British professor Luo Siyi once made this statement: If China allows Indian immigration, I can guarantee that hundreds of millions of Indian women will immediately cross the Himalayas and migrate to China. Of course, Luo Siyi did not say this to praise China, but because the status of women in India is so low, so low that if there is a chance to escape, they must do their best to leave India.
How low is the status of women in India? It can be said that their low status is not only reflected in one thing, but in almost all aspects, and the entire Indian society has a shadow of discrimination against women, and the contempt for women has been engraved in their bones.
For example, in 2012, in New Delhi, India, there was a female student named Jyoti who studied medicine at Delhi University. She and her boyfriend were about to go back to school after watching a movie at night, but they were tricked into getting on a black bus without a business license.
India's "black bus" can be categorized as a blurred strip of legal and social norms. Although on the face of it, these black market public transport is explicitly prohibited, in fact they exist widely and widely. There are many people who choose to use this illegal mode of transportation because they are looking for low transportation costs or because they are deceived by black-market bus solicitors. In addition, in some places, regular public transport lines are not available, forcing some people to resort to black market buses. However, this illegal mode of transport has thus become a breeding ground for crime.
Usually, it only takes ten minutes by bus to reach your destination. However, Jyoti and her boyfriend's experience was different. They had been on a black market bus for more than twenty minutes, only to find themselves on a road that became increasingly unfamiliar. Faced with this situation, they hurriedly asked to get out of the car, but the driver ignored it. On the bus, five men heard their request to get out of the bus and stood up and pounced on Jyoti and her boyfriend.
Jyoty and her boyfriend tried to resist, but they were quickly subdued by five burly thugs. The five thugs first attacked Jyoti's boyfriend, knocked him unconscious and detained him, and then took turns sexually assaulting Jyoti with extreme cruelty. The heinous abuse lasted more than an hour, and the perpetrators resorted to extreme methods, resulting in Jyoti being severely injured, even to her intestines.
However, during this long hour, the driver seemed to be unconcerned about everything that happened and continued to drive as if nothing had happened. It wasn't until the five thugs finally felt content that they joined forces with the driver to throw Joti and her boyfriend out of the car and carefully clean up the traces inside the car. What's even more frightening is that the driver even tried to run the vehicle directly over Joti's body, fortunately, Joti's boyfriend woke up in time and used his last strength to drag Joti away from the dangerous place, and Jyoti survived.
Later, a kind passer-by passed by, found the dying Jyoti and her boyfriend, and immediately called the emergency number. Both were then taken to hospital for treatment. After resuscitation, Jyoti's boyfriend managed to get out of danger, but unfortunately, Jyoti eventually died and became the victim of the tragedy.
The incident shocked the entire Indian society and six criminals, including the driver, were quickly arrested. What is even more shocking, however, is that these criminals have no remorse for their evil deeds, convinced that they have done nothing wrong and should not be punished.
They hold an extreme, inappropriate view that their behavior is a normal reaction in male and female interactions. One of the offenders even said: "If she is really a girl from a good family, she should not go out at night to hang out." "If she hadn't resisted, we might have had a lighter approach to her, and she wouldn't have died." "In these kinds of events, women take on greater responsibility. ”
Instead of regretting it, these people believe that the media has intervened redundantly to over-hold them accountable, in contrast to criminals who generally show remorse after arrest. The lawyers who defended them were even more furious, and Mr. Singh even publicly stated that Joti had had premarital sex and that she deserved it. He even boldly said: "If my daughter had premarital sex and went out shopping at night, I would burn her alive, and all parents should behave." ”
When faced with such a serious crime, Indian courts initially seem intent on adopting lenient sentences, which is in line with the norm in the Indian judicial system when dealing with similar cases. However, in the face of large-scale demonstrations by women in India, demonstrations against sexual violence in various places, and escalating public pressure, the court had to change its position and eventually sentenced five of the criminals to death. Since one of the offenders was a minor, he was exempt from the death penalty.
The incident took place in New Delhi, the capital of India, and it is shocking that such a horrific case has taken place even in such a large city. This raises concerns that similar incidents of sexual violence may become more frequent in large parts of India, especially where law enforcement and legal control are relatively weak. Jyoti enjoys a relatively high status among Indian women, yet she still suffers such severe abuse. This raises concerns about the status of ordinary women in India, while also shedding light on widespread gender inequality in Indian society.
When faced with such a horrific case, it is shocking that this is not a pre-planned criminal gang, and the six criminals were not originally a conspiratorial team. They come from a variety of career backgrounds, including bus drivers, bus cleaners, fruit sellers, fitness instructors, and even underage students. However, these people did not agree in advance, but because a woman got into the car, they immediately joined forces to commit violence against her. This highlights how frequent such incidents are in India that sexual assault seems to be an unspoken consensus.
This reveals that these criminals never subconsciously see women as human beings, but only as objects of satisfying desires. As these criminals say in their self-defense, they believe that these women are only going out to satisfy their desires. This highlights the low status of women in India and reflects the gender inequality that prevails in Indian society.
Indeed, the "New Delhi Black Bus Case" is not an isolated incident, and similar cases are very frequent in India. Cases of sexual violence that have been reported alone occur almost every 15 minutes, while unreported cases are more common. However, the length of time in such cases in India is very long, and only a small percentage (about 26 per cent) have been convicted of a crime in the end.
And even in the very few cases that were found guilty, most were only convicted of misdemeanors, with sentences ranging from two or three years to six or seven years. Only after full pressure from Indian society did the court have to sentence the criminal to death. It is also one of the very few cases of sexual violence in India where the death penalty is finally imposed.
These cases of sexual violence reflect India's deep-rooted culture of discrimination against women. In India, even when cases of sexual violence have been tried, people are generally more inclined to support men than women.
Specifically, when a woman is subjected to sexual violence, the man who committed the violence against her is often not held accountable, but instead the woman is condemned and blamed on the woman. As previously alleged by criminals, they believe that factors such as women's revealing clothing and going out at night contributed to sexual violence. They believe that women inspire the "desire" of these criminals to commit violence, and therefore women should bear the primary responsibility in incidents of sexual violence. This absurd claim has gained a certain market in India.
Even when women don't make any "mistakes," people still blame them. If a woman experiences sexual violence, her family members may not pursue punishment for the abuser, but see it as a disgrace to the woman. Once cases of sexual violence are reported, women may be afraid to go out because they feel "stigmatized." To make matters worse, some families even ask women to marry their abusers after they have been subjected to sexual violence, believing that this is the best way to hold the abuser "accountable" and remove the "stigma."
Of course, the low status of women in India is not limited to gender-based violence. In India, women are often seen as subordinate to men, and female members of the family are often required to follow a concept similar to the ancient Chinese concept of "three obedience and four virtues", that is, obey the father before marrying, obey the husband after marriage, and obey the son after the husband's death. Although this backward concept has been largely eliminated in China, there is still a market in India. This highlights the pervasive gender inequality in Indian society that requires deeper social change to address.
In India, some believe that women should be completely subordinate to men's arrangements in the family. This perception has led to a peculiar practice known as "honor killing", in which female family members who have lost their "honor" are killed.
For example, when some girls are sexually assaulted, their family members not only do not seek justice for them, but choose to kill them because they believe they have lost the "honor" of the family. Some girls may also be killed for refusing to submit to marriages arranged by their families. Some girls are even brutally killed by their relatives just because they are dressed more revealingly. In such "honour killings" cases, courts tend to reduce or revoke the sentence for the murderer, subjecting the murderer to a lighter punishment.
The reason for this phenomenon is that many Indians have a family concept that women are not members of the family, but only a property of the family. Therefore, femicide does not seem to them to be homicide, but merely a "disposition" of family property. They believe that women will eventually marry and therefore are not worth nurturing and cherishing. This has also led to a much higher illiteracy rate among women in India than among men.
In some rural areas of India, the horrific practice of drowning female babies still exists. Some people, after discovering that the family is welcoming a girl, may secretly act to eliminate the baby girl, and the surrounding neighbors often provide them with protection, and few will report the crime because they may have done something similar themselves. In cities, although people are afraid to publicly drown female infants, they often go to hospitals secretly to have their fetal sex tested and choose to terminate their pregnancies if they are found to be girls. All these phenomena combined have resulted in a much higher proportion of male babies than female babies in India, with 40 million more men than women at one point.
These facts show that the status of Indian women is very low, they are not only unable to determine their own destiny, but even their personal safety cannot be guaranteed, which may lead some women to wish to leave India. That's why the British professor claims that once immigration is opened, there will be an influx of Indian women into China. Of course, China's women's rights and interests are not perfect, and there are problems of violating women's rights and interests, but compared with India, which does not regard women as human beings, China's status of women in this regard is already very high, whether in the family or in society, women's status is generally higher than that of men.
Indeed, to truly solve the problem of the status of women in India, immigration alone is not enough. The Indian government has taken a number of policy measures in the past to improve the status of women. In the early post-independence period, India clearly enshrined the principle of equality between men and women and abolished the caste system, as well as a series of laws granting privileges to men. Since then, India has also passed legislation to combat inequalities such as high dowries, honor killings, arranged marriages, and explicitly banned infant drowning and fetal sex determination. India had also established a committee for the protection of women's rights and had enacted the Prevention and Punishment of Violence against Women Act, all of which had been effective to some extent.
In recent years, the ratio of men to women in India has gradually become more balanced, and the previous phenomenon of 40 million more men than women is decreasing. This suggests that some policy and social efforts have begun to improve the status of women, but more work is needed to fundamentally address gender inequality.
Indeed, although some legislative and policy measures have been taken to improve the status of women, the overall status of women in India remains low, and the achievement of gender equality still faces great challenges. The law is only one part, and in the end, it is up to people's mentalities and cultural values to achieve true gender equality.
Gender inequality in India is reflected in the frequency of sexual violence cases, the unfairness of court decisions, and the perception of some lawyers, and many Indians are still accustomed to treating women as "second-class citizens." Therefore, solving this problem requires a whole-of-society effort, including the government's legislative reform and the bottom-up liberation struggle of Indian women.
The status of women in China is also not natural, and it is through efforts such as the women's liberation movement that women's rights and interests in China have been improved. India can learn from China's experience and achieve gender equality by changing entrenched gender attitudes through a wide range of education, advocacy and social campaigns. It is hoped that one day, Indian women will also be truly liberated and enjoy equal rights and respect.