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Journalism of Courage
NEW DELHI, DECEMBER 5: It is not uncommon for women being conferred awards for excelling in their respective fields. But this one was different. The recipients included Rajya Sabha Deputy Chairperson Najma Heptulla, infotech giant Infosys founder Narayanamurthy’s wife Sudha Murthy, India’s first woman chess grandmaster Vijayalaxmi S and Kshama Maitreyi, a social worker from Himachal Pradesh. The organisation which gave away the awards was `Ojaswini,’ a Bhopal-based RSS-backed forum.
The guests who had been invited to confer the awards on the four women included RSS chief K S Sudarshan, Information and Broadcasting minister Sushma Swaraj, her ministerial colleague Sumitra Mahajan and The Times of India group chairperson Indu Jain.
So far so good. But what is bound to raise eyebrows, especially in the Congress circles, was the choice of the RSS chief to confer the award on Congress leader Heptulla for being unanimously elected the chairperson of the Inter-Parliamentary Union.
When it came to speeches both stayed off politics, preferring to pontificate on the status of women. Heptullah wondered why the Prime Minister could not allocate the finance, education and defence ministries to women. “In the Indian mythology, while Lakshmi is the goddess of wealth, Saraswati is the goddess of learning and Durga is associated with protection,” she said.
The RSS chief spoke about the differences in western and Indian thinking on women. “In the west, there was a raging debate whether women could be considered human at all. In England, women had no rights till as late as 1930,” he said. According to Sudarshan the Indian thinking views woman and man as complementary. “The Indian viewpoint on women is now being appreciated by the rest the world,” the RSS chief said.
