The India of my Dreams: January 2012

Sukumaran C. V.

“Woman is not born: she is made. In the making, her humanity is destroyed. She becomes symbol of this, symbol of that: mother of the earth, slut of the universe; but she never becomes herself because it is forbidden for her to do so.''
—Andrea Dworkin (Quoted by Tazlima Nazrin)

Tazlima Nazrin

In the 2011 census, the number of girls to every 1000 boys in the 0-6 age group is 914. In the 2001 census it was 927. It simply means that if the sex of the foetus is female, it is aborted. If a girl wants to live in India, she has to overpower a lot of hurdles starting from the very beginning—the inception!

If the female foetus is fortunate enough to escape the sex-selective abortion, she is born only to discover a plethora of discriminations and dangers for being a girl. There are laws against female foeticide, but the number of girls is decreasing. There are laws against dowry, but the practice of extracting dowry and the dowry related untoward incidents are increasing. There are laws against sexual assault or rape, but the heinous crime is increasing alarmingly. See the tables below. The figures are taken from the latest data of National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB).

Table-1

The States in which the number of rapes is far ahead than all other crimes.

State	Murder	Attempt to murder	Kidnapping & Abduction	Decoity	Rape
Kerala	363	361	261	74	634
Goa	35	27	35	2	36
Sikkim	17	6	6	1	18
Tripura	150	63	114	16	238
MP	2423	2277	1187	110	3135
A&N Islands	9	7	10	1	24

Table-2

Of the national total of 38440 Kidnapping and Abduction (K&A), 29795 victims are women and girls!

Year	2000	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009	2010
Rape	16496	18359	19348	20737	21467	21397	22172
K&A total	22871	22832	23991	27561	20261	33860	38440
K&A of Women and girls	15023	15750	17414	20416	22939	25741	29795

The figures clearly indicate that there is no point of making laws, if our basic attitude stands unchanged. It seems that our culture is dangerously misogynistic. In our Vedas, Puranas, and Ithihasas we can see a strong thread of misogyny and eulogy to everything that is masculine go hand in hand. In the Rig Veda, the earliest known religious text in the world, there are a number of verses like the following ones:

‘Bestow upon us Indra, wealth comprising worthy male offspring’ (Mandala 8, Anuvaka 2, Sukta 7, Verse 33).

‘Agni, bestow upon the pious donour, infinite riches and food with male progeny’ (M. 8, A. 6, S.1, V. 15).

‘Indra, the all-knower,…may he guard our son, our last son and middle son’(A.7, S.1, V.13)

There is not even a single invoking for female offspring in the entire Rig Veda and there is no prayer for the safety of the daughters. No god is asked to guard them! It is a wonder how the females survived.

Today we are in the 21^st century and have great technological developments, but mentally we haven’t moved even a single step further from the Rig Vedic age as far as the attitude to daughters are concerned and the technological sophistication is used to entrench the gender bias.

Jane Austen, who achieved an even level of perfection as a novelist as no other English novelist ever has achieved, writes in her novel Persuasion which was published in 1818:

Captain Harville: …But all histories are against you (women), all stories, prose and verse. I don’t think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon women’s inconstancy. Songs and proverbs all talk of woman’s fickleness.

Anne Elliot:…no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.

A hundred and thirty years later; Simon de Beauvoir, the French feminist, in her groundbreaking study of woman—The Second Sex— wrote that:

humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being. Man can think of himself without woman. She can’t think of herself without man. And she is simply what man decrees; thus she is called ‘the sex’ by which is meant that she appears essentially to the male as a sexual being. For him she is sex—absolute sex, no less. She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the subject, the Absolute—She is the Other.

Today the humankind is in a new century and in a new millennium, but still woman can’t be the subject, the essential; she is still seen as a mere sexual being and humanity is still male. There are many religions in our world and there has never had scarcity of reasons for these religions to differ and quarrel and spill human blood. But on the subject of the status of woman in the society these religions don’t have the slightest difference of opinion. Every religion considers woman as a mere sexual being, believes and teaches that she is inferior to man, and she is meant for man. No religion allows her to be the subject, to have her own identity/personality independent of man.

Everybody knows the (in)famous saying of Manu—na sthri swāthanthryam arhati—which has always been strictly practiced by the Indian societies. Another notorious statement of Manu says that woman should be under her father before marriage, under her husband after marriage and under her son in her old age. Again Manu says that the bull, the slave, the woman and the drum have to be beaten hard to get the best results. (See Jayanti Alam’s article—Religion, Patriarchy and Declining Sex Ratio—in the Mainstream, March 10, 2001.)

In the Mahābāratha there is a story of one Subhri, the daughter of a sage. She wanted to be a rishi and remained unmarried practicing severe penances. But at the time of her death she realized that she could not go to heaven, as her body was not consecrated by the sacrament of marriage!! Therefore, with great difficulty, she had to induce the saint Sringāvat to marry her, stayed with him for one night and became qualified to enter the heaven! Nowhere in the world can we see a story that portrays the dilemma of a man who was not able to go to heaven on account of his body not being united with that of a woman.

The Koran says that woman is the agricultural land of man and men can go to their fields of agriculture according to their own convenience (Koran: Sura 2-223). Christianity has always been successful to establish the notion of woman being the repository of every sin. In the field of misogynistic literature Christianity has explored and exhausted the utmost boundaries of imagination.

The Bible says:

“Every man praying or prophesying, having his head covered, dishonoureth his head.

But if the woman be not covered, let her also be shorn: but if it be a shame for a woman to be shorn or shaven, let her be covered.

For a man indeed ought not to cover his head, forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man.

For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man.

Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man. "

(Corinthians-I, Chapter11 verses 4, 5, 7, 8 and 9)

Ours is a world that is controlled by Man. Man created God in his image, Man invented religions to safeguard his interests and the gods and religions invented by Man legitimized his control over woman and Nature. As Beauvoir says:

Legislators, priests, philosophers, writers and scientists have striven to show that the subordinate position of woman is willed in heaven and advantageous on earth. The religions invented by men reflect this wish for domination.

This age-old patriarchal cultural indoctrination still continues intact in our socio-political set up. Therefore eave-teasing, domestic violence against women and the notion that females are mere objects created for the pleasure of males are taken for granted in our socio-cultural milieu. Education should help to abolish the existing misogynistic and patriarchal ideas and practices. But our schooling, instead of challenging the prevailing gender inequity and helping to create an atmosphere which doesn’t reinforce identities as males and females among children, reinforces gender inequity through its curriculum, teacher attitude and pedagogic practice.

An NCERT study of Hindi text books found that the ratio of boy-centred stories to girl-centred stories was 21:0. In the thirteen language text-books published by the Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages, boy centred stories outnumbered girl centred stories by 81 to 9. Women, if portrayed in textbooks, are usually shown as passive and subservient, adhering to stereotypical gender roles.

If we fail to alter our pre-dominantly male-chauvinistic cultural ambience through education, ideological intervention and political willpower, the present decline in the sex-ratio and the growth rate of crimes against girls and women will continue unabatedly. Mere law making alone can’t change this abysmal reality.

Recently a young girl who was traveling in a passenger train in Kerala was pushed out of the train and raped. She has been in coma for four days and succumbed to her head injuries. The tragedy would not have happened if the girl had left the ladies' compartment when she found that she was alone in it. But the cultural indoctrination is so strong that most girls fear to step out of their reserved places. But they are not secure in their reserved areas also!

From the very stage of inception, the female is attacked. She is killed in the womb itself and if she is born, she has to face the lurking dangers of sexual harassment, molestation and dowry death!

Every Keralite knows the PE Usha case that has created news for more than two years in the state. The woman who is a University employee was sexually harassed by a man while she was traveling in a crowded bus. The man masturbated on her and she being a brave woman made it known to the public and insisted that the man be arrested. When the case snowballed into a major issue; her colleagues, especially a male one, instead of standing by her, began to spread stories about her character—she is not a good woman, she is a woman who divorced her (good) husband, why the man masturbated on nobody else but on herself… [If a woman is divorced by her husband, the society thinks that she is not good, chaste and so on and so forth. And if a woman divorces her husband, then also she is the person who is not good because she became doughty enough to divorce her husband. Strange are the laws of Patriarchy!]

In buses, front seats are reserved for women and they have to get into the bus through the front door. College and school girls are afraid when they are asked by the bus conductor or cleaner to stand back in order to accommodate more women passengers. If they step back in crowded buses (and most often even if they don’t step back) they will have to suffer the masculine lust. It is said that most girls and women silently suffer it. In such an atmosphere when one lady becomes bold enough to expose and question the abominable deeds of the perverted masculine world, she is being persecuted instead of the culprit(s)!

This is the socio-political condition in which women live and work; and they are forced to internalize the patriarchal notion that woman is meant for man. Every girl adapts herself to this ‘reality’. The patriarchal world teaches woman to internalize her secondary position and her sexual beingness through a variety of atrocities. Even little girls are raped and killed; women are being sexually harassed in work places and in the public space. ‘It almost seems as if rape is the favorite pastime of the males of this country’, writes Saraswati Haider—a feminist writer (‘Bandit Queen and Woman Question’, Mainstream, March 23, 1996). All these ‘deeds’ are done by the followers of every religion and in doing so and discussing these ‘adventures’ in details among them, there are no difference of opinion that leads them to a quarrel, like that of when they talk about their separate gods and ‘holy’ books. Everywhere men see women only as objects to satisfy their lust and yet every religious scripture delineates women as lustful beings and every holy book speaks of women’s fickleness! If these absurd patriarchal notions, which are the source of every anthropocentric world-view of Man, are not checked at least at this belated stage; the animal called man will be the terminator of Life itself on the planet.

A country’s well-being depends on the safety and security its farmers and women enjoy. India miserably fails in this count. In our country an average of 15,000 farmers committed suicide every year between 1995 and 2010 (a total of 2, 56,913 according to the NCRB data for 2010). It means that India’s agricultural sector has been in great distress since 1995 and the woes of our farmers still go unaddressed and unmitigated. The farm suicide rate in India does indicate that something has terribly gone wrong in our economic policies. The Rural Affairs Editor of The Hindu, P. Sainath says that ‘the largest wave of recorded suicides in human history has occurred’ in our country in the past sixteen years. In his article “Corporate socialism’s 2G orgy” (The Hindu, March 7, 2011) he writes: “In six years from 2005-6, the Government of India wrote off corporate income tax worth Rs.3,74,937 crore. While writing off this gigantic sum for corporates, Pranab Mukherjee’s latest budget slashes thousands of crores from agriculture.”

It is high time we rectify the wrongs our neo-liberal policy makers have committed and are committing to satisfy the corporate greed. Deserting the interests of the farmers for the sake of corporate interests is suicidal for a country like India.

And the growth rate of crimes against women and girls shows how terrible our socio-cultural rot is. If the statistics of rape increased from 2487 in 1971to 22,172 in 2010 it means India is not progressing as a civilized nation. We are certainly more educated in 2010 than we were in 1971. Why doesn’t our education play a decreasing role in the field of crimes related to girls and women? The more we get educated the more insecure our women become! Does it mean that the prevailing system of education in our country have no role in making people humane and committed to the welfare of society as a whole? Then it needs a complete overhaul. (The educational standard of Kerala is far higher than it was in 1971, but the number of the heinous crime called rape committed in Kearla in 2010 was 634. The number was 33 in 1971!!)

The only crime in which the victim is accused of the responsibility of the crime is sexual harassment or rape. The victim is told that it happened because she wore tight jeans and top or revealing dress or she was tempting to be harassed or raped!! If all the women start wearing burkha (itself a Patriarchal mechanism to curb women’s freedom), Patriarchy will still continue its practice of raping women and then the excuse suggested may be that it happens because of the anatomy of women.

The basic problem is as the Norwegian play-wright Henrik Ibsen—who wrote the epoch-making play, A Doll’s House, which came as a thunderbolt to the male-centric social and moral ethos of Europe—says: “A woman cannot be herself in the society of present day, which is an exclusively masculine society, with laws framed by men and with a judicial system that judges feminine conduct from a masculine point of view.”

It should be remembered that Ibsen wrote the above quoted sentence in the notes he made for the play in 1878. How contemporaneous the sentence seems in the present day Indian socio-cultural background!

In our country, girls and women fear to travel by bus or by train, they are afraid to be in public places. The prejudice (and attack) against women starts from the womb itself. The foetus is killed, if it is female. Without shattering the typical patriarchal mindset of perceiving woman as a sexual object created for man, we can't create a social milieu which is completely free of sexual violence. Woman should be projected as an individual just like man is.

We miserably fail to provide security and safety to our farmers and our women folk. The condition of our farmers and our women continues to be pathetic. In this backdrop we are made to believe that India shines, but actually India rots.