Girl Power

They may be little in stature, but both stand firm in their beliefs and their fight for what they hold dear.

Two women have captured the headlines in India in recent days. One of them is a glamorous sports star who jet sets around the world, the other is a rustic village woman from Karora in Haryana. For one of them, the future is uncertain as she grapples with the spotlight of the community on her; for the second, it has been a baptism of fire from which she has emerged after a lengthy legal process. The two women are Sania Mirza and Chandrapati.

While Sania Mirza and her proposed nuptials to Pakistani cricketer Shoaib Malik have the media abuzz, Chandrapati is the mother of Manoj, who along with his bride Babli, was murdered in an honour killing on the orders of a khap (caste) panchayat in Haryana. Chandrapati fought the system and ensured that the murderers of the two youngsters were brought to justice.

Sania Mirza is India’s best known tennis star. Hailing from a religious Muslim family, Sama is no stranger to controversy. In 2005, there was an uproar when an unnamed Muslim scholar issued a ruling stating that her tennis attire is not suitable to Islam. In July 2009, she announced her engagement to Sohrab Mirza, a businessman from Hyderabad, however 7 months later, in January 2010, the engagement was called off. On 29th March 2010, Sania confirmed media reports that she will be marrying Shoaib Malik, the ex-captain of the Pakistan cricket team in April this year.

While the public was still undecided on this issue of cross border marriage of such

BY PAWAN LUTHRA

high profile sporting icons, more fuel was added to the fire when another woman, Ayesha Siddique, claimed to be Shoaib’s wife. At the time of going to press, the Indian police was still investigating the issue.

Sania Mirza would have been aware of the public outcry when she decided to marry Shoaib. This attractive, vivacious tennis star is a role model for young girls and youth in India and in a country where even inter caste marriages are frowned upon, marrying a cricketer from Pakistan has the potential of bringing out the worst in fundamentalists in both countries. To date, she has stayed in the background and allowed her future partner and the media to have their say, her comments of “I have full confidence in Shoaib and the truth will come out” only reinforces the belief she has in her own actions.

In 2005 Wimbledon, she wore a T-shirt which said, “Well behaved women rarely make history”. She seems to be living up to this saying at the moment.

The other case of a woman shaking the system is Chandrapati who is the first woman in Haryana to take the caste panchayat to court. By doing so, she has challenged the parallel judicial system which often enforces a brutal form of justice. Widowed 18 years ago, she is a mother of two girls, one son who worked as a mechanic (Manoj) and another school-going boy. But when Manoj was murdered by the family of his bride, Babli, Chandrapati found strength within herself to fight for justice, which saw a court conviction for the first time ever in an honour-killing case.

The couple who had married for love belonged to the same gotra (lineage); they earned the ire of the local community and were abducted and murdered.

Chandrapati launched a legal case against the people who killed her son and daughter-in-law. Ostracised by her own caste for three years, she fought the system single-handedly and her justice came when the additional district and session judge in Karnal Vani Gopal Sharma awarded the death penalty to five members of Babli’s family and life sentences to the head of the khap panchayat for hatching a conspiracy to kill the couple.

Chandrapati belongs to a system which claims intercaste marriages are wrong yet she believed in letting her children choose who they wanted to marry. She is illiterate but she knows the difference between right and wrong, and she needs to be commended for her actions. She may have had little formal education but has a deep belief in the happiness and harmony of others in society. She fought for what she believed in and won.

Sania and Chandrapati – both woman are worlds apart, yet both have challenged a society which finds it difficult to accept change.