India Dishonoured: Behind a nation's war on women (Kindle Single) (Guardian Shorts) by Hundal Sunny

Author:Hundal, Sunny [Hundal, Sunny]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Guardian Books
Published: 2013-05-07T00:00:00+00:00

1‘Women and right-wing movements: Indian experiences’ – Sarkar and Butalia, 1995.

2This is depicted very well in the Indian film Khamosh Pani / Silent Waters (2003).

3Her name has been changed to protect her identity.

4The left cannot remain silent over ‘honour killings’, New Statesman, 2012

5Haryana khap blames consumption of chowmein for rapes, Times of India, October 2012

5.

The northern states of Haryana and Punjab, along with the neighbouring city of New Delhi, are ground zero for India’s male problem. In September 2011, Delhi Police stumbled upon a trafficking racket in Haryana after they found a girl who was reported missing in neighbouring Delhi. She had been lured by a man to his house after she lost her way. The police said she was kidnapped and then sold to a farmer for Rs 70,000 ($1305, £840). Unusually, this was not a straightforward case of kidnapping and rape; the farmer had taken the girl to a local temple where they were forcibly ‘married’. A police officer later told the press that he had wanted a wife to do the household chores and fulfil his sexual needs.

The relatively prosperous north is where the dystopian vision of Matrubhoomi is most rapidly becoming a reality. While the sex ratio for children under seven has declined to 914 girls for every 1000 boys across the country, Haryana, Punjab and New Delhi were at the bottom of the league with 830, 846 and 866 girls respectively.1 The impact this disparity has on a broader level is a massive problem but rarely explored.

There are around 7.1 million fewer girls than boys under the age of six across India according to the latest Census. A decade ago the gap was 6 million girls while it was 4.2 million girls in 1991. Since the sex-selection boom took place in the 1980s, a large chunk of those men are now of marriageable age and unable to find a partner.

Added to this problem are factors such as urbanisation – the economic reforms of the 90s enticed a large number of young, unmarried men to big cities to look for jobs. Many of these men know little about interacting with the opposite sex since they come from more conservative village environments. Sociologists say young unattached males are more likely than others to congregate in groups and as a result, become more willing to engage in unusual risky behaviour. This phenomenon is frequently described as ‘risky shift’ or ‘group polarisation’ – the tendency to make more extreme decisions in a group as opposed to those made alone.

In 2005, two Harvard academics, Professor Valerie Hudson and Andrea Boer, wrote in an academic paper2 that such sex imbalances could create dangerous conditions. Societies where the sex ratio is imbalanced will face increasing social problems such as increased crime rates, drug use, alcoholism, smuggling, trafficking, and prostitution. They said. “We are also likely to see the development of a cattle market for women, not only domestically but also internationally, with women not only kidnapped within the country, but also trafficked from border nations.

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