Gender: Are Indian women children of a lesser God?

After a cab driver in Bengaluru forced a woman passenger to strip, Minister for Women and Child Development Maneka Gandhi wrote to Union Nitish Gadkari to enforce a safety protocol to protect women. Earlier in May, the Union Home Ministry set up a new division to address ‘comprehensively’ issues related to women safety. Following the brutal rape and murder of a young woman in a bus way back in December, 2012, the laws have become more stringent. Child rapists can now be given the death sentence. A Nirbhaya Fund was created to improve women’s safety, CCTV were installed in buses and other modes of public transport even as attempts continue to be made to have mobile phones installed with panic buttons.

But installing CCTV in buses has benefited suppliers more than women. Even Maneka Gandhi went on record to say that CCTV cameras were no solution and had failed to prevent molestation of women in crowded buses. “Nobody rapes women in front of a fixed CCTV camera; secondly, the footage would not last three days and finally horrible things like groping etc. are rarely spotted by the cameras,” she said. She was reacting to criticism of the government’s failure to use the Nirbhaya Fund, which was created with an initial corpus of ₹1000 crore by the UPA Government.

A total sum of ₹3,100 crore has been set aside for the fund between 2013 and 2017 even as an additional ₹500 crore was budgeted for 2017-18. Barely 30% of the fund, however, has been utilised and an audit is yet to be done to determine how useful the expenditure has been. In an acknowledgment of the rising incidence of sexual harassment in workplaces, the ministry also launched an online complaint management system christened ‘Sexual Harassment Electronic-Box (SHe-box).

When the technology was rolled out in Delhi, reported Quartz, the lines were jammed and the system crashed after people pressed the button en masse to test the device. Equipping the ladies’ compartments in Mumbai’s local trains also didn’t work with over a thousand false alarms recorded every month. Similarly, media reports said that out of 3000 notifications sent to Delhi Police through its emergency app ‘Himmat’, only 45 had turned out to be genuine.

But while several surveys and studies conducted in India point to the fact that women are unsafe, the Reuters Foundation report that declared India to be the most dangerous country for women touched a raw nerve. The WCD ministry trashed the report and claimed that incidence of child marriages had dropped steeply; that reports of marriage in the age group of 0-9 years had become ‘Nil’ and that the percentage of women in the age group of 15-19 who are already either pregnant or have become mothers has also dropped from 16% in 2005-06 to 7.9% in 2015-16.

But while half-hearted or cosmetic measures continue to be taken to enhance women’s safety, there are other indices which show just how far Indian women have to go to secure their rightful place in a male-dominated society. Monique Villa, Chief Executive Officer of Thomson Reuters Foundation, was quoted by Indiaspend as saying, “When only 10% of women in India own land compared to 20% globally, femicide rates are the highest in the world, there are 37 million more men than women in the Indian population, and 27% girls are married before the age of 18 – also the highest rate in the world- you begin to understand the reality in India.” In rural India, 67% of girls who are graduates do not work. In towns and cities, 68.3% of women who graduate don’t have paid jobs, said a 2015 report by the United Nations Development Programme.

In the first four months of 2017 following Demonetisation of 86% of the currency reported Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), an independent think-tank, jobs for men increased by 0.9 million but 2.4 million women fell off the employment map. Women clearly suffer more whenever employment opportunities dry up, the study indicated.

Educated women, studies show, prefer to work closer home because of considerations of safety. Public transport are either too expensive or considered too unsafe. Walking is preferred by women and if they do not return home by 9 pm, panic bells are pressed even in the capital city of Delhi, surveys show. In August last year Indiaspend reported that if all the women who quit their jobs between 2004-05 and 2012 were to live in the same city and without men, it would be the third most populated city in the world after Shanghai and Beijing and the population would be 19.6 million. Women are not only not working, those who work seem to be quitting at regular intervals.

Affluent, privileged and influential women in India are facing a different kind of threat, especially if they are active on social media and swim against the tide. Remarkably, it required the intervention of the country’s Home Minister Rajnath Singh before Mumbai Police lodged an FIR against unknown persons who had threatened to rape the 10-yearold daughter Congress spokesperson Priyanka Chaturvedi.

Chaturvedi received the explicit threat on Twitter in which the user imperiously asks her to send him her daughter who, he declares, he would rape. Neither Twitter nor Mumbai Police took any action even after Chaturvedi raised the alarm. The Home Minister’s direction finally moved the police to lodge an FIR. The culprit, however, is yet to be arrested.

Even more alarmingly, Union minister of External Affairs Sushma Swaraj received death threats on Twitter amidst hate-filled messages following a row over her direction to issue passports to an inter-faith couple in Lucknow. While the silence of the Prime Minister and his cabinet colleagues were finally broken by at least two of the ‘men’ in the ministry, Rajnath Singh and Nitin Gadkari, condemning the threats, no legal action was taken against the culprits.

And when Sushma Swaraj initiated a Twitter poll on whether she really deserved to be trolled, a whopping 53,000 respondents appeared to justify it. None of the women colleagues of Ms Swaraj uttered a word, the MEA told the media that the issue was being handled ‘personally’ by the minister and there the controversy rests.