Nobel laureate says women should exercise will in sporting veil

In Iran she has launched a campaign to end discrimination against women, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Published on: Nov 27, 2006, 11:41:00 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Iranian Nobel peace prize winner Shirin Ebadi advocated freedom for women to decide whether they want to wear veil or not. "When men can decide on their attire why is such a liberty not provided to women?" she asked.

Pointing at the paradoxical situation creating unhappiness for Muslim women, she said, "In Islamic countries it is compulsory for women to wear the hijab (veil) but in some western countries they are being forced to take it off."

She, however, does not have a choice in Iran, where she has launched a campaign to end discrimination against women. Ebadi, her country's only Nobel laureate, wears a veil in Iran but prefers to skip it outside her country.

Repression of women in Iran also has a flip side, she said, with 65 per cent university attendees being women. In India, she found, women in a better situation although found many customs like dowry "indifferent" to women while blaming the "deep rooted in a patriarchal society" for it. But, an exception to the norm was Indira Gandhi, she said, at a function organised to release a book Place Where We Live is Called A Red-Light Area.

The six-year long protest of Irom Chanu Sharmila against the Armed Forces Special (Protection) Act got international support on Saturday when Iranian Nobel Prize Laureate Shirin Ebadi expressed her solidarity with the campaigner.

For her, supporting Sharmila was for "defence of civil liberties" of the citizens, as she defined Army's duty was to "protect rights" and is not to limit "someone's personal freedom".

In a freewheeling interaction with media on Saturday, Ebadi desisted from critising Iran for its nuclear bomb programme while stating that no country in the world needs an atomic bomb.

What touched Ebadi during her four-day stay in India, including a visit to red light area in Kolkata, was the plight of the sex workers and their deprivation, which is amply depicted in the book released on Saturday.

Email Chetan Chauhan: chetan@hindustantimes.com

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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