Month: February 2018

There’s a sickness infecting some of our boys caused by a toxic combination of over-indulgent parents, schools obsessed with ‘brand image’ and the normalising of sex and violence by mass media

Parents and members of various organisations stage a protest near HAL police station demanding justice and strict punishment for the culprits who sexually assaulted a 6-year-old student at a private school in Marathahalli, Bengaluru (Representative Photo)(KPN

On Instagram, the seventh-grader threatens to have his teacher and her daughter raped. The eighth-grader emails two of his ‘very hot’ teachers and invites them to a ‘candle light date’ since “I feel like f***ing you right now.”

These kids are respectively 12 and 13 years old. They study in a posh Gurugram school and it is tempting to see them as aberrations, silly boys with raging hormones.

Yet, how do we continue to ignore a rising graph — all involving young male perpetrators — that includes at its most extreme, the murder of a seven-year-old student in another school allegedly by a senior student of the same school because he wanted the exams postponed? Or a 17-year-old who is allowed to drive his family Mercedes and ends up killing another man? Or the two teenagers who shoot to death an Uber driver?

It’s time we saw it, this sickness infecting some of our boys caused by a toxic combination of over-indulgent parents, schools obsessed with academic performance to the near exclusion of everything else, and the normalising of sex and violence by mass media.

From every side, we are assaulting our own and our children’s sensibilities with the shouting matches on television, feeding our kids a daily diet of bigotry, hatred and violence. Words like ‘rape’, ‘lynching’, ‘honour killing’ are now everyday casual terms that carry no sting. The objectification of women and the meaning of what it is to be ‘masculine’ washes over our ads, our cinema and the language of our politics. How do we expect any young adult to be immune?

Over-protective parents are raising entitled children. In some cases, there is a lack of supervision. In other cases, affluent parents cover up their sons’ crimes.

Overlooking what might seem like a minor crime tells the kids that daddy will cover up. It tells the other kids that there is no need to fear consequence. And so, a lesser crime of physical violence today escalates into a hit-and-run tomorrow. In both cases, fathers with more money than morality will sort it out.

Schools eager to protect their brand image are sometimes complicit in the cover-up. The Gurugram school in question says‘stern action has been taken ‘including suspension and mandated counselling’, but a spokesperson said she could not get into details. This is not good enough. We need a larger debate on where we are going wrong and what we can do to fix it, not a bland media statement.

When children see their mothers disrespected at home or staff being ill-treated or parents voicing hate statements against minorities and others then, “How do we counter this narrative in school? How do we tell them that their parents are wrong?” asks a teacher who doesn’t want to be named.

Yet, if we are to take a cue from recent events, we need to be able to talk about value-based education and a wholesome curriculum. We need to talk to boys about respect and consent. We need to tell them that violence, including the violence of language, is not cool. And we need to demonstrate that violations will not be tolerated. If some families are failing to impart these basic lessons, then schools will have to step in and fill that vacuum.

Young people are smart. They need only to be nudged in the right direction. In the United States, it is high school students who survived a tragic shooting who are taking lawmakers to task, demanding a ban on assault weapons. At home, we have seen the success of student-led campaigns to ban firecrackers and plastic and clean rivers.

The fault really lies with us, the adults. We are failing our kids.

The point is not a knee-jerk reaction against a particular seventh or eighth grader. The point is to understand that we have a problem. Unless we fix it, what might seem like an aberration now has all the potential to snowball into a full-blown trend.

Namita Bhandare writes on social issues and gender

Twitter: @namitabhandare

The views expressed are personal

We are simply not prepared to grant daughters the right to choose their spouses, particularly in inter-faith marriages

In New Delhi, Ankit Saxena made the fatal error of falling in love with a 20-year-old Muslim woman.

In Kerala, Akhila Ashokan converted to Islam and, as Hadiya, married a man in accordance with her new faith. Convinced she had been brainwashed, her father got the Kerala High Court to annul the marriage. Hadiya has, since, told the Supreme Court that she wishes to continue with her studies and live with her husband. The court has granted part one of her wish.

Nobody has the right to interfere in a marriage between two consenting adults, the Supreme Court declared this past week. The court’s ire was directed at khap panchayats. Left unsaid is what it makes of the Kerala High Court’s observation that, as per Indian tradition, “The custody of an unmarried daughter is with her parents, until she is properly married off.”

India’s march to modernity might seem confusing to anyone who glances at matrimonial ads in newspapers and online sites where would-be brides and grooms — and, more likely, their parents — configure their requirements under religion and community divisions.

A new generation of aspirational women does dream of love, but it is a love that carries the stamp of family approval, the chain of custody passing from father to husband, unbroken and unchallenged.

“Love should be arranged,” 19-year-old Soni, the daughter of a fruit vendor in south Delhi tells me. One of five children, her three married sisters have all had arranged marriages. Soni, an articulate volunteer with an adolescent empowerment group, is doing her BA and dreams of a career with the police.

So, how is love arranged, I ask her. It’s simple: Papa tells you who to fall in love with, and if you’re lucky, you’ll get a good husband — like her sister did, a man who allowed her to continue studying even after she got married.

The price of un-permitted love can be high — social ostracisation and even ‘honour’ killings. Ankit Saxena was killed allegedly by his girlfriend’s family; the plot involved a fake road rage incident and was reportedly hatched by the mother. You have to ask: How awful is the ‘dishonour’ of your adult daughter falling in love with the ‘wrong’ man for you to have to kill him in cold blood, knowing that you will probably end up in jail for the crime?

Saxena’s murder reverses the love jihad narrative in which Muslim men plot to marry gullible Hindu girls with the goal to convert them. It does, however, underline the horror with which Indian society continues to view interfaith marriages.

This is a society where a Facebook post — taken down since — lists 102 interfaith couples, calling openly for violence against the men. This is a society that continues to whip up fears of love jihad, the bogey that the Hindutva brigade uses to keep ‘its’ women in check. In September, a video of Sangeeta Varshney, president of the BJP Mahila Morcha, slapping a young Hindu woman for sitting in a tea stall with a Muslim man, had gone viral. An unrepentant Varshney told TV channels that she had done nothing wrong and would slap anyone who led ‘our Hindu girls’ astray.

But behind all the noise and fury lies one indisputable fact: an insistence by parents, societies and even institutions to ‘control’ daughters.

Cutting across religion, caste and community, there is an assumption that all women (or girls as we prefer calling unmarried women) are simply incapable of making rational choices.

The courts often subscribe to this belief with judgments from across the country peppered with moralistic observations about a woman’s proper place in society.

Somewhere she is told to be like Goddess Sita who unquestioningly followed her husband, elsewhere she is scolded for not taking care of her in-laws, a third judge rules that refusal to wear a mangalsutra amounts to cruelty and, of course, the greatest contempt is reserved for those women who judges refer to as ‘keeps’.

But sometimes you cannot hide your love away.

Valentine’s Day is just around the corner. Once again, we will be witness to a new generation of Indians ‘proposing’ to their chosen ones with red roses. Once again, we will see old India close ranks at these strange, alien customs. It’s Parent’s Worship Day, they will insist, or to use its more appropriate nomenclature, ‘matri-pitra pujan diwas’.

Roses may please kindly be sent to the correct and proper recipients.

Namita Bhandare writes on social issues and gender

The views expressed are personal

Twitter: @namitabhandare