Viral News: 4 लग्नं, 70 मुलं अन् उदरनिर्वाहासाठी संघर्ष! अफगाणिस्तानातील या व्यक्तीच्या आयुष्यातील वास्तव पाहून बसेल धक्का VIDEO

Four wives. Seventy-two children. Fourteen have died. And the surviving children are struggling to get through each day. I watched the BBC footage featuring Mohammad Sadiq, a 57-year-old Afghan man, and what struck me was the enormous distance between his ambitions as a father and the reality of his family’s existence. According to the report, Sadiq married his four wives when they were between 13 and 16 years old. Together, they gave birth to 72 children, of whom 58 are still alive. The footage shows a household struggling with severe poverty. Children are seen living in difficult conditions, with inadequate shelter and limited resources. Their father reportedly cannot even remember all their names. But one particular statement attributed to him deserves serious scrutiny. He reportedly wanted to have more children to increase the number of followers of Prophet Muhammad. I find this deeply disturbing. I respect every individual’s right to practise their religion. But I cannot accept the idea that increasing the population of a religious community is, by itself, a meaningful accomplishment. What exactly has been achieved when the children born in pursuit of that ambition are left struggling for basic necessities? Faith should be a matter of personal conviction, not a numerical contest between communities. And no religious aspiration should take precedence over the wellbeing of the people whose lives are affected by it. There is another uncomfortable aspect of this story that deserves greater attention: the extraordinary imbalance of power between the man making these decisions and the women living with their consequences. Four girls reportedly entered marriage before reaching adulthood. We know very little about their personal wishes, the choices available to them or whether they had any meaningful control over the number of pregnancies they experienced. That uncertainty should concern us. Marriage should never mean surrendering one’s bodily autonomy. Motherhood should not be treated as an obligation that women must fulfil repeatedly to satisfy the expectations of husbands, families or religious communities. I also find it troubling how easily society can turn extreme fatherhood into a spectacle. A man with dozens of children becomes an extraordinary news story. People discuss the numbers, express disbelief and move on. Meanwhile, the women who endured the pregnancies remain largely unheard, and the children become statistics in someone else’s remarkable life story. That is a deeply unequal way of looking at a family. Afghanistan’s economic crisis and restrictions on women’s opportunities undoubtedly form part of the wider background. But poverty cannot explain away every personal decision, just as individual responsibility cannot explain away systemic deprivation. Both deserve examination. We should also resist the temptation to turn this family’s suffering into an attack on Muslims generally. The actions and beliefs of one individual cannot reasonably be attributed to millions of people who share his religion. My criticism is directed at the decisions, attitudes and power structures reflected in this particular story. I do not believe the size of a family determines its worth. A large family can be loving, stable and responsible. A small family can be neglectful. What matters is the freedom of the adults involved and the quality of life available to those who depend on them. Sadiq’s children did not choose the circumstances of their birth. They deserve education, healthcare, security and the possibility of a future different from the one they have inherited. And the women deserve to be recognised as individuals with their own aspirations, not merely as mothers within an unusually large household. Watching this story, I kept returning to a simple question. What is the point of bringing more people into your faith if you cannot ensure that the people already entrusted to your care are treated with dignity? A man’s legacy should never be measured by how many children carry his name. It should be measured by how responsibly he has treated the lives placed in his hands.

— Gopinathan Vijayaraman (@gopinathvijay91) October 22, 2026