Intriguing games at IICC polls
Highly reliable sources have told The Sunday Guardian that in the just concluded elections at the India Islamic Cultural Centre (IICC), located on Lodi Road, a powerful BJP office bearer, who has a strong RSS background, tried to get its president Sirajuddin Qureshi withdraw from the five-year-term poll. The saffron leader had contacted a top retired IPS officer, who is a member of the IICC, to persuade Qureshi to exit from the context. The non-Muslim retired officer politely refused, taking the plea that “Qureshi is a dear friend and I don’t have the courage to ask him to withdraw…and it is also too late.” Qureshi, who has friends in all political parties, had only one rival, former Union Minister Arif M. Khan, who has been in various political parties, including the Congress and the BJP. At present, Khan is not associated with any political force. It is not clear what the BJP leader’s agenda was to get Qureshi withdraw from the race. However, three-time IICC president Qureshi, a meat exporter, won for the fourth time. What made the “global election” (postal ballots came from abroad and across the country) interesting was the fact that Qureshi defeated Arif M. Khan, who had the backing of senior Congress leader and former Union Law Minister Salman Khurshid, who himself was defeated while fighting against Qureshi five years ago. Although Khan and Khurshid are not known to be good friends, both joined hands against Qureshi. Arif Khan had sought votes on the plea that the IICC had failed to become a think-tank for the promotion of Islamic values and inter-faith dialogues. Qureshi’s rivals asked voters “to go for a change as has happened after 15-years of BJP rule in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh”. Qureshi secured 1339 votes. Khan received 702 votes. Except for one post of the Board of Trustees (BOT), the entire panel of Qureshi emerged victorious. Interestingly, for the first time, a non-Muslim member, Naresh Gupta, a journalist, unsuccessfully tried his luck for the post of Executive Committee membership. He received only 460 votes. The IICC, which is described as the “poor cousin” of next door India International Centre (IIC), has a large number of non-Muslim members.
Egg returns to midday meal
Chhattisgarh’s new Congress government put the egg back in the primary schools’ midday meal menu on Wednesday, leading the BJP to accuse it of “imposing this non-vegetarian idea” on those who are vegetarians. The Congress says that the majority of population is tribal and they all eat non-vegetarian food. But the egg is yet to appear in the midday meal in Madhya Pradesh, where the Congress does not enjoy a comfortable majority on its own. So, it is playing safe. A ban was imposed on eggs in Anganwadis by former CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan. In 2010, while addressing a gathering of the Jain community, Chouhan had announced that “I wouldn’t let eggs be served as long as I am in charge.” Jains constitute only about 0.78% of the state’s population but wielded an enormous clout during the previous BJP regime.
Sexual harassment in RSTV
Four complaints of sexual harassment, two each in the Rajya Sabha Secretariat and the Rajya Sabha TV, have been received since a Parliament Act against sexual harassment of women at workplace came into force in 2013. This was revealed by the Rajya Sabha Secretary General, Desh Deepak Verma on Thursday at a sensitisation workshop on various provisions of the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act. He said that two of the cases have been disposed of and the other two are under probe. Officials of the secretariat and professionals of RSTV attended the workshop held in association with Institute of Secretariat Training and Management. 252 women are working in the Upper House Secretariat and another 44 in the RSTV. Based on the complaints received in the National Commission for Women as well, Verma said that the cases of sexual harassment of women at workplace increased from 371 cases in 2014 to 570 in 2017 and as many as 533 such cases have already been reported in the first seven months of 2018. In all, 2,535 such cases were registered over the four years till July, 2018 “which comes to about two cases reported every day.”
Ban apps promoting child porn
BJP’s Rajya Sabha member Rajeev Chandrasekhar is worried about the apps and internet sites that promote and transmit child pornography and fake news. “Children constitute 44.4% of India’s population and they deserve a good safe future,” Chandrasekhar told The Sunday Guardian. In a letter to the Minister for Law & Justice, Electronics & Information Technology, Ravi Shankar Prasad, he has noted that “regrettably the ministry has done little so far on this issue”. Chandrasekhar has learnt that the Central government has decided to consider amendments in the Information Technology Act, 2000, on his suggestions to arm itself with more powers to pull down apps and sites which promote and transmit child pornography and fake news. Chandrasekhar has urged Prasad’s intervention to curb the growing digital sexual abuse of children as well as to regulate and shut down mobile apps which threatens the safety of children. He wants the creation of a permanent framework to monitor and regulate online content that falls under the category of Digital Exploitation of Children. He says that such a framework could be a permanent inter-ministerial group consisting of representatives from the Ministry of Home Affairs, Women and Child Development and Law and IT to arrive at a technology-based solution to the problems of Digital Child Abuse. In his opinion, direct intermediaries such as Google and Apple should take strict measures for removing/banning such apps from Google Play and AppStore which allow exchange of child pornographic images/videos and enable paedophiles to “groom” the children.