Raj

Apparently, I’m receiving threats, hate & unsolicited moral lectures for standing up for a woman who, FYI, happens to be a wonderful human being. First, I’m not running a customer-care department here to issue individual justifications for what I stand for. I know where I stand, & I don’t need a committee of online bullies to validate my conscience. I’d rather be consistent than be a hypocrite with a convenient moral compass. But I do have a rather spicy question for my fellow moral guardians: When a Kashmiri woman became an actress, dated a Hindu man & eventually married him, where were these outrage Olympics? When another woman entered a reality show, her clothes, choices & lifestyle suddenly became entertainment, & somehow everyone had an opinion, but not quite this level of outrage. We have public figures whose personal lives are hardly traditional by the standards some of you claim to uphold. We have men celebrated, glorified & excused for choices that would have an entire woman dragged through the streets of social media. And let’s not even get started on the double standards surrounding powerful men & their personal lives. “Apparently, morality has a VIP entrance, & women aren’t on the guest list.” But God forbid a Kashmiri woman makes a funny video with a Hindu friend! Suddenly, the cultural police are awake, the keyboard warriors are employed, & everyone has become an ambassador of Kashmiri morality. Kitna likhoon? The problem isn’t that you have values. The problem is that you apply them selectively, almost exclusively to women, & with a generosity that men rarely receive. A woman’s dignity is not dependent on whom she befriends, dates, marries, what she wears, what she creates or whether her choices align with your personal beliefs. You cannot celebrate women when they’re convenient, consume their content when it’s entertaining, aspire to their freedom when it looks glamorous, & then destroy them when they exercise that very freedom. And to those sending threats: congratulations, you’ve managed to prove exactly why women need to stand up for one another. Leave her alone. Let women live. And perhaps, before policing someone else’s life, take a long, uncomfortable look at your own hypocrisy. We don’t need more moral policing in Kashmir. We need more humanity, consistency & basic decency. That’s all!