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society
THE entire discourse on gender issues remained confined to rising numbers and brutalisation of sexual crimes against women this year. This, unfortunately, resulted in the intensification of moral surveillance over their lives. The year began on a sad note for Indian women. In June, a Thomas Reuters Foundation survey found India to be the most dangerous place for women to live in. The report was based on news appearing in media about shockingly high numbers of dowry deaths, cases involving trafficking, rape, honour killings, acid attack, etc. and an abysmally low rate of conviction in such crimes. What clinched India’s place at the lowest rung was its 12 million aborted girls over the last three decades (2011 study by The Lancet). This proved that in the last three decades, governments of different shades that ruled this country never took up women’s issues on their priority list.
Unsafe zone Through the year, the social, political and administrative machinery ensured that credentials of the Thomas Reuters report were proved right. India did become the most unsafe country for women across the rural-urban, rich-poor, educated-illiterate divide. The inconceivable depravity of each crime committed against women, as they unfolded, shocked the nation. Women were raped in moving cars, buses, brutalised and dumped on roads, gangraped, filmed while they were being raped, blackmailed, molested publicly, sexually exploited in shelter homes, maimed and ears and fingers chopped off for refusing advances of local goons, killed by security guard, pushed to suicide by the high and powerful for refusing favours, acid thrown over their face to avenge refusal ...there was no rock bottom! And then, the brutal gangrape of a 23-year-old on a moving bus in the national Capital made the nation erupt in anger, demanding justice through intense protests on the streets. Total disregard While majority of women thought these protests would be the harbinger of an end for their everyday humiliation invited by the sheer accident of their gender, specimens of the same old mindsets were voiced from television studios by those in whom the people of this country have vested the power to bring about a change. A judge lamented the fact that due to these uncalled protests, he was delayed in reaching the swearing-in ceremony of a judge by an hour. A senior spokesperson of the ruling party was angry that the girls who have taken seize of the city caused him delay of more than an hour. These attitudes give birth to the same old cynicism among the masses, that, things may get only a cosmetic make over. Cynicism persists because, not only women, now their family members, friends and anyone who dare to challenge the molesters/ rapists risk their lives. A 19-year-old youth was brutally stabbed to death by a group of boys at Dombivli in Thane district over a reported incident of eve-teasing. In Amritsar, an assistant sub-inspector of police was killed for telling the men stalking his daughter to leave her alone. In Hisar, a father committed suicide when he learnt of his 16-year-old daughter’s gangrape and its filming. The bogey of Indian cultural values that continue to infantilise women under the garb of patriarchy must change. And it will change only by more visibility of women in public sphere and by the assertion of their rights; not only on paper but translated into reality. A proactive law and order system can facilitate this change, but not by the existing passing-the-buck kind of machinery. Because the law comes into play only after a crime is committed. The entire social system supports the sexual offender to violate a woman the same way it makes a woman vulnerable, across social spectrum. This needs to change.
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