Centre to give lessons in leadership to Muslim women

To politically empower Muslim women, the Union government has decided to train them for better participation in elections, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Sep 29, 2008, 01:10:56 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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KS Saleeka took an arduous journey from being panchayat head to become Kerala’s only Muslim MLA. She is among less than one per cent Muslim women in our state assemblies and Parliament.

Saleeka’s grit and determination may be an inspiration for many Muslim women to plunge into electoral politics. However, their lack of knowledge about political structure and legal system act as a stumbling block for their political advancement.

To politically empower Muslim women, the Union government has decided to train them for better participation in elections, besides taking benefits of the welfare programmes and fighting for their rights.

A unique scheme initiated by the Women and Child Development (WCD) ministry will also help Muslim women like Shakeela Begum, who has been running from pillar to post to register a police case for being thrashed during the 2002 Gujarat riots.

“Many Muslim women feel left out because of their inability to fight for their rights due to illiteracy. We would train them on how to lodge a complaint with police and fight legal battles,” a WCD ministry official said.

Low participation of Muslim women, the government believes, had been a prime reason for perceptible poor impact of government programmes for minorities.

Twenty-five per cent Muslim children in the age group of 6-14 have never attended a school and about one-third Muslim villages have no educational institution. Muslim women have virtually no access to government schemes. It is evident from the fact that 40 per cent of Muslim-dominated villages have no medical facilities.

In the pilot stage the scheme is likely to be initiated in 15 Muslim-dominated districts of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal at a cost of Rs 5 crore. Later, the scheme will cover all 49 Muslim-dominated districts in India.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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