India is a nightmare for women .... Economist take

**Fabrizio Napoleoni** · 12th-May-2012

An article from Economist, is there anyone from India that can comment on it? I'm just curious!

Indian women: One dishonourable step backwards | The Economist

One dishonourable step backwards

May 11th 2012, 9:56 by A.R. | DELHI

HOW should one judge the lot of women in India, a country that is in many ways progressive, modern, tolerant and yet by turns repressive and hostile? Women hold the highest political positions (the presidency, speaker of parliament, leader of the ruling party, leader of the opposition in parliament, several chief ministers of large states) and in theory they are protected by a variety laws promoting equality.

Though development indicators remain dire, just about all statistics show their lives improving. Women are more literate than ever (last year’s census suggests two-thirds of them can read, compared with fewer than two-fifths in 1991). They are becoming less likely to die in childbirth (well under half the rate of 1990). And they live much longer: at 66 years, India’s female life expectancy outstrips the male one by some three years. Like men, on average they live in better homes than they did in previous years, with more access to health care and schools, telephones and transport.

Yet weigh against such trends the dismal persistence of discrimination, violence and other forms of hostility against girls and women. A cultural preference for boys, combined with modern technology such as ultrasound scanners, allows parents to identify and abort unwanted female fetuses at a terrifying rate. Millions of girls are missing from the demographic norm. Despite laws against sex-selective abortion (or even finding out the sex of your unborn child), in many places the child sex-ratio is growing dangerously skewed.

It is tempting to hope that progress is only a matter of time: that, for example, in the more urban, modern bits of India the lot of women is clearly getting better. In some ways, that must be true: access to medicine, education, paying jobs and more are easier in town. Yet not all is better. Abortion of girl fetuses appears to happen most frequently in semi-urban areas, not villages. In India’s cities violent attacks against women, and their harassment generally, are depressingly common. Nor is the habit of paying dowries (in effect the family of the husband being paid for the burden of taking on a daughter-in-law) dying out.

Perhaps most dispiriting of all, however, is to see women let down by the very institutions and political leaders who should know better. In February the government of West Bengal reacted to the gang-rape of a young woman who had left a posh nightclub in Kolkata by accusing the victim of having plotted a conspiracy to discredit the chief minister of the state. The policewoman who then tracked down the perpetrators was herself punished, being transferred to an unpopular post.

As shocking, this week a deputy inspector-general of police in the state of Uttar Pradesh was shown on television encouraging villagers to shoot a 14-year-old girl who had been abducted earlier by elder men. Her family had asked the policeman, Satish Kumar Mathur, to send officers to help rescue her. He responded, instead, by advising “if she has eloped, you should be ashamed of it and end your life. I would have committed suicide or killed my sister if she had eloped.” On May 10th the policeman was reassigned, presumably to be kept out of sight until the public fuss dies down.

Such murders as Mr Mathur recommends—misnamed as “honour killings”, since the victims are typically killed by relatives who believe they somehow preserve family reputation by doing so—remain depressingly common in India and the region. By one estimate over 1,000 Indians (both men and women) fall victim to it each year. Another suggests that roughly as many Pakistanis die this way each year.

India’s most recent national records show increasing reports of crimes against women in the years to 2010. These include rape, abduction, dowry death (women murdered or committing suicide when their dowries go unpaid), molestation and trafficking, with cruelty by husbands and relatives accounting for a large proportion of offences. Yet whether the rate of crime against women is rising is hard to judge: the figures could possibly, more hopefully, reflect the fact that such offences, taken more seriously than before, are reported better.

The United Nations Development Programme makes a valiant effort to compile various indicators relevant to women’s prospects, and lists countries by the results as a “gender inequality index”. For 2011 the UN’s compilation of data on maternal mortality and health care, teenage pregnancy, women’s representation in parliament and the workforce, women’s education and more, suggest that India ranks a relatively unimpressive 134th out of 173 countries. That, however, is at least a few notches above neighbouring Pakistan or Bangladesh.

**FloatyBoaty** · 12th-May-2012

Yes, very interesting. Although, it would be nice to here your opinions on this as well.

To me, the article seems a little one-sided. It says nothing of the men's side. Like the husbands of the high-ranking women - how are they treated?

This article poses a lot of questions and needs further research.

**Percy** · 13th-May-2012

The article was about women and so it did not need to discuss men, although a mention could have been made.

India is one of those countries where women are treated the way western feminists insist they themselves are treated, despite western women being mollycoddled and privileged. The 'lot' of an Indian woman depends still on her 'caste' which was not mentioned and should have been. And men get the same bad 'lot' in life if they are in the lower castes. It is easy enough to mention that women occupy high political position but even easier, it seems, to ignore that they are from the higher castes. They are the women feminists here wish they were too. An entire social class of Hilary Clintons.

The 'honour' system, which is far more a Hubris system replete with infantile, nacissistic bullies pretending to be adult men, is equally supported by nasty, grabbing, mindless women who live off its 'protections'. It is an archaic and abberant culture.

**FloatyBoaty** · 13th-May-2012

Quote from Percy

The article was about women and so it did not need to discuss men, although a mention could have been made.

India is one of those countries where women are treated the way western feminists insist they themselves are treated, despite western women being mollycoddled and privileged. The 'lot' of an Indian woman depends still on her 'caste' which was not mentioned and should have been. And men get the same bad 'lot' in life if they are in the lower castes. It is easy enough to mention that women occupy high political position but even easier, it seems, to ignore that they are from the higher castes. They are the women feminists here wish they were too. An entire social class of Hilary Clintons.

The 'honour' system, which is far more a Hubris system replete with infantile, nacissistic bullies pretending to be adult men, is equally supported by nasty, grabbing, mindless women who live off its 'protections'. It is an archaic and abberant culture.

Thanks Percy, I knew I was forgetting something.

**Martin E** · 12th-June-2012

It may be that Indian society treats women less well than it treats men. It is difficult to tell what the balance of discrimination is when we are given statistics and facts relating only to one sex. I saw a news item on tele recently in which a husband was apparently coercing his wife to be a prostitute so that they had an income. Some of their income was used to pay for drugs that he needed for a condition that prevented him from working. If I rememebr rightly they had a child and risked eviction from their home if they did not pay rent. His actions were immoral and she despised him for what he was doing to her. But the news item could so easily have been different; it could have been about a boy joining a gang, dealing drugs and risking his life to bring home an illegal income that supports his family and ensures his sickly mother receives the medicine she requires to keep her alive. Or it could have been about the man who works in an environment that is so dangerous or damaging to his health that he literally risks life and limb every day to put dinner on the table and keep his family going.
We can say that Indian women are getting a raw deal in certain aspects of their society but without knowing what compensating burdens are placed upon the men we cannot easily judge who suffers the most. For example, I often see news items in which the plight of women subjected to a reclusive existence within the home is highlighted as a way of showing how badly treated they are. But in that self same society the men will have no option but to risk their lives everyday going out of the home to earn a living. Those men have as little opportunity to stay at home, safe and sound in doors, while their wives risk their lives making a living than the women have in playing their role.
A society that forces women to live a certain way is usually a society that places an equally unequivocal role upon the menfolk and which role you think is best is a matter of opinion and personality rather than an absolute fact. Is it better to be "oppressed" as women are often portrayed, or forced to be a part of a life that is dangerous and corrupting. The very fact that women are not allowed to assume responsibility often places men in the posiiton of having no choice but to assume responsibility no matter how unpalettable this is. The man who must join a gang, must work in a perilous envirnment or must even forse his wife into prostitution is suffering from the flip side of being oppressed and that is being the one who has to make the tough decisions.
The man who forced his wife into prostitution did not perhaps make the right decision but he may well have been prepared to do whatever it takes to look after his wife's welfare if the circumstances had placed her health in his hands.
If we look abroad and see women being oppressed we should not necessarliy assume that the men have any more choice about the role they play in life and nor should we assume that their role is necessarily less onerous.

**FloatyBoaty** · 12th-June-2012

Formatted for clarity:

Quote from Martin E

It may be that Indian society treats women less well than it treats men. It is difficult to tell what the balance of discrimination is when we are given statistics and facts relating only to one sex. I saw a news item on tele recently in which a husband was apparently coercing his wife to be a prostitute so that they had an income. Some of their income was used to pay for drugs that he needed for a condition that prevented him from working. If I rememebr rightly they had a child and risked eviction from their home if they did not pay rent. His actions were immoral and she despised him for what he was doing to her.

But the news item could so easily have been different; it could have been about a boy joining a gang, dealing drugs and risking his life to bring home an illegal income that supports his family and ensures his sickly mother receives the medicine she requires to keep her alive. Or it could have been about the man who works in an environment that is so dangerous or damaging to his health that he literally risks life and limb every day to put dinner on the table and keep his family going.

We can say that Indian women are getting a raw deal in certain aspects of their society but without knowing what compensating burdens are placed upon the men we cannot easily judge who suffers the most. For example, I often see news items in which the plight of women subjected to a reclusive existence within the home is highlighted as a way of showing how badly treated they are. But in that self same society the men will have no option but to risk their lives everyday going out of the home to earn a living. Those men have as little opportunity to stay at home, safe and sound in doors, while their wives risk their lives making a living than the women have in playing their role.

A society that forces women to live a certain way is usually a society that places an equally unequivocal role upon the menfolk and which role you think is best is a matter of opinion and personality rather than an absolute fact. Is it better to be "oppressed" as women are often portrayed, or forced to be a part of a life that is dangerous and corrupting. The very fact that women are not allowed to assume responsibility often places men in the posiiton of having no choice but to assume responsibility no matter how unpalettable this is. The man who must join a gang, must work in a perilous envirnment or must even forse his wife into prostitution is suffering from the flip side of being oppressed and that is being the one who has to make the tough decisions.

The man who forced his wife into prostitution did not perhaps make the right decision but he may well have been prepared to do whatever it takes to look after his wife's welfare if the circumstances had placed her health in his hands.

If we look abroad and see women being oppressed we should not necessarliy assume that the men have any more choice about the role they play in life and nor should we assume that their role is necessarily less onerous.