Letters to the editor: Triple talaq debate, surgical strikes and Kancha Illaiah

Women and society

With time, society also needs to change its mindset (“Triple talaq: Women should not be denied their constitutional rights, Centre tells Supreme Court”).

It’s not just among Muslims, women as a whole do not have the same opportunities as men. India is a secular country where the state does not have right to decide on religious matters. Therefore, it is equally important to have a common law for all that gives more opportunity to women. – Chander Shekhar

Long and short of it

The author has analysed in great detail short-term and long-term consequences of surgical strikes carried out by India (“With surgical strikes, Modi has upped the ante and seems to be going for broke. What next?”)

In the short term, India has overcome the psychological barrier of the fear of a nuclear backlash that was holding them back from crossing the Line of Control. The isolation of Pakistan on the global stage is also apparent.

There are also murmurs of protests in Pakistan occupied Kashmir and Balochistan over the high-handed behaviour of Army and ISI.

Though Pakistan army is still very strong, one cannot discard efforts of civilian government to wrest control post the diplomatic isolation.

In the long term, if there is a war, India is more likely to tolerate the shock than Pakistan. For India, guarding the border is just one aspect of their governance and expenditure. In Pakistan, a major part of the money is invested in border skirmishes that may eventually lead to a war. Will

And if Pakistan uses a nuclear weapon first, it has little chance of living to see a second strike. So I am sure that such a situation will not arise. – Abhijit Ray

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I salute the Army for taking the much-needed action.

It is best to let the government and diplomats tackle the scenario – the media should not interfere.

TV channels should limit their role to offering the people a constructive perspective of the Army’s response to terrorism.

I salute all the martyrs of the Uri attack and my thoughts and prayers are with their family members. I hope these families will be taken care of by our government. – Raghunath PV

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The writer has raised a very important point about where India should go from here.

The situation should not escalate.

The diplomatic offensive internationally could force the two countries to talk, but we should not reach the point of no return in our negotiations.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi must have realised that developing a rapport with his counterpart Nawaz Sharif was ineffective as military calls the shots in Pakistan.

Modi must have a plan B for talks with Pakistan and should make it clear that no commercial ties between the two countries can be maintained till the key issue of terrorism is sorted out.
Secondly, the Centre and state government need to look into the volatile situation in Kashmir through positive action on the ground and not merely by stifling separatists. – Srinivasan N Iyer

Counter strike

If your article's title was everything but the bracketed text, it would have been an average read (“What a surgical strike really is (and why the Army action across the LOC may not qualify as one)”).

But the bracketed text just makes it a marketing tactic. I have never read anything less convincing than this. Your point is that this is not a surgical strike because we still have more people sitting there? – Anurag Adarsh

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I have a few points to raise in response to this article. Firstly, it is not the Indian Army calling it a surgical strike, it was in the official statement of the director general of military operations, who has greater authority and a higher responsibility when making such statements. So why are you counteracting his statement?

Second, the effect is clear – the prevention of a possible terror attack.

Just because someone like an Osama bin Laden was not killed in the strike does not make it inferior. – Hrishikesh Rane

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Wikipedia describes a surgical strike as a “military attack which results in, was intended to result in, or is claimed to have resulted in only damage to the intended legitimate military target, and no or minimal collateral damage to surrounding structures, vehicles, buildings, or the general public infrastructure and utilities.”

Going by that definition, the army's actions definitely qualify as a surgical strike, where they damaged a specific target on which they had specific intelligence.

While the evidence may point to this being a politically charged decision, it doesn't demand such an article from an Indian publishing house, especially at this hour when our soldiers need all the support they can get.

These are the people sacrificing their lives to protect us from terrorism from across the border as well as within. And should their courage falter, the author would not be alive to write this article, nor would I be to retort to it. They need all the support that they can get to get through this time.

In an ideal world, there should be no army protecting a nation's borders – but we do not live in an ideal world.

The statement that “though it’s commendable that India has upped the ante against Pakistan” is again wrong, because the military acted against terrorism and not Pakistan as a nation. Scroll.in should stop spreading this hatred. It might not be intentional, but it sure does spark the age old India vs Pakistan debate, which is not needed at the moment.

This article is flawed, and even if it wasn’t this, is not the correct time for such an article. – Satwik G

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What a joke this article is. The writer argues that the Indian army’s action was not a surgical strike because within two days, terrorists attacked us again. The author has cited examples of successful surgical strikes by the US against terrorists – but has terrorism been eliminated after that? – Sanjit Chavan

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This article is misleading. If Mohan Guruswamy had gone by the simple Wikipedia definition, then the Indian military action does qualify as a surgical strike. Therefore, all the examples given only seem to obfuscate the real issue. The writer reveals the true reason for his article when he deals with the economic situation in the country according to him.

To equate this to previous (short of war) military actions when Sharad Pawar and others were Defence Ministers and under the UPA rule is a stretch. Where was the response to 26/11 and the several other bombings and provocations in their time ?

Here was a clear and strong response with a far-reaching impact. And there is every justification to attribute credit to the prime minister who strongly backed the action, something that was unthinkable for his meek predecessor. At one stroke (that previous leaders feared to take), the morale of the military and of the nation has been bolstered and respect for a strong nation been engendered. – Rajiv Nair

Shifting targets

Shoaib Daniyal's "Why are Pak-backed militants now targetting Indian security forces (and not civilians like before)?" is very interesting but there are few factual errors which i would like to draw attention to.

1. The graph itself shows that the ratio of security force personnel killed versus civilians began to change by mid 2006, picked up in 2007 and rose in 2008. This predates 26/11.
2. The Ragda agitation or the Amarnath land row in 2008 took place prior to 26/11. It was during this period that the militants publicly declared that they were withdrawing from civilian areas, in response to appeals made by the azaadi movement.
3. What is indeed completely overlooked is that the indegneous militant group in response to the appeal of civil society and outrage at the killing of a young woman, studying to be a doctor, in Lal Chowk in September 2003, forced militants to retreat from such dastardly attacks. It is true that grenade throwing did not stop but it began to come down.
4.  In October 2007 the United Jehad Council led by Hizbul Mujahideen declared its compliance with Land Mine Ban and followed it up with unilaterally declaring its commitment to Geneva Convention and Protocol II.

The point is not to belittle the role played by Pakistan and espcially its military establishment which fished in the "troubled waters" of Kashmir, but that the role of the Kashmiri civil society in the shift away from civilian to military targets has been ignored. It is as though they did not matter, or had no control or could effect no change. It is this narrative that needs to be questioned. – Gautam Navlakha

Holding on

Angikaar Choudhury has hit the nail on the head (“Why I’m mourning the death of BlackBerry – even though the end was imminent”). It was almost as though he put my thoughts in words.

I'm sure every BlackBerry aficionado feels this way. Reading this made me realise that I was clinging to the image of what BlackBerry once was, which it can never be again.

It’s almost as though the article helped me come to terms with the death of a dear friend, my BlackBerry, which I was holding on to till a couple of weeks ago till I finally decided to move on to an Android phone. – Neil Pereira

Capital neglect

The Delhi chief minister is a different man nowadays (“Delhi authorities not interested in handling chikungunya and dengue menace, says Supreme Court”). He is shirking his duty towards the menace of dangerous diseases in Delhi, even though human lives are at stake.

By allowing the population of Delhi to be decimated by this epidemic, he is assisting Pakistan in killing Indians. – Shailendra Kadam

No small feat

This article on Paralympics medallist Deepa Malik says that “...living in army homes, she’s always had a surfeit of batmen and helpers at hand” (“'Para-athletes like me aren't used to attention.' Don't worry, Deepa Malik, we'll forget soon”). However, I’d like to clarify that the army no longer calls assistants “batmen”. They are known as “sahayaks” and their responsibility is only towards the serving officers, not towards their families.

My father, a retired Major General, would forbid us from summoning the sahayak or ask him for anything. He only served as my father’s assistant. It is true that many sahayaks may have been asked to assist the officer’s families as well, but that is the exception, not the norm. – Shantanu Sharma

Saving our rivers

In India, water sources are treated like our backyards (“The Ganga has practically disappeared in West Bengal”). These resources, including rivers and moats, have been transformed into gutters.

In Mumbai, a state body has used the bed of the Dahisar river to build the pillars of a flyover, disturbing the water body’s self-cleaning ability.

Adaiyar river in Chennai, home to the famous Snake Park, has also deteriorated into a gutter.Let us come together to promote and rejuvenate and save our rivers and water bodies. – Kedarnath Rao Ghorpade

Closed door

This year, the United States has faced water shortages in seven states, energy exhaustion and resource depletion (“Why it’s wrong to blame immigrants for sputtering economies”). About 100,000,000 immigrants are expected to come into the country through legal means by 2050 – 34 years from now. It's not sustainable or viable for our country to sustain those numbers.

This article shows total lack of insight, understanding or comprehension of the exponential growth. If things continue this way, the US will degrade into a third-world country.

America chose to target 2.03 children per woman since 1970. But the rest of the third world chose to add 3.5 billion of themselves to reach 7.3 billion in 2016. They flee their overpopulated countries to migrate into our Western countries.

Nothing will be solved, but their numbers will overwhelm all of Canada, America, Europe and Australia. We need a worldwide debate on a one-child policy if we hope to survive the 21st century as well as the rest of the animal world. – Frosty Wooldridge

Behind the scenes

The hypocrisy of Indian Left-liberals was exposed when Mother India was nominated for the Oscars (“‘Mother India’ at the Oscars: ‘The audience laughed with the characters and cried with them’”).

The producer, Mehboob Khan, removed the logo of his film company (which resembled the symbol of the Communist Party of India) from the print which was sent for the festival, lest it annoy the jury of a Capitalist country. This means that either he did not believe in the ethos of the CPI, of he fashioned his logo to their symbol just to cash into the sensitivities of the Indian masses. – Anil Maheshwari

Caste question

As the article says, surely Brahmins may have taken advantage of the circumstances and now they are well educated English and other domains too (“Brahmin groups lead movements against English education – but they have benefitted the most from it”). By why don’t you also focus on Dalits who are getting much better facilities than Brahmins. They get admissions in top universities even if they score less marks and are also paying lesser fees.

You see only one side of the coin that Brahmins are well educated but the truth is that despite that, they don’t get good jobs because of reservations while jobs and university seats go to the undeserving. – Pranav Kulkarni

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Sorry, but this is anti-Bramhinism. – Prawin Kumar

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The article says that: “The first English medium schools were started in the Travancore region in 1934. Interestingly, the first learners in these schools were Brahmins, who left their Sanskrit- and Malayalam-medium education behind. The Nairs and Menons joined the English-education system much later”

I really doubt the veracity of this statement. The Brahmins of Kerala come under the category of Namboothiri Brahmins. However there is a class of Tamil Brahmins who had settled in Trivandrum under royal patronage.

Namboothiri Brahmins enjoyed the unchallenged status as feudal lords of almost all of the state. Tamil Brahmins were considered by them to be inferior.

The opposition of Namboothiris to English education was well known from the beginning. It was Tamil Brahmins who enrolled themselves in English education and thrived.

Namboothiris suffered badly in the transition of Kerala's to a modern society because of their decision not to be part of Western education. They continued to rely on Vedic educations and lost out in modern economy. Land reforms spelled the doom for them economically too.

Kancha Ilaiah is reading history out of context. He clearly fails to understand the reality of Brahmin system in Kerala where Namboothiris, despite their supremacy, failed to reap the fruits of western education, which cost them heavily. – Ajay Joy

Write style

Chetan Bhagat needs to sell his books using the marketing skills he has been trained in, since his books don’t have much to offer in terms of content, narrative style, language and imagery (“Watch: Chetan Bhagat researched the lives of women for his new book by getting a wax”).

It’s a pity, the levels to which writers, whom the society should regard as a mirror to society, stooped in order to remain in the limelight. – Sreenikat