NEW DELHI // A village council in the state of Bihar has banned women from using mobile phones, blaming the devices for an unprecedented rise in couples eloping.
Manuwar Alam, who heads the committee tasked with enforcing the ban, said mobile phones were "debasing the social atmosphere" of the Sunderbari village, located 385 kilometres east of Bihar's capital, Patna.
Unmarried women caught using a mobile phone will be fined 10,000 rupees (Dh670). Married women will pay 2,000 rupees if caught using a cell phone in public. They are only allowed to use a mobile phone in the privacy of their homes, and only under the supervision of a relative. Marriages are usually still largely arranged by families acoss India.
"It always gives us a lot of embarrassment when someone asks, 'who has eloped this time'," said Manuwar Alam, who heads a village committee tasked with enforcing the ban.
Mr Alam said the number of elopements and extramarital love affairs had risen in the past few months, with at least six girls and women fleeing their homes.
"Even married women were deserting their husbands to elope with lovers. That was shameful for us," Mr Alam said. "So, we decided to tackle it firmly." The decision by the village council was the latestin a series of such declarations from councils in north India have caused outrage among women rights activists. The pronouncements are a way for men "to control the lives of women", according to Ranjana Kumari, the director of the Centre for Social Research in New Delhi, a non-profit group that works to improve women rights.
"These are tools of patriarchy. They feel that women will connect with whoever they want and they fear they will get boyfriends, break the caste system and all that rubbish," said Dr Kumari. "These are unacceptable archaic ideas." At least two other councils have decreed bans on mobile phones by women. others have south tp ban wearing jeans, watching films and eating Wester-style fast food.
The Supreme Court determined last year that such councils were illegal and asked state governments to investigate their practices, including proclamations that lead to honour killings. The court accused the village councils, known as khap panchayats, of taking the law into their own hands in "kangaroo courts".
However, the self-appointed councils have continued issuing rulings, mostly in the states of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh.
In October, after a series of rapes were reported in Haryana state, a village council blamed women's behaviour, including eating western fast food, for the attacks. They also said the legal marriage age for women in India should be lowered from 18 to 16 to keep women "sexually satisfied".
Sube Singh Samain, a spokesperson for the Haryana-based village council at that time, said young people needed to be married off to avoid them "falling prey to the advances of youth".
In Uttar Pradesh, a village decree in July banned unarranged or "love" marriages, saying that women who chose their own partners would be ostracised from the village.
Jagmati Sangwan, the vice president of the All India Democratic Women's Association, said the village councils have been emboldened by each other, making the decrees and adopting each others' conservative stances.
"There is no such law in a democratic country that bans women from using phones, marrying who they want or dressing how they want to but these councils appeal to a certain mindset with their reactionary messages," said Ms Sangwan. "It affects the morale of women who are already struggling hard in these villages to get their basic rights, whether it is using a phone to access education or employment."
sbhattacharya@thenational.ae
* With additional reporting from Reuters
Conflict, drought, famine
Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.
Band Aid
Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.
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Global state-owned investor ranking by size
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United States
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China
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UAE
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Japan
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Norway
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Canada
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