An ignominious truth

Women's safety in India is a grave concern

What does India have in common with Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia and Saudi Arabia? After all, India prides itself as the fastest-growing major economy in the world, a rising superpower, the leader of the so-called “Asian” century, while the rest are countries ravaged by the worst form of civil and military war or, as in Saudi Arabia’s case, a hyper-conservative and toxic mixture of the most tyrannical elements of religion and politics. Earlier in the week, the Thomson Reuters Foundation — the philanthropic arm of Reuters media company — created a furore when it clubbed India with the other four as the most dangerous countries for women. What made it worse was that India was on top of the list.

Unsurprisingly, substantive issues were quickly lost in the debate as national pride took over and Indian representatives — from Rekha Sharma, chairperson of the National Commission for Women in India, to Shashi Tharoor, a key opposition leader belonging to the Congress party — summarily rejected the “sweeping” findings of the survey. “There is no way that we could be ranked number 1 in such a survey. The countries that have been ranked after India have women who are not even allowed to speak in public,” said an exasperated Ms Sharma. To be sure, there is some merit in questioning the robustness of these findings. That’s because the method of arriving at these results is quite subjective. The survey involved asking some 550 experts on women’s issues from the 193 United Nations member states what they thought were most dangerous countries for women. The respondents had to take into account issues such as health care, economic resources, cultural or traditional practices, sexual violence and harassment, non-sexual violence, and human trafficking.

So one could question the credibility of the findings because the sample size is too small, or because it is all based on opinions, or, indeed, a whole host of inadequacies that afflict such surveys — ranging from how questions are articulated to whether respondents were biased. Not to mention the fact that there are wide differences between societies and how people interact in them. For instance, outsiders would, quite justifiably, disapprove of the stranglehold that arranged marriages have in India. Similarly, Indians could look at social taboos in Saudi Arabia as downright stifling. That might explain why India was ranked the worst for women in terms of human trafficking, including sex slavery and domestic servitude, and for customary practices such as forced marriage, stoning and female infanticide.

But there’s no gain quibbling over whether India’s ignominious top rank is well deserved or not. For instance, there is no point arguing that more rapes are reported in the US than in India because the reporting of such crimes is abysmally low in India. The more substantive element is that India, which was among the top 5 in 2011 in a similar survey, has moved in the wrong direction. The fact that four women are raped in this country every hour should silence the detractors, and guide policymakers and civil society to come together and focus on how to improve the ground reality.

A good starting point would be to focus on the economic empowerment of women. The central reason why women in India are discriminated against is the flawed perception that they are a burden on a household. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In fact, one UN estimate states that 51 per cent of all work done by women in India is unpaid. Economic freedom will not only allow women’s contribution to society be seen and valued explicitly, it will empower them to make their own choices. The necessary precondition for this is the effective enforcement of law and order — better policing and quicker convictions (not necessarily harsher punishments).