BENGALURU: Congress leader and Thiruvananthapuram MP Shashi Tharoor on Saturday was all praise for Prime Minister Narendra Modi for presenting a copy of Bhagavad Gita in Russian to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Tharoor, however, expressed regret that leaders from opposition parties, especially LoP in LS, Rahul Gandhi, were not invited for the state banquet hosted by President Draupadi Murmu in Putin’s honour.
Tharoor was speaking to reporters after an engaging conversation with the audience on his book ‘A Wonderland of Words’ with his niece, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, as moderator kept him on his toes at the Bangalore Literature Festival.
Tharoor said, “This (the banquet) is a courtesy we extend to visiting heads of state. I don’t want to wade into controversies. I certainly do feel that in a democracy like ours, the opposition leaders could have been there. It would have been a nice thing. I was there more in my capacity as the chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee of Parliament, and I must say I had some interesting conversations...”
“I did not think it would be appropriate to decline an invitation from the Rashtrapati to attend a banquet in honor of a foreign president, given that my role involves foreign affairs,” he added.
On PM Modi gifting a copy of Gita to Putin, Tharoor said it was not an attempt to convert Putin into Hinduism. “When I published ‘The Great Indian Novel’ in 1989, which was a satirical retelling of the Mahabharata, I already made the point that because we’re studying in English medium doesn’t mean we should not know our epics. To give a copy of Gita in Russian means conveying to another culture some of the essential lessons that we have learned from our civilisational and spiritual heritage. I see absolutely nothing wrong with that.”
Tharoor, who introduced a Bill in Lok Sabha during the Winter Session seeking criminalization of marital rape, said women are victims of violence. “We’ve heard a large numbers of cases of people who are living separately, husbands who have separated or even abandoned their wives, who can come back and rape them with impunity because the law means they cannot be punished,” he said.
“All of these things have been created as a result of a very old-fashioned patriarchal attitude, which we need to overcome in a modern society. I believe we do need to give women the right to be able to protect their own bodily autonomy, their own agency to say no when they mean no, and certainly in this particular case, it is merely a question of striking an exception from the law,” he said.
“Rape in our country is illegal, and rape is defined very strictly. The only exception written in the law is for husbands. Until a divorce takes place, they are still husbands, and they can do what they like. That has to stop.” “That exception should be removed. In a marriage, normally, sex takes place out of love. It does not take place out of violence. Violence is what rape is about. It’s not about love,” he said