Rayyan Baig
India is the only third world country which had a female prime minister for long 15 years, yet it failed to give bare minimum respect to her women folk.?The life as a woman in the world’s biggest democracy is pretty tough, even 46 years after Indira Gandhi made history by being the country’s first female Prime Minister. In India the womenfolk are considered as a burden for the family and treated as commodity rather than a human being. Even in the womb of her mother, before her birth, she suffers discrimination; ?around 600,000 female fetuses are aborted every year in India because of the preference for boys. If born, a large proportion of girls may not be allowed to live to see the world and may suffer infanticide. In India the sex determination and sex selective abortion by medical professionals has become around US $ 300 million industry.
From infancy to her old age a woman in India remains vulnerable to be sexually harassed/ exploited/ molested by any male, even the foreigners visiting India are not exempted. Not necessarily only a women getting out for job/?employment is harassed, ?rather the one working in the fields or staying in the confines of her home equally suffer. The state of affair can be attributed to Indian culture and dress code, even the goddesses, whom Hindus worship, ?are portrayed in statues, portraits, and sculptures in nude and seminude dresses. A psyche is, therefore, ?developed wherein an image of a female is incused akin to as seen by the worshipersright from the childhood. Due to this culture even the juveniles have been found involved in rape cases; just a few days back a 12 years old boy has made a history of becoming the youngest reported, ?rapist father of an illegitimate child. As per Human Rights Watch around 8000 minors alone are raped each year in India, even minor girls are trafficked into prostitution. Though the Indian constitution does provide protection to such victims, but in reality the victims who dare to report the assaults suffer mistreatment and humiliation from the police.?
??The life of working women in India has become even worse; ?they have to face difficulties/ harassment right after leaving their homes, ?in auto rickshaws, in the busses, on the highways, in the trains, hospitals, schools and work places etc, even the females serving in armed forces are no exception. Most of the female officers, from the first batch, faced sexual harassment within the first year of their passing out. In certain cases a female officer has been repeatedly raped by the commanding officer, his second in command and the adjutant of the same unit.?When she brought charges of sexual harassment against her superior officers, instead of getting justice, she was rather court-martialed.?There is a long list of women in Indian Armed Forces who quietly bear all sorts of sexual harassment by their seniorsdue to the fearof furthervictimization and dismissal. The lack of accountability on rape cases in India in general and in Indian Armed forces in particular has emboldened the Indian soldiers and officers to commit such crimes even when employed abroad onPeace KeepingMissions or as Defense Attaches. Incidents of Indian troops committing such crimes in UN missionsin Sudan, Ethiopia and Lebanon or by Defense Attaché in Afghanistan are just a few examples to quote. There are instances where women were repeatedly gang raped by the same individuals despite earlier rape coming intolime light, and still the culprits go scot free. Though there is no discrimination of caste status or nationality for the rappers, however, the destitute lower caste Hindu girls and women of Kashmir and insurgency ridden areas of India face the brunt of mass rapes from the hands of Indian Armed Forces.
Though there are innumerable rape/ gang rape cases in India, but just a few of the stunning examples of mass rapes in India can be quoted as: in Ajmer, Rajasthan, India,?in 1992, where a gang?? with evil intentions, befriended over 100 school girls, raped them andphotographed them to further exploit the victims. After beingraped, ?most of depressed victims committed suicide. In another case in Maharashtra, in 1994, around 500 innocent girls and women, most of them school minors, were tranquilized before being sexually assaulted and then blackmailed. In 1992 ateam of 263 forest personnel with police entered Dalit dominated village of Vachathi in Dharmpuri district, Tamil Nadu, in search of?a renowned Sandalwood smuggler. During the search they destroyed their houses, ransacked the villagers’ property, killed their cattle and gang raped 18 women.On February 23, 1991 in Kunan Poshspora, located in Indian Held Kashmir’s remote Kupwara District, the Indian Armylaunched a search and interrogation operation in the village. Under the garb of operation, Indian soldiers gang raped 100 women aging from13 to 80 years.In March 2015, in Ranaghat, Nadia district of Indian state of West Bengal, a 71 years old Catholic nun was gang raped by eight men?in Ranaghat Convent School, in front of her staff nuns. Recently, on 3 Jan on New Year Eve at Bengaluru, capital of the Indian state of Karnataka, a mass molestation of the girls, who had come to celebrate the New Year, took place in the presence of police on a busy road having CCTV coverage.?
The rape of women in India is notbig news even the gangrape cases are so rampant that the media writesin a routine “another case of Gang Rape”.?The sex maniacs do not hesitate evento take the lives of their victims or mutilatetheir bodiesin their rape frenzy. The offenders may include men from all the walks of life and from all the social status, eg cab drivers, co-workers, relatives, teachers, doctors, bureaucrats, politicians, ministers, soldiers or the generals.It’s an established fact that the rape is highly under-reported in India, due to the stigma surrounding sex crimes. On an average around 100 rape cases are reported every day in India, whereas a large number of cases go unreported. It is said that for every 100,000 cases only one case gets highlighted in the media. It is quite common in India to burn a rape victim to silence her eternally or burn a girl for not bringing desired dowry. It can thus be said that?India is?truly?shining in the flames of these innocent burning women.
The apathy about rising rape crimes in India can be judged from the mindset ofa man accused of raping and killing an innocent girl, during hisinterview to BBC News:?”If women are not “good,” he said, men have a right to “teach them a lesson” by raping them. And if that happens, the woman being raped has a responsibility to silently accept the assault. “When being raped, she shouldn’t fight back; she should just be silent and allow the rape”. The deplorable state of women in India is not hidden from the world. In a perceptions poll of 370 gender specialists around the world, conducted by Trust Law, a legal news service run by Thomson Reuters Foundation, Indiawas voted to bethe worst place to be a woman out of all the G20 countries. However, the world, UN and OIC need to take notice of the growing looming threats to women in India, especially for minority Muslim community in the back drop of new elect UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s incitement to his followers to “Rape Dead MuslimWomen”.
