In northern India a council of male elders has ordered that two young women be raped. It is intended as a punishment for their brother, whose “crime” was to elope with a woman from a higher caste. This would be profoundly shocking anywhere. In a peaceful and civilised country, ostensibly under the rule of law, it is abhorrent. Sixteen thousand people have signed Amnesty International’s petition calling on the authorities to intervene. The fact that such outrages are not unusual, and that harassment and discrimination are a daily fact of life for many Indian women, is dismaying.
India is rightly proud that it is the largest democracy in the world. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) believes that it may soon have the third-largest economy. Yet in a 2012 poll of G20 countries, India was voted the worst place to be a woman. In 2011 there were 24,000 reported rapes. In 2012 a young woman was gang raped on a bus in Delhi, suffering internal injuries from which she died. One of the perpetrators, the driver of the bus, said that she had no business being out at night and needed to be taught a lesson.
In Uttar Pradesh two sisters from the so-called untouchables caste were gang-raped and hanged from a tree a month after the head of the region’s governing party said of rape: “Boys will be boys.” In Rajasthan, a father beheaded his daughter because she fell in love with a boy from a lower caste. As a columnist in the Hindustan Times noted: “Men abuse women in every society, but few males do it with as much impunity, violence and regularity as the Indian male.”
If India seeks to be taken seriously on the global stage, it cannot countenance that the rule of law extends only to the city limits, and that discrimination against women begins in the womb. In the past ten years eight million female foetuses are estimated to have been aborted. India’s ratio of young girls to boys is now second only to China as the worst in the world. Save The Children has found instances of women and children being sold as chattels, married off as young as ten, and burnt alive, often as a result of dowry related disputes. Forty-five per cent of Indian girls are married before the age of 18; 82 per cent of men are literate, but only 6 per cent of women. It is profoundly depressing that a majority of adolescent boys told Unicef that it was justifiable for men to beat their wives. It is even more depressing that most adolescent girls agreed.
These are not simply deep-rooted social and cultural problems. They also have profound economic implications. The World Economic Forum recently found a positive link between gender equality and per capita GDP. The prime minister, Narendra Modi, swept to power last year promising to revive the Indian economy. He should be concerned that the IMF found that the average global figure for women in the workforce is 50 per cent; in India it is 33 per cent. Nearly 50 years after India elected its first female prime minister, only 125 million of its 380 million working-age women are working or seeking work. The vast majority work in agriculture and can expect to be paid considerably less than men.
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The Indian constitution confers absolute equal rights on women. Its parliament has passed laws seeking to improve their lot, including banning dowries and sex-selective abortion. The problem lies with law enforcement (dowries are still widespread) and the ingrained attitudes of those who flout the law. In 1921 Mahatma Gandhi said: “Of all the evils for which man has made himself responsible, none is so degrading, so shocking or so brutal as his abuse of the better half of humanity: the female sex.”
While there is much to celebrate about 21st-century India, the country’s attitude to women can be little more than medieval.