In the western world, Karen is not just a name, during the 2020 pandemic “Karen” became a sort of pejorative used for “White” women, who used their “white privilege” to have things their way. The operative word here being “privilege” and not “white” because we know Karen’s exist all around the world in every country and every race.

In India , the author, journalist and a member of the erstwhile Lutyens and Sonia Darbar , Tavleen Singh seems to have taken a deep liking to the name that she is virtually provoking others to call her that name with her bilious articles.

The latest attempt in her “Karen” like outrage, she published an article about “Love-Jihad being non-sense”.  The nature of the article being just a fact-free blind rant becomes very clear from the headline.

The headline states “The idea that there is a Muslim conspiracy to prey on Hindu girls and convert them to Islam is ludicrous”. This headline, as dismissive it sounds is actually an insult to all the girls who are trapped in marriage by their Muslim lovers, only to convert the girls to Islam. 

One wonders why does the pain of the parents of the girl who was murdered for her refusal to convert post-marriage become so trifle. This triviality can be understood by looking into Ms. Singh’s history. Maybe she believes that just like she fell for the charms of an India-hating, married, Pakistani Muslim man, the multitude bum from the streets in India also has the same quality of charm and girls find it irresistible.

Across the world, there are stories of Muslim men indulging in criminal activities against Non-Muslim women when Muslims are in majority and minority both. Mian Mithoo in Pakistan, is a cleric who is notorious for running a religious seminary in Sindh where minor non-Muslim girls are force converted. In England and Netherlands, Muslim youth have been involved in grooming gangs where they have trapped and used mostly underage girls as sexual objects.  

When there is a consistent pattern of Muslim men across the world to treat women from other religion with utter contempt and use them as tools, Ms.Singh wants us to believe Indian Muslim men are somehow above water. There are innumerable instances of Hindu girls being trapped by Muslim boys  by changing identity and marry them ONLY to convert them are plenty abound. All Ms. Singh has to do is use an excellent technological advancement called google.com on the internet.

If Hindus do not seem trustworthy, recently enough there was an article by the divorced Parsi wife of a late Muslim musician, where she had recounted how she was under constant pressure to change her faith and convert to Islam by her in-laws. Many women succumb to this pressure, some pay a very heavy price for not converting, like ending up dead and boxed in a suitcase. Ms. Singh might want to read up a few of these cases, to see the difference between her imagined reality and the truth.

What is amusing is that Ms. Singh is fulminating about a law passed by the U.P government in regulating “marriages”.  In one of the paragraphs Ms. Karen writes, “women are now aware enough not to be treated as chattel”, but then again demonstrates how spectacularly disconnected from ground realities she is. She perhaps is not aware of the status of married “Muslim” women who are not treated a lot better than chattel.

The primary contention of her unhinged rant seems to be, that as per her impression, the government of UP has passed a law that takes away the right of woman to marry whom she chooses. That is simply not true and that would have been clear to her if she checked some facts before writing the unhinged rant as is her wont.

Without getting into the specifics, the government of UP has passed the legislation to protect Non-Muslim girls from getting trapped into a marriage by frauds who hide their identity. Marriage for Hindus still remains one of the most sacred and sacrosanct institutions, which last for 7 lives together, unlike Abrahamic marriage ceremonies which are considered a contract between a man and woman. Love cannot be a conspiracy to get the woman into your religious fold and then use the womb of the same woman to increase your headcount.

The government functions is to pass laws, not just to prevent crime and fraud, but also to protect vulnerable groups from the fraud. If Muslim women can be protected with a law against Triple Talaq, Hindu women can most definitely be protected against fraudulent marriages where the decision is made up on incomplete or fraudulent information.

Not satisfied by ranting against UP CM Yogi ji, Hindutva and a host of other non-sense, she finally falls back on her cheap shot of imagined fears, ‘What worries me today is that we seem in India to be regressing into a Hindu version of Pakistan.’ Maybe someone needs to explain it to her, that there is a fundamental difference between being a Hindu India and a Muslim Pakistan. India exists as it is today not because it is “secular” by constitution, it exists only on the backs of Hindus who carry the dead weight of being secular.

So, constitution or not, India is pluralistic with a value on human life irrespective of any religion as long as it is Hindu. The day that factor is taken out, no saying what happens to India. Simple fact, but very difficult for a lot of Karen’s to understand who feel suffocated at not having their way.

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