Whether's its killing of unborn girls in villages of gang-rape of schoolgirls by politicians, India is a match for the Taliban in abuses of women. Only one thing is helping India.
By T J S George

We rush to condemn the Taliban for the atrocities they heap upon women. But we are no less cruel in our attitudes _ whether it is the killing of newborn girls in Tamil Nadu villages or the gang-raping of school girls by politicians.

The saving grace in India is that occasionally a case hits the headlines, and occasionally the courts ensure a measure of justice.

These instances provide a sense of relief, but we are still left dumbstruck by the diabolical savagery to which man can descend at the sight of a skirt.

To its credit, the Supreme Court last week accepted the evidence of two little boys and condemned a man who had committed an unspeakable crime -- raping, then killing a 3-year-old girl. He carried the baby's body in a bag, dripping with blood, and threw it away.

The technicalities of law almost allowed the beast to get away with it. The trial court had found him guilty but the Bombay High Court acquitted him on the ground that the testimony of the little boys was not credible.

Fortunately, the state government went in appeal and the Supreme Court agreed with the trial court, though it reduced the sentence from death to life imprisonment.

A more sensational case was settled in similar fashion in Thiruvananthapuram last week.

The victim here was a poor woman selling fish in a local market. Two rowdies of the locality had confronted her one evening and demanded that she spend the night with them in return for money.

She took offence and told them off. Whereupon they caught her, dragged her out of the crowded market, along the road full of shops and people, took her into a roadside compound and raped her.

No one said or did anything. Some shops just downed their shutters to be on the safe side. But that brave fisherwoman went to the court and fought her case to the finish, ignoring threats to her life.

Providing contrast to her courage was the cowardice of others. Only a couple of witnesses would give evidence against the rowdies.

Two fisherwomen and a woman vegetable vendor who were sitting next to the victim that fateful evening said they saw nothing. Fear made all the women witnesses turn hostile.

The trial court relied on the testimony of a man who described what he saw and on the evidence gathered by alert police investigators.

It sentenced the two thugs to eight years and a 10,000-rupee fine each. One stout-hearted woman had salvaged her honour. How many others might have suffered in silence.

Currently the big headlines in Kerala are about a girl who was put in an orphanage at age 10 and began to be systematically raped there for the next 7 years by the school principal, the electrician, the watchman, two buddies of the watchman, the principal's two guests from the Gulf and sundry VIPs in neighbouring towns to whom the girl was taken as offering. The principal has now been arrested.

This kind of marathon sexapades are by now a tradition in Kerala.

A Muslim League politician whose name has been linked with one of them is now a minister.

A former Congress minister whose name is linked with another is still a Congress busybody. May be the fisherwoman who fought it out was lucky that her persecutors were ordinary thugs, not politician thugs.

This is the state of affairs in the country's most literate state. The situation elsewhere is best imagined.

The difference between Taliban and us is that they do it according to a publicly enunciated policy framework; we profess noble policies and actually do horribly evil things.

Who is the more despicable?

(Mr. T.J.S. George is a retired founder editor of Asiaweek, HongKong. This article entitled "Our Treatment of women is a match to the Taliban" first appeared in Newindpress on Sunday on November 25, 2001)