alt.fan.jai-maharaj@googlegroups.com (Dr. Jai Maharaj): Mar 11 10:25PM
India's Daughter and BBC - Belgian Professor speaks out
Prof. Jakob De Roover
Niti Central
niticentral.com
Wednesday, March 11, 2015
Imagine. A filmmaker travels to Belgium because she has
heard about the pedophilia scandals in the country. She
directs a documentary film, which includes an interview
with an infamous pedophile. This man says that the girls
he raped had actually seduced him and that they really
enjoyed it. The filmmaker then comments that Belgian
society is responsible for creating such pedophiles by
teaching them what to think. Most men in this country are
programmed in this way, she insists. In fact, this is all
part of a larger disease and culture, which is also
reflected in Belgian cinema. How would we Belgians react?
We would find this shocking and infuriating. It is as
though pedophilia is an expression of the core of our
culture, as though we are programmed for child abuse.
This story is not all that imaginary, even though it does
concern another country. Over the past week, the
international hue and cry about rape in India has gone
through another round. This time the cause is a
documentary where one of the accused in a brutal rape
case makes atrocious statements. Significantly, the
English filmmaker, Leslee Udwin, does not see this man as
a pathological individual. In an interview, she
characterises him as representative of "most men in this
country," who are "programmed in a certain way." It is
this society that creates and encourages such rapists,
she says, and the objectifying of women in Bollywood
films reveals how this is part of a larger disease and
culture.
Many Indians reacted with shock. Many are also
infuriated. Some even see this as an international
conspiracy to defame India and call for banning the film.
It is easy to dismiss all of this as expressions of a
hurt national pride unable to cope with the reality of
rape and misogyny in India. Or to ridicule it as a form
of cultural paranoia. But the many Indians who feel this
way are neither paranoid nor stupid. In fact, there is a
need to make sense of the widespread impression that such
an international conspiracy is going on.
To understand what is at stake, let us turn back to the
heart of Europe. Here, the media agrees with the
filmmaker. One headline says "A girl should just let
herself be raped quietly" -insinuating that this is a
widespread opinion in India. The journalist writes:
"Especially in North India women are considered outlaws
when it comes to sex." In other words, any man can have a
go at them without threat of punishment. But how could
Indian men in general - who are also fathers, brothers
and sons of women -see these women as objects freely
available for rape? This can be the case only if the
culture is itself morally perverse: mothers and fathers
must raise their sons to become rapists. This is the
implicit message of the discourse about rape in India.
India used to be the land of gurus, snake charmers, and
fakirs. It was the country of caste, cows and curry.
Nowadays, it has become the rape nation in the Western
imagination. Time and again, women travelling to India
are warned: "Be careful with all those rapists there."
People from all walks of life express their disgust at a
culture where rape seems to be part of everyday life.
Recently, a German university professor refused an Indian
intern because of "the rape problem in India" and the
threat he would pose to her female students. The media
join in: "How India became a country of gang rapes." "The
terrible truth about rape in India." "In rural India,
rapes are common, but justice for victims is not." "Why
rapes are 'normal' in India." These are only a few
representative headlines. What is so striking about these
claims is the following: they transform the immoral acts
of certain individuals into expressions of an entire
culture and its values.
What are the factual grounds for this move? In Belgium,
four to five gang rapes take place every week. Eight
women are raped every single day. In a study of the EU's
Agency for Fundamental Rights one third of all European
women reveal that they have been the victims of physical
and sexual violence. As many report that they went
through such violence at the hands of adults during their
youth. 55% of all women has experienced sexual
intimidation. But how many newspaper stories do we see
about "how Belgium became a country of gang rapes"? How
many journalists try to explain "why sexual violence is
'normal' in Europe" or "how women in the EU are outlawed
when it comes to sex"? Right. None.
"Three women raped per hour in India," the European press
cried out recently. But they forget to mention that this
is out of a population of 1.25 billion. In Belgium, one
rape is reported every three hours - out of a population
of 11 million. In England and Wales alone, where the
population is less than 56 million, about 78,000 rapes
are estimated to occur every year. That amounts to more
than 9 rapes every hour. You can do the math yourself. Or
you could leave that to a 2010 United Nations report. In
India, 1.8 rapes per 100,000 inhabitants were reported
that year. In Belgium, the number was almost 30. It was
27.3 for the US and about 28 for the UK.
The predictable response is that only a fraction of rapes
is reported in India. Well, in countries like Belgium,
experts estimate that only 1 in 10 cases of sexual
violence is reported by the victims. Even if the number
in India is only 1 in 100, there are still many more
cases of sexual violence in Belgium, the US or the UK.
One could add that the Indian police is notoriously
corrupt in its condoning of rape and that even these
projections underestimate the real number. But this only
shows that one can deny any empirical data in order to
embrace the image of India as a rape nation.
The reporting about India excels in ignorance. It blindly
buys into the stories told by a particular class of
journalists and intellectuals. Thus, when two girls were
found hanging from a tree in an Indian village in May
2014, the European media jumped on this. Obviously, these
girls had been raped and murdered because of caste, the
evil social system of India. "You can rape and kill a
Dalit girl," said one headline. Another article reported
that these girls were from "the Dalit community, a group
of people at the bottom of the social ladder who were
excluded from the caste system." The higher castes, both
journalists revealed with much fanfare, use sexual
violence to oppress the lower castes.
When more facts emerged, these same media kept quiet.
They offered no evidence for the claim that men from
'higher castes' systematically rape women from 'lower
castes'. They also failed to admit that the alleged
perpetrators did not belong to an upper caste and the
girls were not Dalits, but that both belonged to OBC
groups. It would be even more painful to recognise that
the CBI came to the conclusion that there was no evidence
of rape or murder, that one of the girls had been having
an affair with the main accused, and that the family
members had made inconsistent statements and appeared to
have bribed the witnesses. Instead they insinuated that
the police was trying to cover up the crimes. This fit
beautifully into the hackneyed story about India; the
facts did not.
In Europe (and among certain intellectuals in India)
clichés about India replace reasonable reflection. Hatred
towards women is deeply rooted in this society,
journalists say. Evidently, the implicit comparison is
always with European society and its emancipation of
women. Well, let us compare the role of women in the
Indian political landscape with that of a country like
Belgium. The last ten years, arguably the most powerful
person in India was a woman. Similarly, several women
could be found among the most popular and powerful
leaders of state-level governments. The same goes for
mayors and university vice-chancellors.India had its
first female prime minister in 1966. Fifty years later,
we are still waiting. As of yet, no woman has become
prime minister of the federal government of Belgium. As
of yet, no woman has become minister-president of the
regional government of Flanders. As of yet, my city has
seen no woman as its mayor. Oh yes, recently my
university did appoint its first female rector in almost
200 years.
It is not that all of the European reporting about India
is fictitious. The country has its share of problems when
it comes to the relationship between men and women. Only
a fool would deny that. There is tremendous injustice
towards women, as is the case elsewhere. In cities like
Delhi, sexual violence and harassment are a major
concern. The hobnobbing between politicians and goondas
in certain parts of India rightly shocks observers. But
our dominant stories do not allow us to understand any of
these dimensions of Indian society. They only create
delusions about the country.
Indeed, in a population of 1.25 billion, one will find
more psychopaths and pathological individuals than in a
population of 11 million. But to infer from this that
most Indian men are programmed to think of women as
objects of rape is an instance of the fallacy of hasty
generalisation. "Not all Indian men think and act in this
way," commentators often admit. But this just confirms
how twisted this approach is. Pathological men are now
presented as the norm of Indian society and others as the
exception, while it is surely the other way round.
To show how defective this discourse is, we can just
select another set of facts, which allow us to draw
opposite conclusions. The numerous female politicians,
the devis so commonly revered, gurus like Amma followed
by so many, the importance of the mother in Indian
society. All of these facts could be used to suggest that
women occupy an extraordinary position in Indian culture.
Without serious research, such a conclusion would be as
empty as the stories about "the deeply rooted hatred of
women." But this exercise reveals just how irrational the
discourse about rape culture in India is.
The fallacy of hasty generalisation is commonly used in
propaganda and the politics of fear. Now, it is part and
parcel of the discourse about rape in India. No wonder
then that many Indians have the sense of an international
conspiracy against their country. However misguided the
calls for banning films and books may be, they are
expressions of feeling powerless in the face of a
centuries-old discourse about Indian culture that
continues to dominate international public opinion. In
insidious ways, this discourse misrepresents India as the
very embodiment of immorality: a culture that programs
its people to follow immoral rules as though these are
moral.
India and the West could together look for solutions to
the problems that we share. Instead, Western commentators
reproduce old colonial stories about India as an immoral
culture. This gives them a twisted relationship to the
Indian people. On the one hand, they keep turning towards
the same class of Indian journalists, activists, and
intellectuals for 'local knowledge'. But these native
informants merely talk the talk of the West to the West.
On the other hand, more and more Indians are disgusted by
the West's condescending attitude towards their country.
And this is then dismissed as hurt pride. If we want to
bring our two peoples and cultures closer together in
this new age, reason and empathy are our only hope. The
madness of the current discourse about India must end.
(Author: Jakob De Roover is a Professor at the India
Platform, Ghent University, Belgium)
Continues at:
http://www.niticentral.com/2015/03/11/indias-daughter-and-bbc-belgian-professor-speaks-out-306333.html
Jai Maharaj, Jyotishi
Om Shanti
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.fan.jai-maharaj
o o o
o Not for commercial use. Solely to be fairly used
for the educational purposes of research and open
discussion. The contents of this post may not have been
authored by, and do not necessarily represent the opinion
of the poster. The contents are protected by copyright
law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
o Posted for information and discussion. Views
expressed by others are not necessarily those of the
poster who may or may not have read the article.
FAIR USE NOTICE: This article may contain copyrighted
material the use of which may or may not have been
specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This
material is being made available in efforts to advance
the understanding of environmental, political, human
rights, economic, democratic, scientific, social, and
cultural, etc., issues. It is believed that this
constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material
as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law.
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the
material on this site is distributed without profit to
those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving
the included information for research, comment,
discussion and educational purposes by subscribing to
USENET newsgroups or visiting web sites. For more
information go to:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
If you wish to use copyrighted material from this article
for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you
must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
Since newsgroup posts are being removed by forgery by one
or more net terrorists, this post may be reposted several
times.
|
