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No Bikini For Mizo Beauties

It is quite difficult to separate bikini rounds from a beauty pageant but visuals of a bevy of girls sashaying down the ramp at the recent Miss Mizoram contest have ruffled many feathers in the northeastern state. Prudes in the Christian-dominated state have taken exception to the photographs of 16 participants in itsy-bitsy clothes which were posted on the official site of the competition before they made their way to various social media sites. While the bikini round was labelled as “un-Christian” and a “threat to public morality”, the Mizoram Hmeichhe Insuihkhawm Pawl (MHIP), the state’s apex body for women, called the ‘exposure’ not only demeaning to the ‘entire womenfolk’ but also against Mizoram’s culture. It suggested that a beauty contest could well be organised with ‘modest or traditional dresses’.  The organisers tried their best to explain that the bikini round had been included to prepare the local girls for national and international pageants, but their argument had few takers in the state.

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Confessions Of A Bhadralok Comrade

Good, old Communists are often accused of being ideologically rigid, but after being divested of power in West Bengal, a dyed-in-the-wool comrade has no qualms in admitting his erstwhile government’s mistakes. In the second volume of his memoir, Phire Dhekha (Looking Back), former chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee does a soul-searching of sorts on an issue that is believed to have cost his party the most.  In 2006, the CPI(M) government had decided to acquire agricultural land to boost industrialisation, but the move backfired, following widespread protests by the farmers at Singur and Nandigram. Buddhadeb now admits that he had thought a lot about those corrosive episodes. He also avers that narrow party interest, corruption and nepotism were the reasons behind the ouster of the Left Front government.

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Kabul Bid To Stop Bachchabaazi

The Taliban has, for long, been using young boys to mount deadly attacks on the police, as well as using them for dance parties. Kabul has now framed stringent laws against what is known as “bachchabaazi” (use of kids) in local parlance. The revised penal code makes provisions for prison term up to seven years for sexually assaulting a young boy. One can also be sent to gallows if he is found guilty of violating more than one boy. A draft of the chapter titled, ‘Driving children towards moral corruption’ also makes it clear that victims cannot be prosecuted. Pederasty and adultery were criminalised earlier, which did not address the rampant abuse of boys.

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No Bigamy Rules For J-K Officials

There has been a sudden rise in sec­ond marriages among cops and government officials lately in Jammu and Kashmir. But the state police have now cautioned its personnel against bigamy.  As per a recent circular issued by L. Mohanti, ADGP, J&K Armed Police, second marriage without prior permission of the government, as laid down in the Government Employees Service Conduct Rules  is ‘a serious misconduct and has adverse and harsh impacts on the welfare of the personnel’s first wife and children’ which ‘warrants stern departmental action’. The circular notes that delinquent officials are getting away with ‘lenient punishments’ for such offences.  “It would be advisable if punishment of forfeiture of increment for at least one year is awarded to such police officials...,” it further states.

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Harmony Prevails Over Bigotry

Pakistan is hardly ass­ociated with religious tolerance. But developments in the Khyber-Pak­htunkhwa province prove otherwise. The Express Tribune reports that Maha Shivaratri was rec­ently celebrated there with much pomp and glory in the Hindu Dargah in Peshawar.  With closed-circuit TV, and scanner machines set up for the purpose by authorities, devotees thronged the shrine in large numbers. To further boost their morale, the Muslim population of the area also turned up in numbers.  This 15th century temple in Peshawar has gathered iconic status for the province. It has not allowed Hindu festivals to be disrupted for a single year, even when other parts of Pakistan have been rocked with terrorist and extremist violence. Tis achievement should be held up as an example.

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Blind To The Fair Play And Justice

Themis, the Greek goddess of justice and order, may have been the veritable personification of impartiality, but her statue—with her eyes blindfolded and the scales of justice in her hands—installed at the Supreme Court recently, has raised the hackles of hardliners in Bangladesh who want it to go. Hundreds led by the fundamentalist group Hefazat-e-Islam took to streets in Dhaka to press for their demand. Asserting that such idols were un-Islamic , they said that it should be replaced with the holy Quran.

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Running Against Stereotypes

ANike commercial featuring Arab women running, fencing, boxing and spinning on ice-skates has kicked up a storm in UAE for its bid to debunk the stereotypes about women confined to domesticity in West Asia. The ad shows a woman nervously adjusting her hijab before going for a sprint. As she runs, a female voiceover says in a Saudi dialect: “What will they say? May be they’ll say you excee­ded all expectations.”  Wit­­hin 48 hours, the video was shared 75,000 times on different social media sites, with over 400,000  YouTube .

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Persona Non Grata

The peace and calm that Sri Lanka had gradually been settling down to since 2009 after the end of the civil war and defeat of the LTTE, is yet again being put to a serious challenge. Recent developments suggest that an assassination attempt on a Tamil politician in the country’s North, all­egedly planned by overseas LTTE members, could well have plunged the nation into another long spell of ethnic strife.

The Lankan Daily Mirror reported that the country’s investigating agencies recently arrested four former LTTE members who were involved in a plan to kill Maithiaparanam Abraham Sumanthiran, the popular Tamil National Alli­ance MP from Jaffna. Interestingly, while the four were to execute the plan, it was the LTTE members who have settled in various Europ­ean cities who were the masterminds of the plot.

According to the detailed account in the Mirror, the plot to assassinate Sumanthiran came to light after a former LTTE member, who was subsequently rehabilitated by the government, was approached by some former Tamil Tigers. They promised to pay him huge sums of money and a safe passage to Europe once he carried out the assassination of the Tamil MP. But the person who was approached not only declined to participate in the plan; he also decided to reveal the entire conspiracy to the Lankan investigators. On the basis of his testimony, intelligence department officials arrested four former LTTE members who were planning to carry out the plot.

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While the TNA MP was warned by the Lankan president and others of the plot to kill him, it was sheer providence that twice saved him. Once, he decided to call off a scheduled meeting in Jaffna at the last minute; the second time, he travelled to a programme in another politician’s car. In both cases, claymore land mines were supposed to be used by his would-be assassins to kill him.

Sumanthiran is an extremely popular Tamil politician from the north who had been using democratic tools effectively not only in parliament, but also in the country’s courts, dem­anding better rights for the Tamil minority. The LTTE had even tried to ensure his defeat in the last parliamentary election, but he managed to win handsomely.

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Sumanthiran may have managed to escape his assassins for now. But the possibility of the LTTE returning to their murderous politics has started causing serious concerns both among moderate Tamil politicians as well as the Sri Lankan authorities.

Illustrations by Sajith Kumar

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