Women in India need no enemies

I have on more than one occasion maintained that a society that cannot protect its children and care for its women has no right to survive. I categorically place the Indian society, including all the smaller societies that make it, into this category.

The fact that India is one of the world's unfriendliest and disrespectful place for women and children need not be repeated again and again to prove that its true. It is true but time and again, there will be reports published in the national and international media which will tell us just how backward we are as a society.

So when a poll by Thomson Reuters Foundation says that India is one of the world's most unsafe places for women given its track record of female infanticide, female foeticide and human trafficking, I think we as a shitty, tabloidical, shallow society that we have become, should pause, think nothing of it and move on, because that is just how important this issue seems to be for us. Better yet, let us watch television where we will be able to see half naked women gyrating to crass music and lip-syncing to absolutely crass lyrics. Yes, I think that would be an apt tribute to this report. Then we can tell the rest of the world that look, our women are so free, how can you say such a thing?!

In this poll, carried out by TrustLaw, the legal news service arm of the trust asked 213 gender experts from all over the world to rank countries based on their perception of danger and the risks posed to women on these six criteria - health threats, sexual violence, non-sexual violence, cultural and religious factors, lack of access to resources and trafficking.

If I look at this list, women fall behind on each and every one, including the cultural and religious factors. In a country where when a monkey of a human being misbehaves with a girl in public, its the girl who is reprimanded for maybe wearing revealing clothing, or for taking that path, or even giving hints to the animal, and the animal just goes on with his daily life of being a nobody.

So this is the society that we live in, this is the society that turns a blind eye to injustice, or this is a society that just doesn't say maybe there is something wrong if we allow our women and children to be exploited and suppressed habitually and systematically.

India's record in human trafficking as always been atrocious, and I am simply unable to comprehend how it is so lucrative that all the politicians and policemen look the other way (while making money on the side). In other words, this is a country ruled and administered by pimps.

According to the TrustLaw website:

India ranked fourth primarily due to female foeticide, infanticide and human trafficking.

In 2009, India's then-Home Secretary Madhukar Gupta estimated that 100 million people, mostly women and girls, were involved in trafficking in India that year.

"The practice is common but lucrative so it goes untouched by government and police," said Cristi Hegranes, founder of the Global Press institute, which trains women in developing countries to be journalists.

India's Central Bureau of Investigation estimated that in 2009 about 90 percent of trafficking took place within the country and that there were some 3 million prostitutes, of which about 40 percent were children.

In addition to sex slavery, other forms of trafficking include forced labour and forced marriage, according to a U.S. State Department report on trafficking in 2010. The report also found slow progress in criminal prosecutions of traffickers.

Up to 50 million girls are thought to be "missing" over the past century due to female infanticide and foeticide, the U.N. Population Fund says.

Some experts said the world's largest democracy was relatively forthcoming about describing its problems, possibly casting it in a darker light than if other countries were equally transparent about trafficking.

Is it possible to protect all of a billion people? If we take crime statistics, is it acceptable to hide behind the mask of numbers, saying that the number of rapes is very small when compared to the total percentage of the population, or some other ridiculous comment like that? Is it acceptable to blame women for wearing provocative clothing or going out of their homes and thus inviting the attention of the animals roaming outside? These all exist in a society because the society itself is slow in accepting, or living, the modern elements that one would think any modern society is based in - the freedom of the individual, respect and equality for all races and genders and creeds, or respect for life itself. Many people blame our backwardness on most of these modern parameters, including one as simple as basic etiquette, on our past, saying we are such an old society that we will take time to change. Till we can make our social development a priority at the societal and governmental level, no amount of economic development will be able to bring genuine happiness and growth to our country.