Sukumaran C. V.
Doesn't Savita Halappanavar's death point to the overwhelmingly patriarchal nature of the laws, religions and customs all over the world? The young woman was stricken with septicaemia and her life would have been saved had the foetus been aborted, but Ireland 'saved' its Catholic belief at the cost of the 31 year old lady-dentist's life. In India abortion is rampant to kill the girl child. In Ireland abortion is denied even to save a woman’s life! In different ways, the female is sacrificed at the altar of patriarchy! When I heard the news of Savita's death, two recent incidents in which also patriarchy is the villain, rushed to my mind.
Savita Halappanavar
In
December 2011, a marriage was registered in the
gram panchayat where I work. The bride’s guardian has come three or four
times
to the office to correct the mistakes in the marriage certificate. They
have made some mistakes while filling the registration forms. The
certificate was prepared accordingly. Days after receiving the certificate, they applied to correct the mistakes. I have made the changes. But when I effected the changes, inadvertently some other mistakes occurred. Nobody noticed, and some days after the guardian came again and the clerical mistakes were rectified in the saved data and new certificate issued.
In the first week of November 2012, the same guardian came to see me and as soon as I saw him I asked, “Is there another mistake?”
“No, Sir,” He replied gloomily, “There is no mistake in the certificate, but the marriage itself was a great mistake. The mistakes you inadvertently made were an omen, Sir. He is having another wife (illegal). When we knew the fact, he is willing to part with his legal wife! Therefore, now I want three certified copies of the certificate to be produced in the court for divorce (with mutual consent).”
Even though I don’t believe in omens, I was stunned. It is hardly one year after the marriage!
Recently, two of our dearest family friends, a couple whom our two daughters affectionately call uncle and aunty, separated legally. They were married even before we were, but they have no children yet. The wife can’t beget. The husband is the only child of his widowed mother and she wants to have a grandchild and has been forcing her son long since to discard his sterile wife and remarry.
Both our daughters are so fond of this unfortunate woman and I don’t know what to tell them when they ask the reason for the permanent absence of their affectionate aunty. She went to her home and will never return to this place where she has lived for ten years. Even if she married against the will of her parents (it was a love marriage), they accepted her.
I am not blaming my friend the man, and I can’t blame the lady who can’t beget. I can’t but think the other way round. Suppose the sterility is in the man, what will happen then? Will the wife be advised by her parents or her mother-in-law to desert her husband and find a fertile man? And will the woman do it? No. She won’t discard her husband, instead she will discard her longing for a child; and if her parents continue to advise her to divorce and remarry, most probably she will snap the relationship with them forever.
In both the cases, the hardly one year old case and the ten year old case, men have nothing to loose; but the women loose everything. They face an infinite vacuum, experience trauma and know not what to do. They have no financial independence. What will they do? Nobody knows and nobody cares. In our society women are always at the receiving end, the girl child and the female foetus are at the receiving end and the Environment is also at the receiving end. Can a society remain healthy by putting the woman, the girl child and the environment permanently at the receiving end? Certainly it will rot and ruin itself, if not reformed.
The increasing insecurity of women and sexual harassment on them tell us that something is terribly wrong with our system. When a girl is raped, instead of finding fault with the propagated notion of seeing girls and women as mere sexual objects to satisfy man’s lust, and strictly punish the culprit, and trying to change the misogynistic social milieu; we are eager to put the blame on the girl’s behaviour, on her lack of modesty, on her ‘revealing’ dress and thus we abet the crime and the culprit.
Patriarchal culture and morality don't teach the males not to rape; instead, the females are taught not to get raped! As far as the victim is concerned, insult is added to the injury. Our society successfully makes her believe that it is her fault, and psychologically she is crushed to death.
In the wake of the Hryana gang rapes, a nineteen year old girl, who is an engineering student, told me that "rape is so negatively powerful that even the very threat or possibility of it occurring has cut short the freedom and independence in so many girls' lives.”
A nation or a people can never be a great one as long as it sustains myriad forms of oppression to ‘cut short the freedom and independence’ of more than half of its citizens.
