Congress' Digvijaya Singh stokes row; equates RSS to Taliban over stance on working women

Stoking a row on Friday, senior Congress leader Digvijaya Singh compared the RSS to the Taliban citing a purported similarity in their views on working women. The terrorist group's takeover of Afghanistan has raised fears that it will reinforce the laws which prevailed during its erstwhile regime from 1996 to 2001 that include barring women from attending school and working outside the home. To justify his comparison, he quoted RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat's speech at a gathering in Indore on January 5, 2013. 

On that occasion, PTI quoted Bhagwat as saying, "A husband and wife are involved in a contract under which the husband has said that you should take care of my house and I will take care of all your needs. I will keep you safe. So, the husband follows the contract terms. Till the time, the wife follows the contract, the husband stays with her, if the wife violates the contract, he can disown her."

After this statement led to an uproar, the then RSS spokesperson Ram Madhav clarified that Bhagwat had described the Indian marriage system as a very sacred institution in which the woman enjoyed a lost of respect. The Congress Rajya Sabha MP compared this mindset to Taliban spokesperson Sayed Zekrullah Hashimi's recent interview with TOLOnews wherein he stated that women should restrict themselves to giving birth. Moreover, Singh demanded clarity on whether the Centre will recognise the new dispensation in Afghanistan considering that it has a number of sanctioned terrorists. 

Taliban takeover and women's rights

After the Taliban stormed into Kabul on August 15, Afghanistan president Ashraf Ghani resigned and fled the country with his associates. Since then, several persons have lost their lives in the chaos at the Hamid Karzai International Airport with thousands of people desperately trying to flee the country. This includes the death of at least 169 Afghans, 11 US Marines, a US Navy sailor, and a US Army soldier in a suicide bombing at the Abbey Gate of the Kabul airport on August 26. This led to US airstrikes on terrorists belonging to ISIS-K which claimed responsibility for this attack.

On August 31, the Taliban gained control of the Kabul airport after the last batch of US troops left Afghanistan. Though the Taliban promised to form an "inclusive" government to run Afghanistan, it announced a 33-member caretaker Cabinet on Tuesday which comprises multiple sanctioned terrorists. No woman has been included in the set-up whereas the Ministry of Women's Affairs has been abolished. 

The terrorist group has also brutally cracked down on protests by Afghan women by using whips and sticks against them.  Meanwhile, it has passed an order mandating that classes in private universities must be segregated by gender and women must wear an abaya robe and niqab. Moreover, the Taliban ordered that only women or old men of "good character" can teach female students. So far, the new regime is yet to explicitly state its policy on the sectors in which women will be allowed to work.