It’s a wonderful wonderful time. Girls are going missing, rape cases are increasing, molestation cases are going live and now khap panchayats or community councils in Haryana have taken to deciding at what age girls should get married and why. The khap council made of elderly patriarchs have come to the conclusion that girls should be married by the ages of 15 or 16 so that they can’t stray and hence are less susceptible to rape. There were many causes for or against the morality leash around girls and surely this is indeed one of the more bizarre.
First, to say that girls get raped because they stray is medieval. This only smacks of a talibanesque attitude to freedom of being and feminine sexuality. This idea has to be smothered at the very beginning. Second, to insist that marriage saves girls from rape is to actually denigrate both marriage as an institution and the bonding between man and a woman. To equate the two is to trigger the idea that after a point girls are anyway going to be raped, so marriage can save the anonymity of that rape. This is to say that marriage is another rape, only that it’s legal. By this of course one also denigrates the idea of the union of two human beings as only sexual and consummation of marriage as only for procreation, for legal rape. The idea is reprehensible and distasteful as is the onus on the ways of supressing female sexuality.
The second problem is of course legal. India has a robust judicial system and the laws of the land have been arrived at after intense discussion for years, intense deliberations, studies and analysis and we have been doing fine in that regard. India’s evolving democracy has its problems but we are proud to be functioning as a disorderly democracy but surely better than many others. So suddenly some illiterate brutes from the village can’t really hope to create regressive and coercive laws for the land. That will be unacceptable. And who do the khaps think they are!
What is completely senseless is that a former chief minister of the state of Haryana, Om Prakash Chautala has endorsed the view. He has said that he thinks that if the marriagable age of boys and girls are reduced, it could actually reduce rape cases in a state which is now witnessing a spurt in rape cases with 14 cases reported in the last month, most of them against Dalit girls. Chautala is a former lawmaker and knows only too well how laws are made in India and as a prominent leader should have desisted from endorsing a reactionary idea.
First, to say that girls get raped because they stray is medieval. This only smacks of a talibanesque attitude to freedom of being and feminine sexuality. This idea has to be smothered at the very beginning. Second, to insist that marriage saves girls from rape is to actually denigrate both marriage as an institution and the bonding between man and a woman. To equate the two is to trigger the idea that after a point girls are anyway going to be raped, so marriage can save the anonymity of that rape. This is to say that marriage is another rape, only that it’s legal. By this of course one also denigrates the idea of the union of two human beings as only sexual and consummation of marriage as only for procreation, for legal rape. The idea is reprehensible and distasteful as is the onus on the ways of supressing female sexuality.
The second problem is of course legal. India has a robust judicial system and the laws of the land have been arrived at after intense discussion for years, intense deliberations, studies and analysis and we have been doing fine in that regard. India’s evolving democracy has its problems but we are proud to be functioning as a disorderly democracy but surely better than many others. So suddenly some illiterate brutes from the village can’t really hope to create regressive and coercive laws for the land. That will be unacceptable. And who do the khaps think they are!
What is completely senseless is that a former chief minister of the state of Haryana, Om Prakash Chautala has endorsed the view. He has said that he thinks that if the marriagable age of boys and girls are reduced, it could actually reduce rape cases in a state which is now witnessing a spurt in rape cases with 14 cases reported in the last month, most of them against Dalit girls. Chautala is a former lawmaker and knows only too well how laws are made in India and as a prominent leader should have desisted from endorsing a reactionary idea.