After yesterday’s birthday, I now want to come back to the series of diary entries which I had started on Monday – about the sad but very important topic of rape and sexual harassment here in India. The gang-rape incident in Delhi has sparked a national interest in the topic, protests and a general awareness which hopefully leads to a necessary change. Again, many people have made their suggestions as to the reasons and what should be done against it and among other things, people demanded the death penalty for rapists. But do you really think rape is a problem of law and order? Or do you think you can prevent it, if there is strict punishment, maybe even the death penalty for rape? I believe death penalty won’t finish rape. You have to go to the root of the problem – and for me that is religion and culture. Let’s focus on religion today.
It is actually not religion itself, it is what religion teaches men about women. It is the fact that religion makes women inauspicious, depicts them as usable objects, as second-grade citizens who belong to men and should obey. That is not a problem of Hinduism, that is a problem of religion itself. I read somewhere that in the Koran it is written that the woman is your field which you can plow as you want. There are enough examples in other religions, too, which say that women can be beaten, can be used and even donated. Advocates of religion and tradition in India should feel ashamed at this point – due to your ideas, the situation of our country has fallen to a level at which you can just feel shame. You and your religion don’t consider women humans anymore.
Religion has created this attitude towards women and that is where the problem has its root. According to recent reports, six million unborn baby girls were murdered in the past ten years because they were ‘only daughters’. Those parents who did not get to know the gender before birth and had a baby girl were unhappy but had to accept it with a heavy heart. How many times have I seen families produce more and more children until finally a boy arrives! Why? Because the last rites are performed by your son, because the family lineage will go on through a son, because Hindu religion tells people that you can only go to heaven if you had a son. How many times have I seen how the new mother of a girl was blamed for not giving birth to a boy!
Do you want to have more concrete examples that show how religion creates a wrong attitude towards women? Rape is nothing rare in Hindu scriptures but instead of being condemned, it is Gods who do it! Hindu scriptures ask you to worship gods like Vishnu, who cheated Vrinda into having sex with him, and Indra, the king of heaven. So a rapist god should be worshipped because he is great, big and powerful. The woman who was raped by Indra however, Ahelia, was cursed by her husband and turned into stone. Indra himself carried away a curse: he should have thousand vaginas in his body! Maybe it was the fantasy of the writer of the story who would like to see not one but thousand vaginas at once. But having a vagina is a curse in itself! That is what religion teaches you!
Religion says ‘Where a woman is, there is god’. The same religion also says that women are the gateway to hell. A certain sect of Hinduism believes that seeing the face of a woman is a sin and you have to do penance if you do. The same sect was however caught in a sex scandal when someone had filmed members while having sex. Hypocrisy on the highest level and an attitude towards women which is not only outdated but encourages crime.
In a society in which religion is strong, men rule and women are weak. It is male-dominate and women are made weak – obviously an easy target for men to rape. Religion makes women a second-grade citizen and makes women weak by advocating that they have to live under the rule of father, husband or son. You cannot free a society of crimes like rape as long as the general mentality is male-oriented and male-dominated. Religion does not want to create equality, they don’t want women to be equal to men. They made her a goddess but not a human with equal rights.
If you want to stop rape, you have to change the mindset, the perception and attitude towards women. And for that people have to finally understand that they need to leave outdated and dangerous religious ideas. You are making your daughters weak by raising them according to religion! That is a very big and important point which is deep in our culture and which I will write further about tomorrow.
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