India not a nice place for women and girls

What the hell is going on in India? Have some of these men gone coo-coo - what's up with raping a 5 year old girl? This makes me really mad.
It is nice to see so many men joining with women to seek justice for the little girl.
I think the government should be swift to punish this man to the fullest extent of the law to stop this recent terror of women.

A post about the gang rape in India

by  Sonia Faleiro photo by: Joanna Neborsky
LIVED for 24 years in New Delhi, a city where sexual harassment is as regular as mealtime. Every day, somewhere in the city, it crosses the line into rape.

As a teenager, I learned to protect myself. I never stood alone if I could help it, and I walked quickly, crossing my arms over my chest, refusing to make eye contact or smile. I cleaved through crowds shoulder-first, and avoided leaving the house after dark except in a private car. At an age when young women elsewhere were experimenting with daring new looks, I wore clothes that were two sizes too large. I still cannot dress attractively without feeling that I am endangering myself.

Things didn’t change when I became an adult. Pepper spray wasn’t available, and my friends, all of them middle- or upper-middle-class like me, carried safety pins or other makeshift weapons to and from their universities and jobs. One carried a knife, and insisted I do the same. I refused; some days I was so full of anger I would have used it — or, worse, had it used on me.

Read more...

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/02/opinion/the-unspeakable-truth-about-rape-in-india.html?

Lowercaste Dalit woman gang-raped by so called uppercaste men

Women are vulnerable in any circumstance, class, clase or whatever. In developing countries as well as developed countries womem are still seen as chattles and goodies to take when they feel peckish. Women and men with a social conscious need to band together to fight this battle that many erroneously think that women have achieved parity with me. There is still a lot of work to do. However, the situation for women of lower socio-economic is a lot worse and need our help in raising awareness of their situation.

http://sunwalked.wordpress.com/2012/09/30/gang-raped-why-are-dalit-people-treated-as-sub-humans-in-india/

India not a good place for Women

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/07/15/indian-anger-over-media-footage-of-girl-being-sexually-assaulted/

Indians have reacted with anger and disgust over video footage of a young woman being sexually assaulted by a laughing mob of more than a dozen men in a busy street outside a bar in north-east India.
Not only did no one intervene for up to 45 minutes during the attack, but an off-duty TV journalist filmed the incident on his phone and called a cameraman to join him. The footage was then broadcast on news channels, prompting a debate on women’s safety in India and whether journalists have a duty to help in such situations.
In an interview with Indian media, the victim asked why the journalists did not help her. “They were only taking pictures. Why could they not help me?”

Local police have been condemned over their initial indifference towards the attack, which took place last Monday night just a few minutes from the nearest police station in Guwahati, Assam.
Frustrated at police inaction in the days following the assault, local residents put up “Wanted” posters of the men caught on camera and circulated the images on social networking sites.
The attack has highlighted the dangers of being a woman in the world’s biggest democracy. Writing in the Mail Today on Sunday, the novelist Palash Krishna Mehrotra said: “This ghastly episode has brought back in focus an old issue: our primitive attitudes towards women.”
A global poll last month voted India the worst G20 country for women, behind even Saudi Arabia.
Seven men have been arrested since Assam’s chief minister, Tarun Gogoi, on Saturday ordered detectives to arrest the culprits within 48 hours. A police official had also been suspended, according to Apurba Jabon Barua, a senior superintendent at Guwahati police force.
Over the weekend a delegation from the National Commission for Women arrived in the city to support the victim. The NCW’s Alka Lamba told reporters the teenager had suffered “animal-like treatment” and claimed that there were cigarette burns all over her body.

 

The victim told local media that the attack went on for “about 45 minutes” and that she would have been raped had the police not eventually come to her aid.
NewsLive channel, whose journalists filmed the attack, defended its staff for not intervening. “Some [media] questioned me as to why my reporter and camera person shot the incident and didn’t prevent the mob from molesting the girl,” tweeted its editor-in-chief, Atanu Bhuyan. “But I’m backing my team since the mob would have attacked them, prevented them from shooting, that would have only destroyed all evidence.”
Girija Vyas, an MP and a former president of the NCW, said: “No amount of criticism is enough for this incident … Is this the 21st century when we talk about equality? We can have a woman sitting at the post of the President of the country but the average woman on the street is not safe.”
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2012

Sunita Choudhary: From her rickshaw to a seat of real power

Andrew Buncombe meets India's vice-presidential hopeful who's now a driving force for women's rights

Andrew Buncombe

Friday, 20 July 2012

Besieged by thronging traffic at Delhi's Connaught Place, Sunita Choudhary does not hesitate. Her left hand releases the clutch, her right revs the throttle and her rickshaw zips past the honking cars. She makes it look easy.

For the past six years or so, Ms Choudhary has been steering a lonely route as the only woman rickshaw driver believed to be working in the North of India. During this time, she has endured beatings from police, harassment from male drivers and no shortage of surprised looks from the customers she stops to pick up.

Now, the 35-year-old wants to use her experience to benefit the people at the bottom of the pile by securing one of the country's highest offices. This week, Ms Choudhary, who as a teenager ran away from home to escape the strictures of village life and an abusive husband she had been forced to marry as a child, filed nomination papers for the vice-presidential election. Her campaign vow is to help the people she has met at ground level, on her journeys across the crowded city.

"It's love that brings people closer. I don't judge people, I try and speak to everyone," Ms Choudhary, who is originally from the state of Uttar Pradesh, says. "The politicians drive around in cars or else stop off at VIP guesthouses and think they are the upper class. I don't believe that; I believe in talking and communicating with the common person."

Ms Choudhary says she has helped dozens of Delhi's less-fortunate citizens over the years, especially poor women who have fallen through society's often-gaping cracks. She says that when she encounters a road accident she ferries the injured to hospital in her rickshaw for no charge. She has helped people secure government payments, file papers with courts and located places for them to live.

From her own raw experience she knows the difficulties to be confronted in a country that was recently said to be the worst for women among the G20 nations and the fourth most dangerous in the world for women after Pakistan, Afghanistan and Somalia. Violence, sexual assault and discrimination are commonplace, despite the fact that many women – Indira Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi, Kumari Mayawati, Mamata Banerjee and Sheila Dikshit among them – have reached the country's highest political offices. "Men expect dominance in society and do not respect women enough," Ms Choudhary, who did not finish school, says. "But they must recognise women and realise they need respect in society."

Among those she has helped are Kusum Lata Sharma and her eight-year-old daughter, Ekta. Abandoned several years ago by her husband, who refuses to help support her, she and her daughter now sleep beneath a tatty piece of tarpaulin in a part of the city set aside by the authorities for organised protests.

"When I first met Sunita, I was reminded of Sunita Williams, [the Indian American female astronaut] because I had heard that name," Ms Sharma says. "Of course she should be a leader. Anybody who has shown such great strength should be a leader."

Ms Choudhary's own story is one of struggle against hardship. As a 12-year-old girl growing up in a village near the city of Meerut, she was married off by her parents to a husband who was violent and alcoholic. Pregnant and desperate, she fled to Delhi where her child died at the age of two months.

Ms Choudhary says that when she ran away, her parents filed a report with the police. She worked in a variety of jobs before hitting upon the idea of becoming a rickshaw driver after coming upon the scene of an accident and helping an injured man to hospital. If she had her own vehicle, she reasoned, she could do more good.

It was years before her parents discovered what she was doing, after someone told them about a media report about her that they had seen.

"I grew up in a conservative family where women were not allowed outside the house. My parents did not want me to do this," says Ms Choudhary, who lives alone in the city's Malviya Nagar neighbourhood. "Now my parents are happy, but not everyone in my village is happy."

This is not the first time that Ms Choudhary, who for years had to rent a rickshaw before being able to buy her own, has run for political office. In 2009 she campaigned to become a member of the country's parliament, travelling around on her rickshaw and distributing leaflets as a candidate for the United Women's Front, an all-women's party that had been formed two years earlier to try and raise the profile of women.

This summer she also filed papers to try to be elected president, though she failed to secure sufficient signatures for her name to go forward. Voting took place yesterday for the largely ceremonial post, with Pranab Mukherjee, India's former Finance Minister, expected to win. Results will be announced on Sunday.

If her campaign for vice-president is to proceed, she will require the backing of at least 40 members of the upper and lower houses of parliament, which make up the electoral college. While India's outgoing President Pratibha Patil is a woman, the country has never had a female vice-president.

"They will do the scrutinising of the nominations after the closing date on [Saturday]. All those nominations that do not have 20 proposers and 20 seconders will be rejected," K Ajay Kumar, a senior official with the Election Commission, says.

So far, Ms Choudhary has managed to secure the backing of just one parliamentarian, Jai Narain Prasad Nishad, an 81-year-old member of the Janata Dal party, who represents the city of Muzaffarpur in Bihar, in the lower house of the parliament. "She is hard working," Mr Nishad says of Ms Choudhary. "She has many qualities."

Ms Choudhary says she is not concerned by the fact she has little chance of success and believes that the extra publicity, albeit modest, generated by her campaign will benefit her efforts to help others.

"Ordinary people ought to be able to choose their president and vice-president," she says. "This is not a political contest so different people should be able to challenge. This election is being carried out by MPs so they are likely to choose an eminent citizen. But I think an ordinary person can also be an eminent citizen."

Best places to be a woman: G20 ranked

1. Canada

2. Germany

3. UK

4. Australia

5. France

6. US

7. Japan

8. Italy

9. Argentina

10. South Korea

11. Brazil

12. Turkey

13. Russia

14. China

15. Mexico

16. South Africa

17. Indonesia

18. Saudi Arabia

19. India

Sisters in India is having a breakthrough the glass ceiling

...In March 2010, feminists and women’s organizations had celebrated the passage of the Women’s Reservation Bill in the upper house, after a fierce 13-year debate among political parties. It seemed then that a battle of some significance had been won.
The bill would amend the Constitution to reserve one-third of seats in Parliament and in state assemblies for women. Despite sometimes chaotic proceedings in the upper house, the final vote was nearly unanimous, with 191 votes for and one against. When it passed, Brinda Karat, a member from the Communist Party of India and a longtime campaigner for women’s rights, spoke for many when she said: “The bill will change the culture of the country, because women today are still caught in a cultural prison. We have to fight stereotypes every day.” 

...

As 2012 begins, even the bill’s most ardent supporters acknowledge that India’s female members of Parliament have a battle on their hands. But some took heart from a statement made by the president of the Indian National Congress party, Sonia Gandhi, the widow of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.

As the winter session of Parliament drew to a close with parties debating a proposal, which ultimately failed, to set up an anti-corruption ombudsman, Mrs. Gandhi mentioned the Women’s Reservation Bill and pledged to fight for its eventual passage in the lower house.

The first female president of the Indian National Congress party, the poet-politician Sarojini Naidu, would have approved. As a young leader of India’s independence movement, Ms. Naidu was among a score of women who campaigned for the right to vote. It took them from 1917, when the Indian National Congress party backed women’s sufferage, to 1926, when women could vote and run for some state legislatures, to see the first changes, and then several more years before all women in India had the right to cast ballots.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/04/world/asia/04iht-letter04.html?src=recg&pagewanted=all