http://www.japantimes.co.jp/print/eo20130107rt.html
Can a woman's death spur a nation to end its violence against a gender?
By RAMESH THAKUR
CANBERRA - Never have I felt so ashamed to be from India nor so
despairing of its future.
The poor young woman, brutally assaulted by a pack of thugs, not
named in order to protect the family's privacy, is dead, leaving
behind a grieving family and a billion broken hearts. As she lies in
a sleep beyond disturbing, will the nation atone by lifting the
shroud of sexual violence from the body politic?
Mahatma Gandhi had promised that come independence, the tears would
be wiped from every Indian eye. Good thing he was a Hindu and
cremated, else he would surely have been spinning in his grave at the
serial desecrations of the temples-in-the-air he constructed.
The gendered violence inflicted on India's women is structural and
requires systemic solutions. Sri Lanka's Radhika Commaraswamy wrote
in 2005 about South Asian women's "vulnerability to violence at every
stage of their life cycle": from sex selective abortion before birth
and female infanticide at or just after birth, to incest,
trafficking, rape and dowry deaths.
The same year, the U.N. Development Program reported that among
Indian children aged 1 to 5, girls are 50 percent more likely to die
than boys. Using the methodology of excess deaths, economists
calculate that, denied the same level of food, health and medical
care as men, altogether 2 million women are discriminated to death
every year in India.
When I read the sad news, there was a collection of related stories
on the website of The Hindu: "Six years after gang rape, Sukma women
give up on justice"; "In Chhattisgarh, punishment for rape is jobs in
police force"; "Down the corridor from gang-rape victims ward, an
acid-attack victim contemplates bleak future."
Behind every such story is an individual victim and highly specific
causes for each act of brutality. In response to the wave of
revulsion that has shook the country, the president, prime minister
and others have promised swift justice. Based on past, the rage will
pass. It will become yesterday's story and fade from public memory,
the media will move on to new scandals, and the politicians - female
and male - will return to enriching themselves while mouthing slogans
of social justice.
Reflecting prevailing social callousness, the police and politicians
competed in the race to the bottom in public insensitivity and tone
deafness. Delhi's police commissioner equated women being raped to
men having their pockets picked.
The president's son dismissed the protesters as a "dented and painted
crowd" (the phrase Indian panel beaters use to describe their work on
old car bodies).
West Bengal's woman chief minister has implemented a policy of
financial compensation for rape victims. A Marxist state legislator
asked what her "fee" was for getting raped.
Manmohan Singh, prime minister since 2004, has presided over India's
locust years. He has neither the ticker to assert himself nor the
self-respect and dignity to resign. While he is in office, power lies
in the hands of the lofty first family. Singh has responsibility
without power. Sonia and Rahul Gandhi have the power but disclaim
responsibility. No one is ever held accountable for governmental
misdeeds.
Singh has presided over the biggest collection of corruption scandals
in India's history. He was not on the scene during the terrorist
siege of Mumbai in 2008 and took over a week to speak to the
country's rising anger at the brutal pack rape in Delhi.
No politician suffered lasting damage to the grossly insensitive
comments in Mumbai, and none is likely to now in a regime where
loyalty is everything, incompetence is quickly forgiven (the present
home minister was promoted to the post just as India suffered its
worst-ever power outage under his watch), and brazenness knows no
bounds.
The victim was apparently airlifted to Singapore not for medical but
for political reasons, as authorities feared the fury of the mob if
she were to die in Delhi.
The default mode of governance to any problem is makeshift solutions.
As law and order and the criminal justice systems creak with
dysfunctional, with cases entangled in courts for decades, special
courts are created to fast-track serious cases involving heinous
crimes. On Christmas Day, the western state of Maharashtra announced
25 special courts will be created for tackling crimes against women.
I grew up in the state of Bihar as road and rail bridges built by the
British crumbled. Instead of repairs and upgrades, massive speed
bumps were put in place to slow traffic and lower the strain on the
bridges. The education and employment deficits are not corrected;
quotas are set aside for the few to ensure that the previously
advantaged are leveled down.
If seats are reserved for women in India's legislatures, they will
mostly be commandeered for the wives, daughters and daughters-in-law
of the present leaders.
India's democracy will remain deeply flawed and unresponsive to
people's aspirations so long as political parties are family fiefdoms
(cue Rahul Gandhi, president's son and many more).
The youth should unite and agitate against all candidates and any
party suggesting such pathology. Even more, they should publicize
candidates with criminal records and sponsoring parties. Large
numbers of today's members of Parliament have pending charges of
murder, rape and armed gang robbery. The brutal rape and murder of
young women in the nation's capital is not an aberration but
symptomatic of the deeper malaise.
If change is going to come to India, it will not be from the present
crop of politicians. The young and the outraged must up-shift from
the politics of street protests to ballot boxes. They have the
numbers. Unlike their Arab counterparts, they do not have to fight to
win democratic rights.
They do have to become actively engaged, break the stranglehold of
self-serving and self-perpetuating dynasties and time-servers who
have run out of time and should be run out of office. Turn public
outrage into mass political movements. Form new parties. Run for
office. Network across all big cities.
Instead of taking the law into their own hands on the streets of
Delhi, the millions of protesters must take back ownership of
national politics in the Parliament of India.
Ramesh Thakur is director of the Center for Nuclear Nonproliferation
and Disarmament, Australian National University.
The Japan Times: Monday, Jan. 7, 2013
_______________________________________________
Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list
Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org
http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel
