She...!

She is a daughter, a sister, a wife, a mother, a grandmother, revered as a creator of life, a goddess worshipped by billions, she is a woman, she is you, me, the girl passing you on the street. 

A woman has so many names, yet the only thing that’s constant is the violence she has to endure day in and day out – all at the hands of the very men who swore to protect her – husbands, sons, fathers and brothers. Why? This is a question which is yet without an answer. In India, violence against women is the norm. It is shameful, disgusting and beyond belief but still happening every day without lasting consequences.

The recent case of the victim known as “The Delhi Braveheart” has brought this issue to the forefront like never before. It is appalling that it has taken a violent crime of such horrific proportions to get people angry enough to demand permanent change. Will it last though? My cynical side thinks the hoopla surrounding this case will last about six months or so, after which the furor will die down, the protesters will return to their homes and the country will go back to its apathetic self. I do still have hope that after the adrenaline has stopped pumping, behind government doors the wheel of justice will keep churning, creating an everlasting change much needed for women all over the country.

This is not just an isolated incident. Early last year there was the case of the woman in Calcutta on Park Street. She came out of a pub in the early hours of the morning and was conned into getting into a car with men who raped her. That story is all but forgotten. Where are the indignant crowds for her? What disgusted me further was the behavior of Calcutta’s own woman chief minister Mamata Banerjee who decided that the whole case had been fabricated to malign “her government” and who if reports are to be believed, along with police officers were too quick to judge the victim as a ‘loose woman’ because she had been out at a pub until dawn.

Let’s not forget the case of the young woman molested and manhandled in Guwahati, Assam, by a group of men after leaving a pub which garnered more attention than the usual kind because a journalist – and I use the term loosely – recorded the entire incident instead of you know, doing the right and decent thing by stopping the bastards or calling the police immediately. The excuse he gave was that it had been too dangerous to step in and moreover if he hadn't kept recording then the perpetrators wouldn't have been caught. Somehow, I find that hard to believe. To me if the police had at least been called, the girl would've been spared further trauma, but wait if he had done that then that would've been the end of his sensational footage, guaranteed to raise TRP’s.

For a country that is meant to revere women and holds religious festivals dime a dozen honoring the numerous goddesses, India treats its women with no respect, let alone reverence. This article recently published on BBC News paints a pretty dismal yet horrifyingly accurate picture of how women are treated.

According to the reporter Soutik Biswas, Delhi correspondent for the BBC, TrustLaw which is a news service run by Thomson Reuters has ranked India as the worst G20 country in which to be a woman. These facts he says “in the country where the leader of the ruling party, the speaker of the lower house of parliament, at least three chief ministers and a number of sports and business icons are women”.

The article goes on to state how people find it hard to believe the government on promises to toughen laws and prosecute those charged with crimes against women when “…political parties in the last five years have fielded candidates for state elections that included 27 candidates who declared they had been charged with rape”

The stats the article quotes make you want to question whether these facts are true, but true they are. As an Indian woman, I am ashamed at my country’s attitude towards us. My fellow Indian men regularly abort female foetuses, kill baby girls just for being girls, constantly treat women as second class citizens and of course harass women in general. 

The thing that gets me – one of many – is our own culpability in this mess. We women are no less in many cases. Stories of mothers in law driving their daughters in law to death for dowry, giving birth to a daughter, having an equal hand in brutalising their daughters for “ dishonoring the family name” have been heard plenty. Don’t these women ever stop to consider the possibility that what they are doing to others could have been done to them or their mothers? Every time I hear the fact that some poor woman has been castigated for giving birth to a girl I’m always reminded by what my mother told me about the fact that it is the man who determines whether the foetus is female or male, not the woman. A scientific fact I am told yet one that is not surprisingly ignored by these people – after all, why should one let facts and science get in the way of a twisted belief system?

It is not just these facts that have destroyed the hope people have in their government and their fellow man.

In 2011 two young men, Keenan Santos and Reuben Fernandez were brutally murdered when they stepped up to defend their women friends from being assaulted. They were killed by a mob and no one thought to help them. Similarly in the recent Delhi case, the companion of the 23-year-old victim described a harrowing time after they had been attacked, lying on the street, their clothes in shreds, hoping someone would come to their aid, but no one did. Instead it seems that while they lay in unimaginable pain the police instead of rushing them to hospital, and covering them to preserve whatever little dignity they had left, wasted time arguing about which jurisdiction the case fell under.

There are people I know who bristle indignantly every time some western country calls India “Third-World” – my answer to them – until disgusting behavior like the above is not rooted out – India is certainly third world – if not even further below in the food chain and don’t even get me started on how the country treats its poor. That is one for another blog.

I leave you with this fine post aptly titled “This Is Also India” that I came across which gives me some hope, that maybe, just maybe our country is not doomed.