The high human cost of India’s “respect” for women

My attention was drawn to the speech by Congress party presidential hopeful, Pratabha Patil who said:

Women have always been respected in the Indian culture. The purdah system was introduced to protect them from the Muslim invaders. However, times have changed. India is now independent and hence, the systems should also change.

This is simply untrue. One can understand Patil’s desire to harden her electoral numbers, no politician has ever failed by vilifying Muslims, and it taps into the Hindu nationalist agenda that the BJP and the RSS have been peddling for some time. It has also gained a mainstream audience through its most eloquent exponent, VS Naipaul.

Naipaul explains away India’s cultural failure by insisting that Islam has stifled it. I disagree, it is not so much that Islamic rulers stifled indigenous culture, indeed if they did, how could the vast majority of Indians remain Hindu? Rather that Islamic civilization produced a cultural output that has better endured. India, despite being ruled by Muslims for hundreds of years, has remained a Hindu majority country. The Islamic rulers of India have even been criticized by Muslim scholars for not eradicating customs that Muslims found offensive such as the conspicuous idolatry, the payment of a dowry by the woman at the time of the marriage contract (rather than the opposite as dictated by Sharia) and the burning of women on the funeral pyre of her husband (which is a deeply offensive crime for Muslims). If Muslims ruled India with an cultural iron fist as Naipaul insists, then ipso facto he would simply not exist or he would be a Muslim bigot pumping out polemical (but grammatically correct) pamphlets for Hizb-ul-Tahrir.

What Naipul, and other Indian nationalists should do is have the courage of their convictions and demolish the Taj Mahal, the Red Fort, the Jama Masjid, burn the books of Mughal Urdu poetry, ban the serving of meat dishes and direct tourists to their own great cultural achievements. A month-long tour of India on daal roti, snake charmers and a dip in the Ganges should give the visitor to India a lifetime legacy of Indian nationalism.

Patil has gone the one step further by suggesting that Islam is the reason that Indian women are treated badly, and the veil is an example of that. This so completely untrue, that one can only imagine that Patil is herself illiterate in her nation’s own history, or is betting that her audience is. If Muslims had insisted on their own Sharia for all India, then:

1. Brides in India would be paid a Mahr at the time of their wedding, rather than having to pay a dowry;
2. The practice of burning one’s wife (suttee) at the funeral pyre would have vanished long a ago;
3. The genocide against India’s unborn female infants would not exist. In this scholarly article, the Indian authors estimate that 10 million female infants have not been born in India.

India’s women can rightly insist, that if this is an example of society “respecting” them, then can it please stop doing so.

Patil’s silence on this issue shows she has no interest in the fate of her gender, but will use any tool, however blunt, to run a populist anti-Muslim agenda.

It also shows the disgraceful silence of western feministas who like Patil indulge their hatred of Muslims rather than defend the rights of women. If one does sincerely believe that a cloth placed over the head of a woman is deeply oppressive then what about gender-based abortion? The latter is purely a product of the modern, educated, industrialized India, with its pre-natal ultrasounds and its fee for service abortionists. Surely a sincere woman campaigning for high office in India on the platform of woman’s rights, would include amongst those rights, the right to exist.

It seems that some white women believe that a white woman’s right to an abortion without any restriction outweighs a brown woman’s right to be born.