The recent Badaun rape case wherein two teenage
sisters from lower caste were brutally gang raped and hung from a tree only to
have the perpetrators of the crime, high-caste goons, given police solicitation,
is telling of the status accorded to the ‘fairer sex’ of the world’s largest
democracy. That the girls were from an impoverished, minority caste makes their
lives as valuable as the rock we see on the street and infinitely lesser than the
rock we worship in our homes and temples. They were among the invisible pariahs,
among the 300 million women in India, mostly underprivileged, who defecate in
the open, lacking as basic an access to proper sanitation. Hence they had to
wait until night fell to protect their modesty only to be preyed upon by
gun-wielding brash unemployed ruffians. The sisters remain another
statistic of course; their death, a case to be raked up on media channels,
having sufficiently roused the activists, politicians, media anchors and public
from a routine slumber. Since then there have reportedly been four such hangings
in a spate of two weeks!
In India, violence against women begins even
before a girl is born and continues until her death. It is pervasive across
domains, its form beyond the depraved sexual assaults. There have been so many
such incidents reported of molestations, rapes, acid attacks, bride burning,
female infanticides on a daily basis that the public has become largely numb
towards it. According to the
latest government figures a woman is raped every 20 minutes! The horrific
Nirbhaya case attracted much international attention and while Justice Verma
Committee did set in some stringent punitive measures, it attempts to tackle
one aspect of a multi-dimensional problem. If we were to carefully listen to
the conversations that envelop us – in our social circles, within our own and
extended communities, our politicians, we realise that the seeds of rape are
constantly being sown within the socio-economic and cultural fabric of the
country.
When ministers state that ‘boys will be boys’
and get away with it or question the character of the girl for being out at
night or for wearing ‘provocative’ clothing – even as girls as young as one
month old to women of eighty years are assaulted and raped. When a mother has
to kill her unborn daughter in her womb lest she be burnt alive, when parents
keep back daughters from traveling to school lest they get raped, when young
girls are forced to marry without having a choice, when daughters are told that
they can’t do something that their brothers/ males
can, when men are taught to believe that it is ok to hit wives, ignore them and
be arrogant. We teach our daughters to be submissive, to retreat, to yield, to
endure, to be patient, to choose women oriented careers…Even the educated ones
and working ones are taught to hold their tongue, yield in to demands of
in-laws, brothers and father, nurture a child almost single handed and keep her
needs at the backburner. This is not just the situation of the rural women,
even the urban women go through varied degrees of unfreedom. We have six out of
seven support female staff members who being married
still have a single parent status, struggling to provide for the education of
their children and as basic as two square meals a day, while the husbands
choose to drink and make merry.
The discrimination is obvious even within so
called urban educated communities. We have often observed it’s often the women
(mother-daughter or mother-in-law daughter-in-law) that initially come to check
the school for admission. However, while they are convinced and enthusiastic about
the infrastructure, curriculum, and ethos of the school, they yet have to go
home and convince their husbands and fathers-in-law to permit them to take
admission. Hence decision making still is within the male-domain, since it is
the men who are the bread winners. Again, we have observed ample instances
wherein given a choice between enrolling two children from the same household,
decision is made in favour of the boy while the girl is sent to a nearby,
relatively ‘cheaper’ school. At a juncture when mindsets are just being formed
such discriminatory practices attribute to the imbalance.
It also doesn’t help that with the failure of
our education system there are scores of unemployed, uneducated, impoverished
youth, mostly men, frustrated, who have been taught to believe that their
insecurities can be allayed by yielding power – which can unfortunately be
freely sought by belonging to a particular caste or gender or lineage, further
empowered by an inefficient judicial or legal system. Power over the gullible
is considered a justifiable outlet and an uneducated, unemployed and repressed
section makes good victims. To add to it, there is maximum stigma attached to a
rape as if the girl has been robbed of everything because she has been sexually
exploited. In a way this victimisation encourages rapists since they do so believing
it will shame women. Women have anyway been trained to lower their gaze, run
for cover and retreat rather than fight, scream, stand for rights or be trained
in martial arts. We had undertaken a campaign against child sexual abuse in our
school, ‘Chuppi Todo’ (Break the silence) to encourage children from 3 to 15
years to speak up against sexual assault. While some parents appreciated our
efforts there were some who were slightly apprehensive. Sex education in India
is frowned upon and misconstrued as that which will encourage pre-marital sex,
especially in co-ed schools. Issues of menstrual hygiene, critical to maternal and
adolescent girls’ health are also hushed and considered a social taboo; according
to women’s welfare foundation, Dasra, 88% of the country’s 355 million
menstruating women have no access to sanitary pads. Around 66% school girls skip school while having a period and one third of these eventually drop out of school due to lack of toilets and basic hygiene parameters.
This is where the difference between being a literate
as opposed to an educated society becomes starker. With a desensitised
society -- comprising doctors, lawyers, police, politicians, priests, teachers,
nurtured by underpowered and illiterate women, bound by archaic traditions,
customs and hypocrisies -- bridging the gender and other social gaps will
require tackling from a 360-degree perspective. Currently, India has the
lowest workforce participation rate of women among the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) due to
socio-cultural reasons and low education levels. How will a nation progress
when such a huge section of its population, which ironically grooms its future,
is not empowered? Among the world’s top 20 economies, India is considered the
worst in which to be a female, a notch below Saudi Arabia! Enhancing access to
schools, improving infrastructure and sanitary conditions, making conditions
conducive for women to work by tightening laws, strict and immediate redress of
complaints, gender and sex and adult education will go a long way to ensure
that women are empowered. Additionally, ensuring that educated citizens are
indeed skilled to get jobs, enhancing job-skill match, will ensure that the
youth are dispensing their energies constructively and taking the nation
forward while taking along with them the marginalised sections of society –
rather than them be discovered as unfortunate targets of an imbalanced society,
found brutalised and hung from a mango tree like a disposable fraction.
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