Day: October 15, 2009

A love story ‘murdered’ in Srinagar
— Times of India reports: “Rajneesh was a small trader from Jammu often going on business trips to Srinagar. He fell in love with a girl and married her.”
— “He wanted to be faithful to his beloved from Srinagar, who was beautiful and had unflinching trust in her life partner. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to have love bloom between Jammu and Srinagar. But it was more than that. The boy from Jammu was a Hindu and the girl from Srinagar, a Muslim. Ameena was her name and she changed her name to Anchal Sharma after marriage.”
— “A month after the marriage the boy was picked up from his Jammu house by the Kashmir police and taken to Srinagar for ‘investigation.’ The police never registered his name, Rajneesh Sharma, as the accused who is being taken to Srinagar, but instead named his brother Pawan Sharma in police records, to confuse and hide the real identity.”
— “The smell of a plot was there the moment they took the boy hustled in a jeep and covered with a blanket.”
— “The boy never returned home to celebrate his first Diwali with Anchal nee Ameena.”
— “He was found dead hanging with an iron grill in his Srinagar cell. Police said he committed ‘suicide.’ An inconsolable Anchal alleged that her parents bribed police to murder her beloved because he dared to marry a Muslim girl from the valley. Anchal’s father works in Srinagar’s police department, hence the influence was obvious.”
— “This week Anchal would have been celebrating Diwali with her husband Rajneesh but for if this ultimate Taliban act. Surprisingly the incident, so brutal and tragic hasn’t found an echo in the elite human-rightist circles of Delhi and the self-righteous media which had taken up the Rizwan case of Kolkata at a greater war footing than it has shown regarding Chinese incursions.”
— “Rajneesh’s ‘murder’ in a police post in Srinagar wouldn’t have occurred if Rajneesh was a ‘Rizwan’ and the girl had remained an Ameena.”
— “The writerati, who declare love’s supremacy whenever the boy is someone else and the girl is a Hindu (the final test one has to pass to be declared secular in this land of self-flagellation) are maintaining a studied silence. None has spoken so far. None has tried to invoke the wrath of the Women’s Commission, none has bothered to take a delegation of women to Jammu in the name of secularism and its prophets. And none has found it a deserving case for a heated debate on the sparkling channels discussing who should win — love or the colour of your faith?”
— “Why?”
— “Because the girl was a Muslim turned Hindu and the boy, unfortunately happened to be  Hindu. Because the culprit in this case is Srinagar, the reservoir of all that is sacred in secular pantheon and the boy belongs to the Hindu Jammu and hence anything that would demand a condemnation of the Taliban in Srinagar must be held back and forgotten?”
— “The girl, Anchal nee Ameena, said sobbingly in Jammu that the Srinagar police tortured her husband just for his crime of marrying a Muslim girl. The mother of the girl knew about the affair but insisted the boy convert to Islam, which Rajneesh refused. Anchal says Rajneesh was tortured in the police custody putting pressure on him to convert and when he refused consistently, he was murdered. The Jammu papers have reported quoting the postmortem report that police tortured the boy in custody, broke his legs, crushed his knee, gave him electric shocks and peeled his nails before declaring his ‘suicide.’ In cold blood.”

Oregonian: “Through a teen’s lens: the Taliban in Portland”
— The Oregonian reports on a teen amateur fictional video (“Sharia” by Cypress Chvatal-Jones) that portrays an extremist future America, where Taliban “religious police” amputate a child’s hand, a masked man in a kaffiyeh murders a man for his “travesty against Islamic rule and way of life,” and children go to an underground “dealer” to try to obtain music cassettes.  During the short film, it describes a realistic scenario supported by the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan today that “All music-listening devices such as records, tapes, and CDs are highly illegal.  Violators may be punished by the amputation of a finger or hand.”  (Note the short fictional film has scenes of simulated violence, with one child choosing to pursue terrorist action. Responsible for Equality And Liberty condemns all terrorist activity.)

“Sharia,” by Cypress Chvatal-Jones

— Oregonian reports:
— “That summer, Chvatal-Jones shot a couple of funny movies about his family’s beach vacations. But he got the kernel of a much larger project as a freshman at Lincoln High, in Steve Lancaster’s global studies class.”
— “They discussed the churning complexities that are the Middle East, and Chvatal-Jones was perplexed by it. Through lunch periods and after school, he talked with Lancaster about the violence and the struggles, trying to understand.”
— “Then the class examined Afghanistan under the Taliban and sharia, the strict Islamic code that for 21st-century American teenagers can seem mind-boggling: Theft is punished by the amputation of a hand. Women cannot leave home without a male relative. Possession of Western music is forbidden. Boys and girls having a party together is a crime.”
— “On a test, Lancaster posed a hypothetical that struck Chvatal-Jones hard: Describe what would happen if the Taliban took over an American city. Long after he turned in his paper, Chvatal-Jones was galvanized by the what-ifs.”
— ” ‘And the more I thought about it,’ he said, ‘the more I wanted to try to make a movie about it.’ ”
— “As soon as the academy ended, Chvatal-Jones pounded out a screenplay called ‘Sharia,’ a story about a group of teenagers in an American city — nameless, but clearly Portland — that has been taken over by the Taliban.”
— “The plot centers on three boys trying to buy music cassettes from an underground dealer. They get caught and punished by the religious police. A young woman, also named Sharia, becomes so distraught at the consequences that she makes a desperate choice.”

Maldives: Parliament takes on revised penal code
— Minivan News: “Existing laws and regulations, principles of Islamic sharia and norms and values acceptable to Maldivians were taken as the basis for drafting the law, he said.”
— “Suood said difficulties arose when there were conflicts between the three. ‘Some Islamic sharia punishments are not enforced in the Maldives. For example, there is no amputation for thieves or death for apostates.'”
— “Another difficulty were disagreements among fiqh scholars in interpreting the Qur’an and the hadiths, he continued, and the traditional values and practices in the country were considered in such cases.”
— “Several MPs said Islamic sharia should take precedence in specifying offences and punishments and spoke in favour of introducing the death penalty.”

— Wikipedia notes that: “The Maldives have, in cooperation with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), undertaken to write the world’s first Muslim criminal code”

— Wikipedia notes that: “Meanwhile, Islam remains the only official religion of The Maldives with popular support of the people of the Republic. The open practice of all other religions is forbidden and such actions are liable to prosecution under the law of the country.”

— Wikipedia notes that: “adult literacy stands at 99%”