Jamil Chughtai
In yet another gory incident of women victimization in India, a thirteen year old low-caste Hindu girl has been beheaded in Tamil Nadu by a man of higher caste for refusing to allow him sex with her. It happened on October 3, 2018 in village Attur of District Salem where a man named Dinesh Kumar tried to force the teenager living in the neighbourhood to satiate his devilish desires. When the little girl fought back to keep her virtue, Kumar got infuriated taking it as an insult to his higher Hindu caste and decapitated her with a sickle right in front of her parents and siblings.
The incident is not a rare happening in caste-reeking India that witnessed 47000 such occurrences against women in 2017 alone where majority of the female victims were either low-caste Dalits or women from minority faiths. Pitifully, the very religion itself does not provide refuge to Hindu women, where faithful female believers are in fact discriminated against based merely on their gender. Just a couple of weeks back Hindu hardliners blocked intersections, threatened drivers, threw stones at buses and ordered a strike to bar women from visiting one of India’s holiest sites known as ‘the Lord Ayyappa Temple’ at Sabarimala in Kerala state. Hindu fundamentalists threatened that they would only let women below 10 years and above 50 year age into the holy place of worship, and they forcibly made sure that women failing their age criteria do not enter the temple. More awful becomes the fate of an Indian woman causing displeasure to Hindu bigots if she happens to be from other minority faiths. Such was the treatment meted out to a Christian woman, who on some unfounded allegations was savagely beaten and paraded naked on the roads of Bihar while RSS (Rashtria Swayamsevak Sangh) goons were seen shamelessly kicking, booing and stoning her on the way.
Of late a study was carried out by Thompson Reuters Foundation through more than 500 experts on women’s issues covering areas such as healthcare, discrimination, sexual/ non-sexual violence and human-trafficking. It is worth-mentioning that India has won laurels by snatching first position in terms of ‘woman victimization’ this time round having climbed three rungs in the span of seven years as it stood 4th by the same world survey conducted in 2011. Since crimes against women in India rose by more than 80% from 2007 onwards, not a single day passes in India now when rape or sexual molestation of scores of women is not reported. Nearly 35,000 rapes were reported in 2016-17 alone, which does not include the non-reported ones. The statistics available till current mid-year had already soared to over 16000 reported rape cases in India and roughly comes to 100 rapes per day that includes rapes of minors as well. The shining India dreaming to become a global giant is instead getting worse every passing day for the working women as there were 539 cases of workplace sexual harassment in 2017 which are 170% higher than that of 2006. These statistics are more alarming when considered against the fact that the number of reported cases of sexual abuse are always much less than actual occurrences as majority of them are not made public due to social taboos.
The Year 2018 has also unfolded horrific account of sexual terrorism against minors both girls and boys. Who can forget the horrendous “Chennai Horror” incident in July this year when 17 men gang-raped an 11-year old girl over a period of seven months. More dreadful is the account of another 8-year old girl who was kidnapped, locked in a temple, gang-raped and then beaten to death. Similarly in the month of June a 7-year old girl was raped by two men, and after committing that appalling crime they slit her throat and left her to die. In today’s India, insecurity of women and minors is an extremely serious issue; however, Modi’s government has instead preferred to keep only two-point agenda on top of everything, which revolves around “Cow Meat” and “who all are eating it in India”. In fact, what is being witnessed in the present India is an attempt at pushing forward the Hindutva ideology by BJP-RSS conglomerate. Rest everything that impacts the masses is secondary in India; and as for as women rights and minors’ security are concerned they are yet to find a slot even at the lowest rungs of the priority list maintained by Modi government.
As a matter of fact when human values become non-existent in a society, the rights of weaker segments including women, low-caste Hindus and the minorities do not find a niche within its national edifice. Killing of Muslims and Dalits by ‘gau rakshaks’ for consuming beef and everyday massacre of innocent demonstrators in occupied Kashmir amply support the case in point. In the already typical misogynist Indian society, Modi’s terming sexual violence on Muslim women as an inter-community dispute has further deteriorated the situation. Asifa Bano’s incident last year is the case in point, where an eight year old Kashmiri girl was held captive and gang raped for days by a group of Hindus. All these incidents and happenings bring forth only one conclusion; India, as a state, does not value human lives and rights when it comes to safeguarding its Hindutva ideology. Regrettably for women – as a human – have never had any place of worth within the orthodox Hindu dogmas, except in the practice of ‘Satti’ in which widows were “forced to gracefully burn alive” on their husbands’ funeral pyres.
Pragmatically, as long as PM Modi-led BJP government continues to brazenly dismiss victimization of women from minorities including Dalits, Muslims and Christians as mere inter-communal conflicts, the police officers and judges would remain unwilling to prosecute sexual crimes with requisite conviction. To control this growing menace, India must seriously focus on setting her social priorities right, before it become too late.
