Two sisters
A horror out of a village in India. Amnesty International UK broke the story, and I tried to read their account first but it has drawn so much attention that the site wouldn’t load so I got the Independent’s version.
Two sisters who have been told they will be repeatedly gang-raped as a “punishment” for the crimes committed by their brother have pleaded with the Supreme Court to be protected.
The pair fled their village after an all-male council “ruled” that they should be raped, have their faces blackened and then be paraded naked because the brother eloped with a married woman from a higher caste.
They forgot the scare-quotes on “crimes committed.” Under reasonable laws and human rights regimes, there’s so such thing as the “crime” of eloping, nor is there such a thing as a “higher caste.” The whole story should be dotted with quotation marks.
But of course the whole thing is so grotesque that that part is almost tangential. In what universe do you punish X by raping Y and Z? In what universe do you officially and juridically punish anyone by raping anyone?
We know the idea. The idea is that the council is shaming and humiliating the brother by soiling two women in the brother’s family. It’s nothing to do with the women, it’s just a matter of dishonoring the brother, whose honor lies in policing the genitalia of the women in his family.
Meenakshi Kumari, who is 23, is petitioning for protection from India’s highest court for herself and her 15-year-old sister and family, who are the lowest caste in India – Dalit, or Untouchables.
It’s upper castes persecuting Dalits, and it’s men persecuting women.
After their brother Ravi married and ran away with a woman of the Jat caste, senior male members in the village, which is just outside Delhi, pledged to “avenge the dishonour” by inflicting horrific and humiliating punishment on his sisters.
Sumit Kumar, another of Meenakshi’s brothers, said the members of the Jat caste were powerful in the village. “The Jat decision is final,” he told Amnesty International.
The woman with whom Ravi eloped may also be in severe danger, according to the international human rights group. She married him willingly and is thought to be pregnant – while it is not clear whether the brother himself is in danger.
The coverage by Indian news site Zee Media outlines the love story between Ravi and the Jat woman, saying they wanted to be together when she was forcibly married to someone else in February.
What a slut, thinking she gets to choose for herself what man she wants to live with and have sex with.
The two sisters fear for their lives, and have said they cannot return to their homes in the Baghpat district. Such unelected village councils, called khap panchyat, have been labelled “kangaroo courts” by the Supreme Court they are appealing to.
Yet their decisions continue to be carried out across India, as the country remains engulfed in a wave of international controversy over the treatment of women since the gang-rape and murder of a female student in 2012 and other murders, burnings and rapes since.
And this is why Taslima wants, ultimately, to return to India to live. She is needed there.
It has nothing to do with the women (and, at 15 yrs old, one is only a girl) because they are not human. Not really human, anyway. The double-whammy of Untouchable and female means that they are less valuable than cattle. They are the possessions of the male members of their household and nothing else. Damaging them, in effect, damages the net worth of the family.
I love the term “untouchable” in a horrible, sarcastic way. The women of the caste know full well that upper caste men do not find them “untouchable” as they are so often victims of rape.
Hrible. Hrrm. HORRIBLE.
Not terribly surprising, alas.
There are so many countries I would never want to touch, even indiarectly.
I gotta build me a RA-raft. But that would imply forsaking beef … Holy Cow, what a quandary.
As you know, I’m actually a rather mild person but this pushes buttons even I’d forgotten I had. And I’m made mostly from buttons. LATSOT MAD at every part of this but the hurting of those women seems like only the second most awful part. The most awful part to me is the apparent glee with which those men decided to hurt those women.
Callousness is awful. I expect everyone here is opposed to casual cruelty. But as horrible as casual cruelty is, gleeful cruelty is manymuch worse. It’s not just about gleeful intention to harm, which is bad enough, it’s that the glee seems license enough to recommend this sort of behaviour to others.
Don’t get me wrong; my priority and instinct is usually to intervene on a personal level when actual people are being hurt. My personal piss boiling isn’t automatically a boon to anyone else. But HOLY FUCK, this sort of thing is a whisper away from becoming mainstream and that’s what people should be scared of.
https://www.facebook.com/144310995587370/photos/a.271728576178944.71555.144310995587370/1038254756192985/?l=7b66983421