Why does India treat its women so badly?
People have
called her Braveheart, Fearless and India's Daughter, among other
things, and sent up a billion prayers for a speedy recovery.
When the unidentified woman died in a Singapore hospital early on
Saturday, the victim of a savage rape on a moving bus in the capital,
Delhi, it was time again, many said, to ask: why does India treat its
women so badly?
Female foetuses are aborted and baby girls killed after birth,
leading to an an appallingly skewed sex ratio. Many of those who survive
face discrimination, prejudice, violence and neglect all their lives,
as single or married women.
TrustLaw, a news service run by Thomson Reuters, has ranked India as the worst country in which to be a woman.
This in the country where the leader of the ruling party, the speaker
of the lower house of parliament, at least three chief ministers, and a
number of sports and business icons are women.
It is also a country where a generation of newly empowered young women are going out to work in larger numbers than ever before.
But crimes against women are rising too.
With more than 24,000 reported cases in 2011, rape registered a 9.2%
rise over the previous year. More than half (54.7%) of the victims were
aged between 18 and 30.
Most disturbingly, according to police records, the offenders were
known to their victims in more than 94% of the cases. Neighbours
accounted for a third of the offenders, while parents and other
relatives were also involved. Delhi accounted for over 17% of the total
number of rape cases in the country.
And it is not rape alone. Police records from 2011 show kidnappings
and abductions of women were up 19.4%, women being killed in disputes
over dowry payments by 2.7%, torture by 5.4%, molestation by 5.8% and
trafficking by an alarming 122% over the previous year.
The Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has estimated that more
than 100m women are "missing" worldwide - women who would have been
around had they received similar healthcare, medicine and nutrition as
men.
New research by economists Siwan Anderson and Debraj Ray estimates
that in India, more than 2m women are missing in a given year.
The economists found that roughly 12% of the missing women disappear
at birth, 25% die in childhood, 18% at the reproductive ages, and 45% at
older ages.
They found that women died more from "injuries" in a given year than
while giving birth - injuries, they say, "appear to be indicator of
violence against women".
Deaths from fire-related incidents, they say, is a major cause - each
year more than 100,000 women are killed by fires in India. The
researchers say many cases could be linked to demands over a dowry
leading to women being set on fire. Research also found a large number
of women died of heart diseases.
These findings point to life-long neglect of women in India. It also
proves that a strong preference for sons over daughters - leading to sex
selective abortions - is just part of the story.
Clearly, many Indian women face threats to life at every stage -
violence, inadequate healthcare, inequality, neglect, bad diet, lack of
attention to personal health and well-being.
Analysts say deep-rooted changes in social attitudes are needed to
make India's women more accepted and secure. There is deeply entrenched
patriarchy and widespread misogyny in vast swathes of the country,
especially in the north. And the state has been found wanting in its
protection of women.
Angry citizens believe that politicians, including Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh, are being disingenuous when they promise to toughen laws
and speed up the prosecution of rapists and perpetrators of crime
against women.
How else, they ask, can political parties in the last five years have
fielded candidates for state elections that included 27 candidates who
declared they had been charged with rape?
How, they say, can politicians be believed when there are six elected state legislators who have charges of rape against them?
But the renewed protests in Delhi after the woman's death hold out
some hope. Has her death come as an inflexion point in India's history,
which will force the government to enact tougher laws and people to
begin seriously thinking about the neglect of women?
It's early days yet, but one hopes these are the first stirrings of change.
-BBC