As we know, India is a very large country and is said to be the largest democracy in the world. Even so, it is still dogged with old attitudes and customs.
Two pieces provide an insight into modern-day India as it goes to the polls in an election.
First, from an Indian journalist writing in The Age in "Indian election: Hidden wife is a good wife":
"The ideal woman does not assert herself, merely accepts what comes her way.
This belief explains why any woman who is the antithesis of this image – attractive, wears sexy clothes, goes out at night, socialises with men – gets no sympathy if she is sexually assaulted or raped.
An under-age rape victim in Kerala was recently given short shrift by her community because she was raped after going to see an evening show at the local cinema with her sisters. She had no business going out for an innocent pleasure.
The victim of the Delhi gang rape, had she lived, would also have been criticised in many quarters for going out in the evening with her boyfriend to the cinema. Her death pre-empted those sermons.
Likewise, if the media had dashed to Gujarat, where Mrs Modi lives, and discovered she had a boyfriend, a Facebook account, drank pinot noir and partied – that she was not the praying and meditating type that Mrs Modi happens to be – the commentaries would have been very different.
Other remarks in this election campaign have been equally dismaying. Well-known politician Mulayam Singh Yadav recently said that convicted rapists in Mumbai were just ‘'being boys’' when they gang-raped a woman.
His colleague, Abu Azmi, sank further, demanding that women who had sex outside marriage be hanged, including rape victims. Incredible but true.
As Indian men, they can be expected to hold oppressive opinions on women. What is worse is how Indian culture has brainwashed women into thinking the same way.
That is why millions of women, in survey after survey, say their husbands are justified in beating them if they burn the dinner or go out without his permission."
Second, a piece "How Suicide and Politics Mix in India" in The New York Times:
"As politicians scramble for India’s 815 million votes in the most expensive and closely contested general election in the nation’s history, an unexpected protest is rumbling from what was once one of the country’s most placid voter blocs: its farmers.
The protest is inflamed by rising attention to the shocking suicide rate on India’s hardscrabble farms. Since 1995, more than 290,000 farmers have killed themselves. Though that figure, compiled by the National Crime Records Bureau, is sketchy at best, perceptions are what counts in politics. And that perception, along with the reality that most of these suicides are borne of desperation wrought by decades of official corruption, crushing debt and cruel neglect, is being coupled with a revolutionary change in election law. For the first time, angry farmers can reject all the politicians clamoring for the vote and mark their ballots “None of the Above.”
Two pieces provide an insight into modern-day India as it goes to the polls in an election.
First, from an Indian journalist writing in The Age in "Indian election: Hidden wife is a good wife":
"The ideal woman does not assert herself, merely accepts what comes her way.
This belief explains why any woman who is the antithesis of this image – attractive, wears sexy clothes, goes out at night, socialises with men – gets no sympathy if she is sexually assaulted or raped.
An under-age rape victim in Kerala was recently given short shrift by her community because she was raped after going to see an evening show at the local cinema with her sisters. She had no business going out for an innocent pleasure.
The victim of the Delhi gang rape, had she lived, would also have been criticised in many quarters for going out in the evening with her boyfriend to the cinema. Her death pre-empted those sermons.
Likewise, if the media had dashed to Gujarat, where Mrs Modi lives, and discovered she had a boyfriend, a Facebook account, drank pinot noir and partied – that she was not the praying and meditating type that Mrs Modi happens to be – the commentaries would have been very different.
Other remarks in this election campaign have been equally dismaying. Well-known politician Mulayam Singh Yadav recently said that convicted rapists in Mumbai were just ‘'being boys’' when they gang-raped a woman.
His colleague, Abu Azmi, sank further, demanding that women who had sex outside marriage be hanged, including rape victims. Incredible but true.
As Indian men, they can be expected to hold oppressive opinions on women. What is worse is how Indian culture has brainwashed women into thinking the same way.
That is why millions of women, in survey after survey, say their husbands are justified in beating them if they burn the dinner or go out without his permission."
Second, a piece "How Suicide and Politics Mix in India" in The New York Times:
"As politicians scramble for India’s 815 million votes in the most expensive and closely contested general election in the nation’s history, an unexpected protest is rumbling from what was once one of the country’s most placid voter blocs: its farmers.
The protest is inflamed by rising attention to the shocking suicide rate on India’s hardscrabble farms. Since 1995, more than 290,000 farmers have killed themselves. Though that figure, compiled by the National Crime Records Bureau, is sketchy at best, perceptions are what counts in politics. And that perception, along with the reality that most of these suicides are borne of desperation wrought by decades of official corruption, crushing debt and cruel neglect, is being coupled with a revolutionary change in election law. For the first time, angry farmers can reject all the politicians clamoring for the vote and mark their ballots “None of the Above.”
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