Data: There are many cases. Let me cite a few to prove that my words are true. According to the New India Times, Hindustan, Shahara and Awakening Daily, from 1 1 in 2000 to 5438+0 in February 2006, there were eight cases of burning kannika nimtragol in and around New Delhi, India. According to the statistics of the National Bureau of Criminal Records of India, in 1996, 97 and 98, 55 13, 6006 and 69 17 women were burned, strangled, poisoned or stabbed to death due to dowry respectively. Suicide does not count. There are 35,246 women, 36,592 women, 4 1, 3 18 women brutally tortured by dowry. There is an upward trend year by year.
Influenced by the traditional custom that men are superior to women, women's social status is low, and women in real life are like second-class nationals. However, with the rise of female consciousness, based on the equality between men and women, women began to fight for their due rights and interests, and more and more women left home to enter the society, showing that they were not inferior to men, which made Indian women gradually gloomy and face the light.
During June 5438+ 10, when passing through Mumbai, the car was intercepted by the motorcade on the way to the city. The local province of Machata is electing members of parliament. This team wearing the national flag is obviously a campaign team. A middle-aged woman stood in the first motorcade, dashing, and attracted everyone's attention. She is sonia gandhi, who led the Congress Party to win the parliamentary election in May. On September 6th, she was named one of the top ten most influential women in the world by Forbes magazine.
Just when everyone was attracted by the most outstanding woman in India, a haggard girl, holding a thin baby, knocked on the window of a car in the street, pointed her finger at her mouth and pointed at the baby in her arms. She is a beggar woman everywhere on the streets of India. If Sonia represents the extreme of women's rights in this country, then this girl is undoubtedly the epitome of being at the bottom of society, and the two are worlds apart.
Parasu Raman, director of the Tata Instutute of Social Sciences, a well-known academic research institution in South India, said that women are highly respected in Indian myths and legends. In Hinduism, the goddess is the symbol of strength, but in real life, women are suffering and belong to second-class nationals, and Sonia is only a special case. (Text transferred to the fifth edition)
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Parasu Raman believes that this phenomenon has religious and social reasons. 94% of India's population believes in Hinduism and Islam, both of which discriminate against women. According to Hindu teachings, a person's soul can only be saved by holding a deathbed ceremony before his son dies. Moreover, his son inherits property and has the obligation to support his parents. So parents try their best to have boys, and girls are born with discrimination.
Moreover, the Hindu classic Padma's Book of the Past, written around 750 BC, stipulates that women's only god in this world is their husbands, and their only job is to obey and please their husbands, no matter what defects they have. This concept is deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, and women should be a good wife and mother after being instilled.
He said that marriage is a secret pain for many women, because dowry is prevalent in India, and married women are easily abused by their husbands if they don't have a decent dowry. Moreover, the dowry is not paid in one lump sum at the time of marriage, and the husband's family will continue to ask for bicycles, motorcycles, televisions or washing machines for many years after marriage. It is not uncommon that his wife was burned alive by her husband's family because her parents could not afford it. Parents should strive for their daughter's happiness, and her daughter has become a burden to the family.
In fact, most marriages in India are arranged by parents. Blind date is a humiliating moment in a woman's life, and the man and parents are invited to her home. The woman dressed up and entertained the man with rich food. It is inevitable that the woman's parents will praise her daughter's skills, such as emphasizing that all the dishes are cooked by her daughter before taking her out to show her to each other.
If the other party is satisfied, both parents will start to discuss the dowry. If the man has good conditions, such as civil servants, the dowry will be more. On the other hand, if the woman has good conditions, such as high school education, the dowry can be less. If it doesn't work, the whole blind date process will start all over again. It is extremely painful for a woman to be rejected because of her mediocre appearance or her father's failure to raise the marriage capital required by the man.
Looking back at the history of India, Islam entered India in the 7th century and flourished in the16th century under the rule of the Muslim Mughal Empire. The Mughal emperor aurangzeb (16 18- 1707) designated Islam as the state religion, which was the last one in 1858. Islam strictly guards against men and women. Women are not allowed to have contact with men other than close relatives. They must wear veils when they go out, and life is like confinement.
Although most Muslim men only have one wife now, according to Muslim law, he can marry four wives and divorce at any time and place without any reason. Just say "talaq" three times loudly, which means "I divorced you. Whether angry or thoughtful. Women can't get married more, and divorce must be pronounced by the court.
In Muslim families, girls' inheritance rights are only half that of boys, on the grounds that men will have wives in the future, while women don't need so many husbands to rely on.
Under the influence of Hinduism and Islam, Indian women are slaves at home, and they have little opportunity to receive education, so it is difficult to make a living independently. In her life, she was a man's daughter, wife, mother or grandmother, without her own identity. In traditional Indian families, husbands usually call their wives "the mother of their sons". 」
It is precisely because of this traditional value that men are superior to women that the custom of killing baby girls is formed. Baby girls are suffocated, drowned, poisoned or starved from time to time. In Rajasthan, near the desert in northern India, there is a hill called Nuwa Gang, where local people bury baby girls. Madurai in the south also has this custom.
The Order of Charity founded by Mother Teresa opened a nursery in Calcutta, with a cradle at the door for people to leave abandoned babies, 90% of whom were baby girls.
The custom of abandoning babies, which is prevalent in rural areas, has evolved into abortion in cities. When women have a pregnancy test, they find that they are pregnant with a female fetus, and they are often forced to have an abortion by their families.
Years of discrimination against women have affected the sex ratio in the population structure. In normal society, there are more women, otherwise it means that women's status is low. 1947 When India became independent, the ratio of male to female was 1000 to 987, but it was 200 1, which has dropped to 1000 to 933. India may be the country with the lowest ratio of male to female in the world.
In 2002, the infant mortality rate was as high as 68 per 65,438+0,000 live births. In the same year, it was 6.9 in the United States, 27 in China and 25 in Mexico, which was equivalent to the Indian economic development level.
The infant mortality rate is high, and the family attaches importance to the baby boy, so women give birth frequently, which affects their health, because women are generally malnourished during pregnancy and lactation. Moreover, the risk of delivery of pregnant women in India is quite high, with 540 deaths per 10000 people, ranking first in the world with Nepal 19. On average, only 42% of women can get professional medical assistance during childbirth. The reason is that the Indian government's public medical expenditure only accounts for 0.9% of GDP, ranking 17 1 among the 75 countries with statistics in the world, even Pakistan (1%), Nepal (1.5%) and Bangladesh (/.
In India, few women choose to be single in order to escape the tragic fate, because single women are regarded as abnormal in India. Even single women with good education and proper jobs can't get the same treatment as men. In the office, they often become the topic of men. When renting a house, they have to endure the landlord's rude heckling: "When will you come back at night?" Will you receive male friends here? You can't let guests spend the night. 」
In rural areas, most women are single because they were abandoned or their husbands died. They must raise their own children and support their families. There is also a Hindu custom in which a widow jumps into her husband's cremation pyre and is buried. 1987 In September, a woman aged 18 was born in Deola, Rajasthan. RoopKanwar shocked the whole country because of his martyrdom. However, it is puzzling that many local politicians even praised Roop Kanwar as a chaste woman. It was later discovered that Rupert Kanwar didn't want to be buried, but her husband's relatives charmed her with drugs and dragged her into the fire. These relatives have been sued by the court.
Hinduism, which believes in reincarnation, regards the loss of a woman's husband as a punishment for her past sins, and the childhood widow under the child marriage system is particularly ominous, and she is the most excluded. In the Brahmin class in southern India, widows must wear coarse clothes, shave their hair once every two weeks, and are forbidden to attend family banquets for life. Their lives are desperate, boring and empty.
Gandhi, who led India's independence through non-violent struggle, was one of the first Indian leaders to awaken women's consciousness. He said in 19 19: "If non-violence is the law of our existence, then the future depends on women. 」
Article 15 (65438-0947) of the Constitution of India after independence prohibits gender discrimination and stipulates that boys and girls receive compulsory education equally. Knowledge is power. It helps women find jobs and become financially self-reliant. It also liberated women's minds and changed their lives.
This situation is most obvious among the urban middle class. Well-educated women have jobs before marriage, so they can share the family expenses and become the object of men's competition. In men's personals, there is often a note that "professional women are preferred". Of course, they need to prepare less dowry.
In recent years, the Indian government has found that educated women can not only improve their lives, but also influence their future families and children, which is a weapon to overcome poverty. Therefore, it encourages girls to go to school and provides them with school uniforms and fixed allowances free of charge. However, the national literacy rate in India is still only 59.5%, of which only 48.3% are women, far lower than 70.2% of men.
The rise of female consciousness urges many educated women to join social movements and fight against laws and systems that they think are unfair, such as domestic violence, alcoholism, rape, pregnancy test, sexual harassment and environmental protection. Their efforts accelerated the disintegration of the old society and the establishment of new ideas.
But it doesn't seem to be smooth sailing. 1975? Shah Bano, a 62-year-old Muslim woman in Indore, Madhya Pradesh, was abandoned by her husband after 45 years of marriage. 1978, she asked the court to force her husband to pay alimony monthly. As her husband is a lawyer with a good income, the court ordered him to pay about 18 USD monthly alimony. Although according to Islamic law, the husband's obligation to support his next wife and children is limited to three months after divorce, which is equivalent to about three months.
This judgment was confirmed by the Supreme Court 1985, which immediately aroused protests from Islamic fundamentalists, arguing that it violated Islamic laws and the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom. Rajiv gandhi, the then Prime Minister, worried that the verdict would cause anxiety among Muslims and ordered the verdict to be revoked. At the same time, in order to appease Muslims, 1986, the National Assembly passed a Muslim women's law, prohibiting Muslim women from invoking secular laws to protect ordinary women. Aref Mohammad Khan, a young Muslim minister, resigned angrily.
These twists and turns show that it is difficult to shake off the Millennium differences overnight, but in India today, there are many outstanding women in most industries, whether they are doctors, scientists, engineers, civil aviation pilots, police chiefs, etc. There have been female officers since 1992. Their achievements prove that the women's liberation movement has begun, just like a huge ship. Although it moves slowly, once it is launched,