Look at Gujarat Muslim flogging, says Taliban, as it beats up Afghan female students at home

The Taliban have cited the public flogging of Muslim men in Gujarat in defence of their security guards beating up Afghan female students in Badakshan University Monday, ostensibly because the girls were not wearing “proper uniform.”

In a WhatsApp conversation with me, Abdul Qahar Balkhi, the spokesperson of the ministry of foreign affairs of the Islamic Emirate, responded to the question on guards beating the female students by sending two video clips – one of the French police tackling a couple of female protesters and another of the Gujarat police flogging 10 Muslim men. “Would you rather have us deal with civil disobedience like this?” Balkhi asked.

The men who were tied to a pole in Gujarat’s Undhela village and publicly flogged by policemen as villagers cheered on were accused of disrupting a Garba event the previous night.

I asked Balkhi if he justified the beating up of Afghan female students because Muslim men were being flogged in India. He replied, “The reference was not only to India, but the link before it was to French conduct with protests.

All these actions are wrong, but journalists should keep everything in context by not allowing their raw emotions and prejudice to dictate their reporting,” Balkhi added.

Certainly, there is some irony in the Islamic Emirate invoking the actions of the police in the world’s largest democracy. Afghanistan’s current rule of law is synonymous with a puritanical version of the Sharia and its government still hasn’t been formally recognised by the international community 15 months after the Taliban took power, although India has opened a mission in Kabul.

The Gujarat government has still not censured the plainclothes policemen for taking the law into their own hands; a petition filed by the victims came up in the Gujarat High Court a fortnight ago and the court asked the government to respond by December.

Perhaps, Balkhi is right. All these actions are wrong. Moreover, there must be some context applied in reporting every story, both in India and in Afghanistan.