Women: The moral policing

Synopsis: The question the assaulted women ask is “whom do we turn to?”


Asian women have been chained to tradition over centuries. Subservience to male influences and monogamous marriages is the accepted practice.

Increasing domination

Education and employment, that many women choose today, alter gender equations of the past. But, the trend in male responses to women’s progressiveness in the 21st century appears to be in increasing their domination and control.

In many communities, men assume moral policing of women’s behaviour, their clothing, and their freedoms of choice. Elsewhere they are the targets of war.

Fate of femaleness

In Afghanistan, young girls and women studying or teaching in schools, or appearing in public without the veil, are being subjected to acid attacks. In Pakistan’s Swat region, governance agreements are forged with the Taliban. In war-torn African countries, eighty percent of refugees are women and children, many of them the products of rape.

Governments and world leaders issue condemnations. But in nations challenged on many fronts, the social development of women doesn’t get high priority.

Immigrant women are hardly better off. The founder of a ‘positive’ Muslim TV channel in USA beheaded his wife for lodging complaints of domestic violence. The man has been charged with second-degree murder, perhaps only because of the location of the crime.

Indian culture?

In democratic India, the trend of forcing subservience seems to be catching on. In January 2009, a few dozen activists of Sri Ram Sena, a little known right-wing outfit, barged into a pub in Mangalore a city in the southern state of Karnataka and physically assaulted the patrons, young women and men, for behaviours anti ‘Indian culture’.

Further incidents have occurred of school or college-going boys and girls being hauled off public transport buses and harassed for talking or being together – especially if they belong to different communities.


No complaints

The young groups being beaten in public are intimidated. A teenaged girl reportedly committed suicide over such a humiliation.

None of the girls molested in Mangalore’s pubs filed police complaints against their attackers. They say policemen in the vicinity of the pubs had simply looked on during the incidents. Their question is “whom do we turn to?”

Initially, there was little reaction by the state’s police and administrative authorities. Media attention also encouraged the group’s leader to dismiss the episode as a "small thing" on national TV. He warned the public that unmarried couples caught celebrating Valentine’s Day would be forcibly wed.

Formal protests

But elsewhere in India, there have been sharp reactions from men and women, prominently carried in print, channel and electronic media. Public protests have mobilized.

The pub incidents even sparked rows between Centre and state. Fiery Union Minister for Women and Child Development, Renuka Chowdhury decried the (Hindu) “Talibanization”. The remarks irked the Mayor of the city, who decided to move court against her for inflammatory statements.

More diplomatically, Shabnam Hashmi, a member of the National Integration Council, Ministry of Home Affairs, submitted a memorandum to the state’s Governor, and met the state’s Police Commissioner to express her anguish and distress.

Cont’d 2...The power of pink