Why is India so bad for women?

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ex-l

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Why is India so bad for women?

Post24 Jul 2012

I think the Brahma Kumaris should go back to India and sort this kind of **** out instead sucking Westerners for their money.

At least if they were sucking Westerners for their money to sort this kind of **** out I would not mind so much.

This is the "pure" motherland of India today. Often these attack are not just sexist but also classist, they are attacks against the women for being from the lowest castes. In rural areas it is worse, read of the a Father, below, who beheaded his 20-year-old daughter with a sword in a village in Rajasthan for falling in love with a lower-caste boy.
From: Why is India so bad for women?

Of all the rich G20 nations, India has been labelled the worst place to be a woman. But how is this possible in a country that prides itself on being the world's largest democracy? - Helen Pidd, guardian.co.uk

In an ashram perched high on a hill above the noisy city of Guwahati in north-east India is a small exhibit commemorating the life of India's most famous son. Alongside an uncomfortable-looking divan where Mahatma Gandhi once slept is a display reminding visitors of something the man himself said in 1921: "Of all the evils for which man has made himself responsible, none is so degrading, so shocking or so brutal as his abuse of the better half of humanity; the female sex (not the weaker sex)."

One evening two weeks ago, just a few miles downhill, a young student left a bar and was set upon by a gang of at least 18 men. They dragged her into the road by her hair, tried to rip off her clothes and smiled at the cameras that filmed it all. It was around 9.30pm on one of Guwahati's busiest streets – a chaotic three-lane thoroughfare soundtracked by constantly beeping horns and chugging tuk-tuks. But for at least 20 minutes, no one called the police. They easily could have. Many of those present had phones: they were using them to film the scene as the men yanked up the girl's vest and tugged at her bra and groped her breasts as she begged for help from passing cars. We know this because a cameraman from the local TV channel was there too, capturing the attack for his viewers' enjoyment. The woman was abused for 45 minutes before the police arrived.

Within half an hour, clips were broadcast on Assam's NewsLive channel. Watching across town, Sheetal Sharma and Bitopi Dutta were horrified. "I was fuming like anything. There was this horrible, brutal assault being shown on screen – and the most disturbing thing was, the blame was being put on the woman, who, the report emphasised, was drunk," says Sharma, a 29-year-old feminist activist from the North-East Network, a women's rights organisation in Guwahati. "The way it was filmed, the camera was panning up and down her body, focusing on her breasts, her thighs," says Dutta, her 22-year-old colleague.

When the police eventually turned up, they took away the woman, who is 20 or 21 (oddly, Guwahati police claimed not to know exactly). While NewsLive re-played pixellated footage of her attack throughout the night, she was questioned and given a medical examination. No attempt was made to arrest the men whose faces could clearly be seen laughing and jeering on camera. Soon afterwards, the editor-in-chief of NewsLive (who has since resigned) remarked on Twitter that "prostitutes form a major chunk of girls who visit bars and night clubs".

It was only a few days later, when the clip had gone viral and had been picked up by the national channels in Delhi, that the police were shamed into action. By then, Guwahati residents had taken matters into their own hands, producing an enormous banner that they strung up alongside one of the city's arterial roads featuring screen grabs of the main suspects. Six days after the attack, the chief minister of Assam, the state where Guwahati is located, ordered the police to arrest a dozen key suspects. He met the victim and promised her 50,000 rupees (£580) compensation.

The damage was already irreversible. Most Indians know full well how tough life as a woman can be in the world's biggest democracy, even 46 years after Indira Gandhi made history as the country's first female prime minister in 1966. But here, caught on camera, was proof. And in Assam – a state long romanticised as the most female-friendly corner of the country, largely thanks to the matrilineal Khasi tribe in Meghalaya. The nation was outraged.

"The story is the same," said the news anchor. "No respect for women. No respect for our culture. And as far as the law is concerned: who cares?"

There is currently no special law in India against sexual assault or harassment, and only vaginal penetration by a penis counts as rape. Those who molested the woman in Guwahati would be booked for "insulting or outraging the modesty of a woman" or "intruding upon her privacy". The maximum punishment is a year's imprisonment, or a fine, or both.

As a columnist in the national Hindustan Times said of the attack: "This is a story of a dangerous decline in Indians and India itself, of not just failing morality but disintegrating public governance when it comes to women." Samar Halarnkar added: "Men abuse women in every society, but few males do it with as much impunity, violence and regularity as the Indian male."

Halarnkar then offered as proof a survey that caused indignation in India last month: a poll of 370 gender specialists around the world that voted India the worst place to be a woman out of all the G20 countries. It stung – especially as Saudi Arabia was at the second-worst. But the experts were resolute in their choice. "In India, women and girls continue to be sold as chattels, married off as young as 10, burned alive as a result of dowry-related disputes and young girls exploited and abused as domestic slave labour," said Gulshun Rehman, health programme development adviser at Save the Children UK, who was one of those polled.

A preference for sons and fear of having to pay a dowry has resulted in 12 million girls being aborted over the past three decades, according to a 2011 study by the Lancet.

A glance at the Indian media reveals the range of abuse suffered by the nation's women on a daily basis. Today it was reported that a woman had been stripped and had her head shaved by villagers near Udaipur as punishment for an extramarital affair. Villagers stoned the police when they came to the rescue. In Uttar Pradesh, a woman alleged she was gang raped at a police station – she claimed she was set on by officers after being lured to the Kushinagar station with the promise of a job.

Last Wednesday, a man in Indore was arrested for keeping his wife's genitals locked. Sohanlal Chouhan, 38, "drilled holes" on her body and, before he went to work each day, would insert a small lock, tucking the keys under his socks. Earlier this month, children were discovered near Bhopal playing with a female foetus they had mistaken for a doll in a bin. In the southern state of Karnataka, a dentist was arrested after his wife accused him of forcing her to drink his urine because she refused to meet dowry demands.

In June, a Father beheaded his 20-year-old daughter with a sword in a village in Rajasthan, Western India, parading her bleeding head around as a warning to other young women who might fall in love with a lower-caste boy.




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ex-l

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Re: Why is India so bad for women?

Post24 Jul 2012

The Brahma Kumaris' solution to the Dowry problem in India? Answer ... they take the dowry if a young girl surrenders to them.

They said they do it to stop poor families "dumping" their daughters on them.
Jan Angevine

There is a kind of privilege extended to young men in India. The boys are treated like a prince in the family and many remain very spoiled and childish well into their 30s. Mistreating a woman is just a joke to them, and a prince is never punished, which reinforces his delinquency. A boy must be "bought" with a girl's dowry to marry. Because the boys receive a girl's dowry, they are seen as the one who will support their own family in the long run. So they are favored and catered to because they are a good "investment."

Having a daughter, on the other hand, means a financial obligation that is extracted from the family and does not come back. There is no "investment incentive" in having a girl. Once a girl leaves her family she becomes strictly a member of her husband's family. Many girls never see their original families again. A female child is an economic burden. Unless one is at least modestly wealthy, having more than one daughter can spell financial ruin for a man, especially one who is poor. So this financial "marker" on women is one of the things that sets a volatile cultural confusion about them.

If the dowry was truly eliminated---there have been attempts, but it continues to be ignored---the relationship between men and women would be vastly changed. One would think that women might then be freer to have life of their own with loving, mature men. Until then, Indian men (and men of many other cultures) continue to express their dependence on and desire for women in the most violent and inferior way.

During the time I lived in India, at least three women in the area I lived were dragged off buses an thrown down wells and died because of some infraction they committed, or because they were considered "ugly." It was common place to read of women dying in "kitchen fires," once the dowry ran out. As much as I love India, it has to be said that India is a terrible, terrible country for women.

dany

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Re: Why is India so bad for women?

Post24 Jul 2012

Since all miseries, misfortunes and so on are refered and blamed on "KARMA", according to Brahma Kumaris teachings, would the BKWSU then just tell mistreated Indian women that this is part of their "KARMA" and possibly "THE DRAMA", and nothing can be done about it ..??
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ex-l

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Re: Why is India so bad for women?

Post24 Jul 2012

Good question.

The BKs like to play the "feminist" card but according to their philosophy, what you say would have to be true.

My guess is that privately they would have to accept that but publicly they would "have more Yoga, come to morning class and donate to Baba's box" ... it's the only way to clear one's karma according to them.

dany

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Re: Why is India so bad for women?

Post24 Jul 2012

""KARMA" and "DRAMA", are the two wings, which would quarantee the "passive personality" ... take off ..!

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