Last month, the Thomson Reuters Foundation released the results of a survey which ranked India as the fourth worst place in the world for a woman to live. That's right; India is the world's largest democracy, an emerging economic superpower and is concurrently an atrocious place to live as a woman. That doesn't seem right, does it? Well, for anybody who has traveled to India or knows a little about the reality of India instead of the fantasy portrayed by Bollywood, this statistic seems less shocking.
India has rampant levels of female foeticide and infanticide, which paradoxically, seems to have gotten steadily worse since 1981, despite India's rapid economic expansion. In addition, the country has unbridled levels of sex trafficking, which is the primary reason for its inclusion on the list. However, there is more to the story than that. The root cause of the problem is a deeply ingrained notion that women are second-class citizens and are to be subservient to men, who are venerated and revered. This philosophy is prevalent across the many diverse ethnic, religious and linguistic lines in India, and thus no one group is more responsible for it than another.
I soon realized that I had seen little reporting on the results of the survey. I became curious to see how many times India had been mentioned by the Canadian media in the past month. As any good law student might, I performed a prompt LexisNexis search to see just what kind of media coverage India had been getting. Unsurprisingly, inputting "India" in the search engine generated over 900 results. I quickly skimmed through the headlines, only to find a disproportionate number of hits pertaining to the International Indian Film Academy Awards (IIFA).
I decided to refine my results. I typed in "India" and "Thomson Reuters" into the search engine, only to have it generate three results. Interesting. For my own amusement I plugged in "India," "Bollywood" and "Toronto" as the search terms and I found myself staring at 126 results. As I stared at my computer screen in disbelief, I reluctantly conceded that this was the sad state of reality. It makes sense that the Canadian media would cover the IIFA with such fervour, especially considering that South Asians are the largest visible minority group in the Greater Toronto Area. After all, Indians are a proud people who love their culture and Bollywood is an integral part of it. And yet, India has a darker side to its cultural traditions that nobody desires to address.
The fact that India is still a patriarchal, repressive society for women seems to have flown under the radar for the Canadian media. Disappointing in and of itself. What is even more upsetting is that no major Indo-Canadian organization commented on the results of the Thomson Reuters study. The silence emanating from Indo-Canadians on this issue is akin to our denial of the larger problem of culturally driven domestic violence that takes place within our community here on Canadian soil.
Under the guise of ethnocultural solidarity, Southeast Asians -- Indians included -- rarely openly speak out against culturally motivated domestic violence against women. Aruna Papp is among the few who have the courage to address the issue head-on. In her study entitled "Culturally Driven Violence against Women" she sheds light on the unique nature of domestic violence motivated by cultural factors: statistical frequency, collusion of multiple family members and the approval of the violence from members of the community, to name but a few.
Of course, I am not suggesting that the Indian community here in Canada holds an exclusive consortium over domestic violence, considering that on any given day, over 4,000 women are staying in a shelter in order to avoid spousal abuse. However, that does not detract from the issue of my people's inaction when faced with a cultural problem.
As a community, much like the rest of Canada, we chose to ignore the embarrassing and disgraceful inclusion of India in the results of the survey, so that our attention could be focused on the more important things in life: melodramatic Indian cinema and its international superstars. After all, who cares about the plight of an Indian girl being sold for sex trafficking when Ontario Premier, Dalton McGuinty, gets to walk down the green carpet with Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan? Certainly not Canadians, Indian or otherwise.
Follow Supriya Dwivedi on Twitter: www.twitter.com/supriyadwivedi
J. L. Morin: Modern-Day Slavery 101: Losing Control All over the World
Sex Trafficking in India - NYTimes.com
Global Health Council - Sex Trafficking and HIV in India and South ...
YouTube - VIDEO - India's sex trafficking court focuses on victims
Forced labour, 'child sex tours': how slavery thrives in India
The only thing I like about China is the fact they love their country and don't want it changed.
And why would they?
as someone who was raised sikh (i am now an atheist), i find that indians often have a tendency to blame india's problem on one group so as to absolve their own internal group from any responsibility.
nobody is suggesting that ALL of india is backwards in this respect or that ALL indians subscribe to this view, but the fact remains that the indians who do treat women as 2nd class citizens come from all walks of indian life. and to say otherwise is to ignore the gravity of the situation and committing a great disservice to india and its women.
where are all the indian people that value gender equality? instead, all the indians on this comment board seem to be defending their own patriarchal culture.
I will state once again, bc you didn't understand the first 2 times;
Just bc a crime is the same in a LEGAL, PHYSICAL sense, does NOT make the motivations behind the crime the same, and this is the issue being discussed.
Therefore, NOT all violence is the 'same'. Why is this so hard for you to understand?
Making an amendment to include honour killings as a seperate offence will not only do nothing to solve honour killings from happening, but will only increase the amount of plea bargains and, therefore, lessen the amount of time a criminal would likely spend in jail.
Therefore, it would serve no legal benefit to amend something where all the characterisations of a crime are already included in the legal definition of 'murder'.
Just bc an author highlighted a prevalent inssue that's being ignored by the mainstream media, does not make her a "self hating Indian" or 'singling out an ethnic community'. Just bc violence is occurring elsewhere, does not mean we ignore the violence occurring within a certain community, and the cultrual reasons WHY it is occurring.
We must delve deeper into the cultural, psychological, legal and political motivations behind such acts of violence, if we wish to eradicate them in the future.
You need to seriously take a crash course in humanities, sociology, psychology, anything to educate yourself from making such ignorant and unfounded statements in the future.
HONOR KILLING SHOULD GET YOU THE DEATH PENALTY IN CANADA.
1. yes, the IIFA were more advertised, and took place AFTER the results of the survey were released, that's the point the author is trying to make; the fact that bollywood film awards took precedence in the canadian media. Also, the author used a LexisNexis search, not a google search. LexisNexis is a legal/media search engine and does not exclude results in the same manner.
2. the state of women in india has worsened in taking into account the very skewed sex ratio. the author hyperlinked an article to the economist which you clearly failed to read.
3. yes, it does indeed have female dieties, so what? girls who are sold into sex slavery, baby girls are killed, female fetuses are aborted and female toddlers are forced to undergo gender reassignment surgery.
4. i'm from toronto, and i have consistently heard indians referred to as south east asians, but perhaps you are right, even though it has no bearing on the merits of the article.
to summarize, you seem to be a middle aged indian man who has a problem with a young, smart indian girl who knows how to speak her mind and look at her culture critically. A country that is as inclusive as Canada should promote its values, such as gender equality. Perhaps you should look at the defensive tone of your arguments and reassess what it is that you are defending.
her last post was in favour of multicultarism and now she is not.
which is it?
both articles are promoting equality. so i don't see how one cancels the other out. maybe that's just me.
EVERY COUNTRY IN THE FREE WORLD HAS SAID HOW LOUSY MULTI-CULTI IS.
Read the news.
Read what the Netherlands did a few weeks ago.
MULTI-CULTI IS DEAD.
how can india be a worse place to live than iran?
also- i'm not sure what this has to do with the article, if there is a correction to be made you should notify huffingtonpost, not put it in the comment section.
South Asia, on the other hand, is the southern region of the Asian continent, which comprises the sub-Himalayan countries and, for some authorities, also includes the adjoining countries to the west and the east. Topographically, it is dominated by the Indian Plate, which rises above sea level as the Indian subcontinent south of the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush. South Asia is surrounded (clockwise, from west) by Western Asia, Central Asia, Eastern Asia, Southeastern Asia and the Indian Ocean.
According to the United Nations geographical region classification, Southern Asia comprises the countries of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Maldives, Afghanistan, Iran and Sri Lanka. By other definitions and interpretations, Myanmar and Tibet are also sometimes included in the region of South Asia.
A racially provoked gang death in LA, a teen shooting up a school, or an indian child beat to death because of her gender, are all acts of violence that were all motivated by different reasons.
Therefore,in order to prevent such acts of violence from occurring, it is imperative to understand the reasons behind WHY they are occurring and treat it with a different a different mindset.
In this case, women in India continue to be greatly persecuted against, and are viewed as lesser than their male counterparts. They are being killed from birth bc they are a 'burden' to society. These killings are motivated by an archaic cultural ideology that women have zero worth and should be 'rid' of.
Hence 'culturally motivated violence'.