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November 6, 2011, 8:30 AM IST
India Journal: Why Does India Hate
Women?
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By Tripti Lahiri
So, which countries in the world boast — though I suspect that’s not quite the
right word — the highest rates of pregnancy among teenage girls? If you were to pick
one of the nations of the supposedly sexually precocious West, you’d be quite wrong.
The latest United Nations human
development report shows that if you’re
looking for large numbers of teen
mothers, you should look at India. While
the highest rates of teen pregnancy in
the world are in sub-Saharan Africa,
rates in some South Asian countries are
up there, too.
Deshakalyan Chowdhury/Agence France-Presse/Getty
Images
The latest UN report show s that if you’re looking for
large numbers of teen mothers, you should look at India.
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Within South Asia, India and Nepal have
the highest rates. In India, 8.6% of girls
aged between 15 and 19 are having
babies; in Nepal, that figure tops 10%.
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But because of India’s huge population,
the country probably has, in absolute
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numbers, more teen mothers than almost
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anywhere else in the world — a rough
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Yet, except for the odd voice you never
hear that much about India’s teen pregnancy epidemic, because those pregnancies are
generally happening within the confines of marriage — and that, apparently, makes it
okay. Except it’s not.
Teen pregnancy rates are an indicator of how a nation is treating its women. Most
health experts (and the rest of us) agree that teenagers aren’t grown up yet, either
physically or mentally, and most of them aren’t equipped to care both for themselves
and a child. Some studies show that Indian girls who marry young are more likely to
have malnourished children.
These are years when young girls could be — or should be — finishing an education,
and then getting married, joining the workforce, or some combination of the two,
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depending on their personal circumstances.
The figures on adolescent fertility are part of the calculations for the United Nations
gender inequality index — first introduced last year in its human development report.
Last year, India ranked 122 out of 138 countries on gender inequality; this year it
ranked 129 out of 146. More countries were included in the gender inequality index in
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2011, so it’s hard to compare the two years.
In overall development, India ranked 134 out of 187 countries this year; last year it
ranked 119 out of 169 countries.
Not coincidentally, most of the countries on the “high” human development list don’t
have very high rates of teen pregnancy. In the United States, just over 4% of teenagers
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have babies; in sexually permissive Norway, which topped the human development
index, that figure is under 1%.
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And many of the countries with the highest rates of teen pregnancy appear rather low
down the human development index. Sure, there are countries that buck the trend —
that have teen pregnancy rates similar to India’s and still report higher rates of overall
development — but there’s still a pattern here that India should pay attention to.
Will it? Looking at the gender equity numbers, Jairam Ramesh, minister for rural
development, saw a world where India was being discriminated against because of how
the UN calculates some parts of the index, according to a story in the Indian Express on
Thursday. Looking at the numbers, many of us would see a country where women are
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not just discriminated against, but actively disliked.
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Which is why it’s sort of a puzzle when Indians, particularly those who have settled
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overseas, remark upon how proud they are that they or their children haven’t
succumbed to Western mores, that they remain Indian “at heart.” That’s great for Indian
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boys, maybe — not so much for Indian girls.
keyword
Numbers related to gender development, trafficking, sex abuse, education and nutrition
rarely show that Indians are particularly good at protecting their daughters from early
sexual activity, early pregnancy, dropping out of school or even hunger — the
mistreatment just happens in a way that’s culturally palatable.
city, state, zip
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Let’s take sex, for example. It’s probably fair to say that most Indian women have their
first sexual experience with a complete stranger. If that were happening post a visit to a
bar and a few drinks — horrors. Subtract the bar and add a fire and priest — all well
and good. Relations between teenage women and older men would anywhere else be
called pedophilia or at least statutory rape. But add a fire and a priest, and well, you see
where this is going.
Yes, yes, India had a female head of government before many industrialized countries
have; the head of the nation’s ruling party is a woman, and so on and so forth. But
surely the existence of Sonia Gandhi or Pepsico CEO Indra Nooyi says as little about
the general well-being of women in India as Mukesh Ambani’s bank balance does about
India’s overall economic development.
Even families who have educated their daughters pressure them to abandon their
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professional desires, as this blogger laments.
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Think a moment on the lives of the Indian women you know, no matter the class. Think a
moment on the experiences women you know have told you about.
I think, for example, of the number of women friends who have grown up in South Asia
who recount having been molested by a family friend. I think, for example, of the
backbreaking work most Indian women do every day, without it appearing to earn them
much respect from their own families.
Village fields are dotted with women weeding and doing other agricultural work; up in the
hills, mothers and their daughters carry enormous bundles of firewood on their heads.
Some two centuries ago, Thomas Munro, a settlement officer and collector in south India
wrote a letter recounting how one farmer “cannot afford to pay his usual rent because
his wife is dead, who used to do more work than his best bullock,” which Philip Mason
quotes in his account of Indian Civil Service life. I doubt women are working any less
hard today.
At city construction sites, women hoist heavy baskets of bricks back-and-forth as men
run the machines. The people who sweep the streets in many city neighborhoods are
women. I’ve met many women, even married ones, who are the main bread-winners in
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their families, sometimes because a husband is unemployed or drinks, sometimes for
other reasons.
If there’s anything to quibble about in the human development stats, it’s surely how
much the 32.8% labor force participation rate is missing, given that it’s hard to meet an
Indian women, except perhaps the very rich, who don’t spend most of the day toiling
away.
First they toil in their parents’ homes; then they toil in their in-laws’ homes (for which
honor the new family often gets a handsome sum, even these days). And yet somehow
the collective wisdom that daughters are a burden still prevails, despite daily visual
evidence to the contrary, and becomes a justification for neglect. When that neglect
shows up in the numbers, we quibble about how they were calculated.
Think on all this and it’s hard not to think this is a country that doesn’t just dislike
women, it hates them.
Now, can someone please tell me why?
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7:53 am May 29, 2012
American wrote:
Title is absolute nonsense and so is the article.
Completely imbalanced. I could also ask why India loves its women so much and hate it men so
much?
Just check the gender biased laws. ALL are biased in favor of women. I repeat ALL. Go to
http://www.498a.org to see what is actually going on and how women are exploiting men.
Double standards are disgusting. This article (including the title itself) is a big exaggerated one
sided lie and has double standards.
So many men have commited suicide because of the gender biased laws in India (in favor of
women) and this tripti lahiri has the nerve to ask why Indians hate women?
11:12 am March 20, 2012
jeerknbn wrote:
KARACHI: Former envoy to US Husain Haqqani has agreed to appear just before the Judicial
Commission probing into the memo scam on March 26, Geo News reported.
Reiterating his innocence, Haqqani categorically told Geo News, he was not the creator in the
memo he had been accused of writing.
Haqqani sounded rather self-assured saying that the evidence created before the Commission
couldn’t be held against him, adding, the forensic report would prove Mansoor Ijaz wrong in all
respects.
Earlier, the Judicial Commission had ordered former ambassador to the US, Hussain Haqqani to
record his statement in Islamabad High Court on March 26.
To this, Hussain Haqqani had mentioned that he wanted the commission to reach a conclusion
as soon as possible and for that he could seem before the commission tomorrow to testify.
“I am the affected party who had to quit the position of an ambassador because of the memo
case, so I want the commission to obtain to some conclusion as soon as possible,” Haqqani
mentioned.
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11:29 pm March 15, 2012
poonam singh wrote:
its not india who hates women…..it is woman of india who dont know yet what she wants,,,,,she
hates herself,,,no one else
10:16 pm February 14, 2012
Preeti Again wrote:
I also want to thank Jay for his thought-provoking and insightful analysis of the psychological
roots of hatred.
I have often wondered why a certain kind of Indian man gets so outraged when he sees women
“asserting” themselves in any way.
A certain kind of Indian man gets enraged when he sees women wearing Western clothing,
talking and laughing loudly, being assertive and self-confident and generally refusing to bow and
scrape before every man who crosses their path.
When young women were attacked and beaten up for drinking in a bar in Mangalore in 2009, I
wondered what sort of a man would think it perfectly acceptable to “discipline” women in such a
brutal fashion.
Jay’s analysis helped me understand the psyche of men who think nothing of assaulting women
on the pretext of “protecting Indian culture”.
I now understand why such men harbour so much rage and hostility against women.
I have no doubt that the commentators who appear sceptical of the truth of the article are mostly
men who have never thought about what it must be like to be an Indian woman. Such men think
of women as selfless, cheerfully servile creatures who are happy to serve, obey and pamper the
men in their lives.
For such men, women don’t exist as individuals in their own right, they only exist to serve and
be of use to the men in their lives.
5:40 pm February 14, 2012
Preeti wrote:
Didn’t you know that most Indians wake up every morning and pray to their respective gods, “No
daughters please, we are Indian.”
Gender-based inequality is so great and so ubiquitious in India, that most Indians assume it to
be natural and universal.
There’s a great deal of hypocrisy in how Indian society treats women. Many Hindus will tell you
that women are worshipped as godesses in Hinduism but will, in the same breath, say the most
misogynistic things about “females”.
Many Indian men are like Ganesh Savadi, an ex-ministers who was caught watching a woman’s
gang rape on his phone, while the state legislature was in session.
He was formerly Karnataka’s minister for women and child welfare, and had publicly declared
that women ought to cover themselves and behave modestly if they wanted to prevent rape and
sexual assault.
It is not surprising that he felt no moral dilemma in watching a gang-bang while the house was in
session. After all, women were responsible for what happened to them, weren’t they?
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