Varislintu wrote:vijayjohn wrote:In that case, you'd be shocked to see how Indian men (or perhaps I should go further and say South Asian men) talk about women, just in general. Considering some of the things that women and girls are forced to endure in India, I'm honestly not sure that the situation of women in India is better than that of women in Afghanistan.
Great... I guess I have an inkling, though. I've read about some Indian women killing their girl infants just to spare them the life as a woman (I mean, they themselves state that as a reason for killing them). Of course that's the ultimate extreme, but... I just can't even imagine the life those women must have led and vitnessed all around them. Just think about the amount of women that must be living with PTSD, depression and other mental issues born out of maltreatment and sexual violence. And then those women raise the next generation. I wish the Indian government would realise that these aren't just the personal tragedies of half the population, but that it affects and holds back men as well. It's a problem of the entire society, because the ripples travel far, and therefore important to fight.
I do get, of course, that India is huge with many different cultures in it, and varying degrees of progressive attitudes. The extreme is the extreme, but it makes me so sad nonetheless.
I think you're basically right (although seriously, abortion of female babies is really way too common in India, partly because of dowry), but the way I see it, the thing is that again, it's not just women's rights. There are all kinds of issues that are at least as serious in India, e.g. casteism, and then there's the additional complication that these issues are really not separate. For example, in Bihar (in eastern India), for the past few years, there is a caste war that has been going on for years already. In the course of said war, many lower-caste women have learned to use guns in order to defend themselves because they run a high risk of being raped by higher-caste men as they're just going about their day. So there you can see a clear example of how it isn't just a question of women's rights; it's that combined with the rights of (in this case) lower caste people.
The government is far too corrupt to do anything at all about this war, about casteism in general, about gender violence in general, or really about anything. The police are completely useless because anybody who gives them a bribe that's big enough can get them to do whatever they want, so it doesn't even matter whether something is legal or not; it happens anyway. That's what the problem really is. And what really seems to make a practical difference in the Indian context is education; in parts of India where the literacy rate is relatively high, women are less likely to abort female babies, and people are just generally more likely to have a greater awareness of what their rights are and to stand up for them.