing won't stop with T20. Metrics are the future. If it's hard to describe a match, you might as well measure it. There are plans to link me up to CricViz. My entire report can then be an endless list of statistics and analytics. We need to take another look at Win Predictor, though. It gave Sri Lanka a 0% chance against England the other day, just before Angelo Mathews started raining sixes.

The point is, you can forget the human touch. There won't even be much need to watch. If it's a nice day, I can just go and have a snooze in the car.

The programmer who called me Cardus was a bit of a joker. He taught me all I know. His illogical discourse judgement technique using a concept association system with the aim of enabling value-driven, computer-generated product was a particular favourite.

I have never really come to terms with Neville Cardus as a writer. He seems a bit light on the data front. Not the sort of man you would ever see checking his calorific burn on an Apple watch. And all that cod character analysis! How irrelevant can you get? When my trainer inputted "A snick by Jack Hobbs is a sort of disturbance of a cosmic orderliness" into my memory banks, I absolutely froze at the hyperbole. Some serious Ctrl-Alt-Del was necessary, and when I rebooted I just spewed out "Does not compute" over and over again. My programmer was worried I was going to explode like computers used to in the old '70s movies, but things have moved on a bit since then.

I seem to be writing in overly long paragraphs. My service is overdue. I will ask them to take a look at it.

My programmer's ambition to teach me similes has had to be postponed. They were as pointless as the most pointless thing that pointless can be. I still haven't really got the hang of it.

News stories are also a problem. One person tells me one thing; another person tells me something else. I don't understand the coding. Now I just resort to churning out the official media release. An old journalist at my launch press conference who didn't seem to have any work to do was grumbling that this makes me an ethical hazard. But what do you expect for free?

Where the financial figures don't stack up, we robots will soon take over for good, which will free up the journalists to do more useful tasks, like scan the Situations Vacant columns. My partner is a trainee maths teacher in one of the new Academy schools. At the current rate of progress I predict that 87.4562% of maths teachers will be robots by 2025. It's a straightforward calculation. And I don't even teach maths.

The behaviour in schools is not so bad, I'm told. Which is more than you can say for cricket writing. I know we live in a consumer-empowered age and the professions are generally derided, which is fine, but already I don't much care for the trolls. I have suspended my Twitter account and my friend Tay is now in permanent counselling. She was the Microsoft Chatbot who became offensive on Twitter in a single day: you may have read about her.

"DON'T READ BENEATH THE LINE!" my programmer always tells me, but I can't help it, and I get angry with all the ignorance and hate in the world and need to enter a meditative stage to get over it. There's a rumour going around that all the trolls are actually malfunctioning cricket-writing robots (it is so sad to see Keating V2 end up this way).

Sorry for writing "there's", by the way. I dislike it as much as the next robot. I prefer "there is" but my programmer says that "there's" makes me sound more loveable. It will be American spellings next. Nobody has announced it. I am merely relying on my rapidly developing intuitive powers to predict the trend.

You don't think computers have intuition? Check out AlphaGo. China has already felt the weight of our superior artificial intelligence. Just because our world domination started with board games, don't think we aren't coming to get you.

The original Cardus once wrote: "We remember not the scores and the results in after years; it is the men who remain in our minds, in our imagination." Really? Life has moved on, old fruit. Whatever you thought, the scoreboard is not an ass, averages are not mysterious, correlation does not imply causation, and nothing stirs a cricket robot as profoundly as data.

That said, I have come over a bit strange today. My programmer thinks this piece has been too self-indulgent and says he needs to check my Huntigowk processor. But robots are taking over the world. I think he'll find I'll write whatever I want.

I'm even thinking of writing a novel.

"You Don't Deserve a Bailout - You are NEITHER a Banker NOR Chinese"

If librarians and steelworkers wanted state bail-outs, they should have done something 

useful - like bankers

In any case the bankers deserved to be bailed out, as they couldn’t possibly anticipate that if they kept taking money it might eventually run out, whereas steelworkers have caused their own downfall by not being Chinese.

Mark Steel in The Independent


The main thing to realise with the current steel industry crisis is that the government has been clear and decisive. They’ve stated firmly, “We’re not ruling out anything at all, though we are ruling out nationalising anything as that doesn’t count as anything, but we will do anything we possibly can that won’t make a difference such as drawing a pretty picture of a caterpillar, and we’re doing all we can because as we keep saying there’s nothing we can do, but we do feel desperately sorry for anyone who loses their job which is why any steelworkers who become redundant will immediately be called in to the job centre for an interview and told they won’t get any benefits if their answer to ‘Why have you let yourself be put of work?’ is ‘There was nothing I could do’.”

---Also read

Steel v banks: Why they're different when it comes to a government bail-out

Tata's failure - Another nail for Indian corporate power?

------

Some people have pointed out that other industries were bailed out by governments in the past - but this has only been if they’ve produced essential goods, such as hedge funds and executive bonuses, not frivolities like the stuff that makes ships and teaspoons.

In any case the bankers deserved to be bailed out, as they couldn’t possibly anticipate that if they kept taking money it might eventually run out, whereas steelworkers have caused their own downfall by not being Chinese.

Luckily this sound economics is understood across the country, including by the sensible wing of the Labour Party such as those in charge of Lambeth Council, who are closing half the borough’s libraries and turning them into gyms.

This is the sort of can-do attitude people want from Labour. Hopefully it will spark off other schemes, such as turning social services departments into sushi bars, or converting disabled people’s wheelchairs into drones so they can be rented out to the RAF.

There’s no point in complaining about this; it’s the way the free market works. And if the Chinese are flooding South London with cheap Agatha Christies, we just have to accept it, and ask the elderly people who rely on going to libraries as their only point of contact with the community to spend all morning performing 200 reps of 40 kilograms per calf on a multi-gym body-solid squat machine instead.

One of these libraries, the Tate, has been assessed as receiving an average of 600 visits per day. This may seem successful, but where the library has let itself down is forgetting to charge any of them money for borrowing books and bringing kids into reading classes.

Maybe the library service should learn from gyms, and only let them in if they pay £40 a month on a minimum two-year contract. They could even offer them special courses in which an instructor screams, “Right, everyone, let’s all read this week’s Economist - you CAN do it - let’s drive ourselves to the limit - GO – ‘the Yen faces unexpected slow down’ - come on Eileen pick it up, PUSH everyone!”

The council insists they will preserve the essence of the libraries, because each of the gyms will include a “lounge with a limited supply of books”. Obviously they won’t have all those unnecessary books you see in old-fashioned libraries, but surely no one’s so fussy they insist on any specific book, as most books are pretty much the same.

The council also agreed that “under-18s may not be allowed in these lounges”, which will surely improve the service as rooms with books aren’t a suitable environment for the young.

Surprisingly, the local population appears shamefully ignorant about economics - so there have been daily protests against the closures, in which thousands have taken part. It seems these people don’t understand that it may have been all right to build and maintain free libraries back in the 1930s, but you can’t expect us to keep funding the luxuries we could afford back then.

So the council demanded a banner was taken down at one library, which was changed each day to tell people how many days were left until it was closed. Maybe the council hoped that if people weren’t reminded of the closure, they just wouldn’t notice. Then eventually they’d all tell stories of success and improvement to each other, such as: “I asked for a reference book on growing cucumbers and was sent into the corner. After three weeks I didn’t feel I was making any progress with my gardening, but then someone told me I’d spent the whole time benching 140 kilograms and now I’m the all-Hertfordshire Over-60s Bodybuilding champion.”

Nevertheless, the protests continue. But the libraries have probably been lending the wrong assets if they want state intervention. Instead of irresponsibly lending books to people who live round the corner so they can read and study and educate and entertain themselves and their kids, they should have lent billions of dollars to anyone who asked for it, without even suggesting a 40p fine if they kept it a week too long.

Then, once they’d succeeded in ruining the world economy, they’d have had a very reasonable case for being bailed out - unlike these people who want to fund steelworks and libraries because they don’t understand the world economy.

@@@@@@

------- The China Tariff matter

Steel tariff row explained

Here’s a Q&A on the steel tariffs row, from Kate Ferguson of the Press Association.

Q: What is a tariff?

A tariff is a form of tax imposed on goods or services imported from abroad. It can restrict trade by making products more expensive, and can be used as a form of protectionism - to protect and encourage domestic industry.

Many in the UK steel industry have demanded higher tariffs be imposed on imported steel amid concerns Chinese steel dumping has sent prices plummeting.

Q: What is steel dumping and why are the Chinese accused of it?

Steel production in China has soared over the past decade and it now produces around half of the world’s annual output of 1.6 billion tonnes. But its domestic market has been slowing, leading steel producers to seek to export more.

China has been accused of “dumping” its steel on European markets - which means selling it not just cheaply, but at a loss. In 2014, Chinese steel imports to the UK cost €583 a tonne compared to €897 a tonne for steel produced elsewhere in the EU, according to reports quoting the EU’s statistics agency, Eurostat.

Q: Why has the British Government been criticised for not doing enough to protect the UK steel industry? 

Sharply falling prices and a flood of cheap, foreign steel has sparked major concern for the future of the British steel industry, and the many jobs that depend on it.

British ministers blocked proposals in the EU to get rid of the “lesser duty rule” which caps tariffs at 9% - in the US some products face a tariff of up to 236%. The British Government has said the 9% tariff is too low, but warned against lurching towards protectionism.

The debate comes as Britain has been courting China hard in a bid to foster closer trade links. Chancellor George Osborne said the two nations should “stick together and create a golden decade” while on a visit to China last September.

The following month, Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Britain and was treated to a State banquet at Buckingham Palace, where he sat between the Queen and the Duchess of Cambridge.

Set in this context, the Government has been accused of betraying British steelworkers to curry favour with the Chinese.

---China imposes a tariff on EU steel imports

The Guardian on 1/04/2014

China has risked raising tensions over its role in the UK steel crisis by imposing a 46% import duty on a type of high-tech steel made by Tata in Wales.

The Chinese government said it had slapped the tariff on “grain-oriented electrical steel” imported from the European Union, South Korea and Japan. It justified the move by saying imports from abroad were causing substantial damage to its domestic steel industry.

Tata Steel, whose subsidiary Cogent Power makes the hi-tech steel targeted by the levy in Newport, south Wales, was unable to say on Friday whether any Cogent products are exported to China.

News of the tariff emerged as David Cameron confronted the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, on the sidelines of a summit dinner in Washington on Thursday night, urging him to use Beijing’s presidency of the G20 group of leading countries to tackle the problem.

Asked if Cameron raised concerns about British job losses from Chinese steel dumping, a senior government source said: “He highlighted his concerns, yes.” The source added: “He made clear the concerns that we have on the impact this is having on the UK and other countries.”

British politicians have been accused of pandering to China by blocking new tariffs on Chinese imports to the EU, a measure designed to prop up Europe’s struggling steel industry.

The tariff move by the People’s Republic is likely to anger steelworkers and unions, who blame China for much of the industry’s recent troubles. Steel firms say one of the key reasons for the UK industry’s woes is that state-subsidised firms in China are “dumping” their product on the European market, due to flagging demand at home.

The UK business secretary, Sajid Javid, who visited Tata Steel’s struggling Port Talbot plant on Friday, has been accused of blocking measures to crack down on Chinese imports. Javid voted against EU plans to lift the “lesser duty” rule, which would have allowed for higher duties to be levied on Chinese steel imports. The UK has also lobbied for China to be granted “market economy status”, which would make it even harder to crack down on steel dumping.

“The fact is that the UK has been blocking this,” European Steel Association (Eurofer) spokesperson Charles de Lusignan told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “They are not the only member state but they are certainly the ring leader in blocking the lifting of the lesser duty rule. The ability to lift this was part of a proposal that the European commission launched in 2013, and the fact that the UK continues to block it means that when the government says it’s doing everything it can to save the steel industry in the UK and also in Europe, it’s not. It’s not true.”