Delhi girls are easy?

A few weeks ago, I was talking to an acquaintance about a news item about a young girl who'd been sexually abused by her local guardian. Blackmailed and abused for several months, she finally picked up the courage to file a case against him.


TV news channels immediately scented a story and convinced her to tell her story. While they did blur her face (legal requirements and all), one of the channels focussed repeatedly and unnecessarily on Page 1 of her case affidavit which gave her real name, father's name and address.

I was really mad and being very vocal about this completely unethical behaviour, when suddenly she said – remember this is a jeans-clad, Gucci-sporting 21st century woman speaking - “Oh, You can't trust these Delhi girls, yaar! They're easy! She must have had her fun from it! You make everything into a woman's issue. It's passé to be feminist now!” And she giggled.

Delhi girls are easy? Passé to be feminist? A woman's issue? How can anyone be so insensitive? I completely acknowledge that there are thousands of women in this country who have enjoyed nothing but kindness and protection from their menfolk. Fathers, uncles, brothers, sons, husbands have always supported and guided them. They have kept them away from petty annoyances and raised them to be a league apart. And just because they live like that, how can they deny the existence of someone like that girl on TV?

Don't they realise that in this very nation where they live like princesses, hundreds of women are burnt for dowry? Do they deny the women who submit to sexual excesses and put themselves at risk of domestic violence and abuse by spouses who were supposed to love and protect them? Do they deny the thousands of little girls in our country who don't get enough to eat or don't go to school because of their gender?

Can they deny all the little babies that were thrown in dustbins or poisoned merely because they were female? Do they deny all the young girls working in their very own homes and factories? Do they deny bonded labour? Do they deny trafficking in children? When they attack women who talk about serious issues and kick them to the sidelines, do they realise that there, but for the grace of God, might be themselves?

It is a pathetic state of affairs and it saddens me. Not that I have been labelled and sidelined, but that the issues have been denied and sidetracked. Unlike the American women all of whom were denied suffrage and fought for the vote, our country has a few privileged who have most of the say. Those who have don't want to fight for the have nots. No one wants to sully their hands in feminism.

The system is too dirty to clean up. They know they have to play dumb to keep their own situations safe. Everywhere I see a false sense of well-being. People who are afraid to protest because they don't want to face the discrimination themselves. They so want to be 'in' that they completely forget that so many, so many of their sisterhood is very much 'out of it.'

Every woman who overworks and underpays her maid or who employs a little child to look after her children is a criminal. Every woman who looks the other way while lower wages are paid to women in her factory or company for the same work that male workers get paid more for is a callous bitch. Apathy I have met before. But denial? That is really taking it too far.