I mean what in the Holy Fuck! She’s being forced to marry her father-in-law.
He raped her and now her 10-year marriage to her husband is null and void. She has to go home and become “pure” for seven months and 10 days.
What the hell is the problem with my birth country? Every time I try to go around showing off how fucking proud I am, it does something like this. My own son-of-a-bicth cousin is a wife-beater, and does his wife have any legal recourse? FUCK NO! He can do whatever he wants to his property.
How in the fucking hell is India ever going to step into the First World if it dictates policies like this? AARRRGH!
I’m so pissed! Women are people too, you crack-headed addle-pated monkeys’ asses!
The story mentions that it is ‘community leaders’ that are forcing this. I’m not too familiar with India, but it sounds like the state doesn’t have any presence in that village and from what I understand that is fairly common. Is there anything that the government can do in this case?
Anaamika: *How in the fucking hell is India ever going to step into the First World if it dictates policies like this? *
Actually, this appalling incident seems to be the result not of Indian government policy, but of a religious edict by conservative clerics in a poor rural Muslim community. The secular authorities apparently have quite different ideas about the situation:
I know it’s due to the Muslim elders, and I know the government is stepping. Still, can you even imagine this happening in a civilized country? Oh right, you can. :rolleyes: I’m sure there’s societal pressure even in certain parts of the U.S.
Still, it gets me seeing red.
Did you guys see that Uttar Pradesh has 165 million people? That’s more than Russia!
Then again, who wants to live in Russia?
Ugh! I’m trying to make a joke and lighten up but I’m so pissed. She would have had to treat her 10-year husband as her son. Her son!
As I understand it, the thing is that Indian secular law allows religious sects quite a bit of autonomy in making rules on social issues such as marriage. For example, since polygamy and divorce are recognized practices in Islam, Indian law allows Muslims to divorce and to marry more than one wife. (Divorce is permitted by secular law to Hindus too, but bigamy is not.)
So technically, if a Muslim woman divorces her husband to marry her father-in-law, that’s her legal right and the government has no business interfering in it. The question of coercion is where things get tricky. If she’s being forced into it by the clerics and village leaders, can the government step in and protect her? How about if she’s afraid to openly defy the coercion?
However, the government can prosecute and punish rape, and that appears to be what they’re trying to do here. Rape is still a crime even if the local religious community isn’t treating it as such. (Though I cynically suspect that at least some elements of the Hindu-majority polity wouldn’t be so eager to crack down on this rape if it hadn’t been a Muslim that committed it. Lotsa anti-Muslim propaganda points to be scored here.)
Big moral o’ the story: support more education and self-determination for women. As women get more freedom and economic power, religious doctrines on marital law etc. will be forced to adjust to that.
I’m trying to even wrap my mind around the primitive logic behind forcing her to leave her husband for the rapist. All the cases I’ve ever seen involved an unmarried woman who was forced to marry her rapist which, although barbaric, at least makes a sort of twisted sense from a “women as property” point of view.
But this just seems to be a decision that sex (any sex) = marriage. If she then has sex with her husband again, will she get to remarry him?
Anaamika, welcome to Utah. (It’s one those dusty, squarish states down in the southwestern corner.)
And don’t get me started on southern Missouri/northern Arkansas/Kentucky. There’s a lot of nice, decent people in those states no doubt, but I’ve met some genuine sleezebags-in-the-guise-of-Christians there, too.
Is there more going on here than we know about? Does the Father in-law have influence with these Elders? Does any raped woman automatically have to marry her attacker in that village/region?