Wake up UNGA to plight of women in rogue nations
Video grab of assault on Mahsa Amini
A News Commentary
By Manish Anand
New Delhi, September 17: The world has conveniently turned its eyes away from human degradations of unprecedented scales in Iran and Afghanistan, while the stage is being set for the 77th UN General Assembly session where the leaders of several countries would yet again deliver lofty and hollow talks.
Mahsa Amini was only 22 years old, and full of life. But the moral police of Iran dragged her out from a car for not adequately wearing hijab, gave fatal blows even while her friends and relatives pleaded for mercy.
Masih Alinejad, an Iranian activist, tweeted that Amini was killed for “wearing bad hijab”.
“We are all Mahsa Amini. We Iranian women call on international communities, we call an (on) all women in the world to show solidarity with Mahsa. We don’t deserve to be beaten, lashed, jailed, and murdered like Mahsa for not wanting to wear hijab. We want freedom of choice,” tweeted Alinejad.
She shared a video by Margret Atwood in which Amini was seen dragged by the moral policy, ironically consisting of men and women, and violently assaulted even while the young girl sought to shield herself from the fatal blows.
Alinejad appealed that “nobody should normalize compulsory hijab”.
Amini, said Alinejad, was full of life and ambition, and she had not done anything wrong to deserve such violent death.
Amini is now a story among several women, who are being subjected to a degraded human life, while being exploited as objects for the gratifications of the Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan.
The world has abandoned Afghanistan, while Iran, after the 1979 Islamic revolution slipped into the medieval age, blunting the western sanctions with its oil wealth. The two countries are seeking normalisation of ties.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi also held a bilateral meeting with the Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), saying “we talked about the growing India-Iran friendship and the scope to boost ties in sectors like energy, commerce and connectivity”.
India’s national interest calls for a closer ties with Iran. So is the case of China and Russia, who have closer ties with Iran. This explains how a depraved administration in Tehran is legitimized internationally.
A few years ago the then Union Minister for External Affairs Sushma Swaraj had shocked the people in India by wearing head to toe, all covering, attire in a sign of cultural submission to the medieval practices of Iran. That is the scale of the normalization when other countries accept the depravity of a nation as a fait accompli.
Ironically, Delhi being the home of the most vibrant civil society has not seen protests outside the Iranian embassy for ages against the gross human rights violations of women. Even the western world has conveniently gone into the sleep mode. For others, the strategic interests outweigh the unacceptable abuses of the people by the ruling regimes in Afghanistan and Iran.
Now that the United Nations General Assembly gets into session, the time may be ripe for the heads of the nations aspiring to give new directions to the world order to take a pause to bring the interests of humanity at the centre stage of their efforts.
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