Who says it’s the season of hatred in India?
At least the women across the India-Pakistan border have taken Rahul Gandhi’s ‘Mohabbat Ki Dukan’ slogan literally.
Actually this phenomenon is nothing new but it becomes Page One news only when the women cross the LOC of the Indo-Pak border.
What is not fair in this scenario is that when a Seema Haider crosses the border from Pakistan along with her four children to join a much younger Sachin in India our TV Channels jump in to claim that she is a Pakistan spy.
But when our own Anju, a mother of two, reaches Pakistan to meet her Facebook friend Nasrulla her relatives, including her father are out to prove that she was a mental case.
But I am most disappointed by the response of her husband Arvind. Being a Sunny Del fan I would have expected her husband Arvind to rush to Pakistan to get his wife back a la Gadar. Instead, he is believed to have left his house with his children.
Nobody is raking the Indian spy angle this time as should have been done but blaming Pakistan spy agencies again.
Are the Indian agencies like RAW or NIA so incapable of sending spies across the border to a small country like Pakistan?
I won’t under estimate it so much.
Remember Operation Bangladesh in 1971?
These two cases of cross-border love are being blamed on social media like Facebook where one can only see the faces put out there.
But there is an old song which says:
“Tasveer Teri Dil Mera Bahla na Sakegi”
But this is not true in every case.
If the recent developments are being blamed on ‘India’ represented by Internet, Facebook and Twitter (represented by X now) much has been happening in ‘Bharat’ too but hidden in Page 9 or 10.
In 2015, a newly- wed woman in Nagpur ran away with her lover.
In 2020, a married woman ran away with her lover but both were arrested. I am not sure if that is legally sound, though.
But the cake goes to our state of Bihar, permanently dubbed a backward state.
Here, one Ruby Devi (?) married Neeraj in 2009. The couple had four children. In February 2023, she married her lover Mukesh who refused to hand her over back despite all pressures.
Neeraj took the next best option.
He went on to marry the wife of Mukesh, conveniently and providentially named Ruby. At least, he would not fumble when he calls her out.
(Amitabh Srivastava is, a senior columnist and was with “Evening News HT”, for decades. The views in this report are his personal)
