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Dear Patriarchal Indian Society
No other civilized society treats its women they way you have been treating us since centuries. While elsewhere, women are nurtured, protected and respected, we are violated, tortured and murdered. Add to that the disgust of a long and painful process trying to get justice. There also, we invariably see you adding weight to the criminal’s side of the scale of justice. Justice is not delayed, but denied.
Men rape and then you blame the victim for provoking an animal who is mentally unstable. You justify your point by proving that the victim deserved to be raped because she wasn’t wearing conservative Indian clothing, or was out during the night, or was drunk. Sometimes you blame it on chowmein , the marital age of women, cellphones or co-education. You even go to the extent of saying that we ask for it. That is a whole lot of creative ideas, I must say. You even fail to recognize the crime, when committed inside a wedlock. Now, that I must say, is taking the gender-bias to a whole new level.You’re like an obsessive, over-protective mother to your sons and a stepmother to your daughters. They commit crimes, and we suffer because you’re a Gandhari who can’t see the culprit in her son. Duryodhan was wrong and he suffered even though he had an entire empire protecting him. A modern day Mahabharata is becoming the need of the hour. But, this time we know real men would stand up with us, unlike the Pandavas. Justify the crime as much as you want but it would still be a crime.
People torture daughter-in-laws for dowry and you comfortably ignore, as if sucking immense pleasure out of it. You say you can’t interfere in a family matter. You chose to act un-informed and silently pray to loot truckloads of money the day your sons get married. You blame the victim again for not supporting the family as her so called family members call her names and burn her. Enough of participating actively in a crime or watching it silently. Really.
Safety of women is a huge issue today. We have made a hue and cry about it, and rightly so. It took centuries to awaken our rulers. This was never an election-agenda, so no one really bothered about it. You knew that vote-banks won’t be overflowing with this kind of a manifesto. A girl child isn’t even safe in her mother’s womb because you love your sons more than daughters. You taught people to discriminate between their own children. You taught them to educate the sons, but employ the daughters in household chores. You taught the sons that they are royalty, shoveling the daughters miles aside. You taught them to pamper a male-child and murder a female one. No wonder half of Indian men feel they are a blessing to women. No wonder they have no respect for women. No wonder they consider women as objects of sex or child bearing machines.
You feel it is okay to suppress women. You pretend to close your eyes when you see a man beating his wife. You again say, it is a family affair. Let me enlighten you that violence of any kind( whether inside closed-doors or out in the open) is not a family affair but a crime in the eyes of our Constitution. Not reporting a crime is a crime too. Read between the lines and you’ll get what I mean.
It hurts you in the heart when women of today question you as an institution. So you come up with new ideas to try to tame her independence. Not once do you try to re-consider your age old, ridiculous beliefs.Instead, you try to reinforce them on women.Try as much as you want, but your patriarchal ways are not going to survive for long. I am sure all the real men are also on our side, this time. The war has begun…
Good-Luck! May the best side win.
Your violated-tortured-murdered daughter.
