While details of the assault by a male passenger who urinated on a 70-year-old woman on a New York-Delhi Air India flight are still emerging, there’s news of another incident, also concerning a male passenger, a woman and urine.
The first incident took place on November 26, but came to light only recently. The second also took place on an Air India flight, this one from Paris-Delhi on December 6 a drunk male passenger peed on the blanket of a woman passenger who had left her seat to use the washroom.
Although, the man apologized to the woman, the pilot of the Paris-Delhi flight reported him to Air Traffic Control and he was apprehended on landing at Delhi. He was allowed to leave after a written apology and a “mutual compromise” between the two passengers.
On the earlier New York flight, a male passenger, now identified as Shankar Mishra, was apparently so drunk that he unzipped his pants and urinated on a woman co-passenger leaving her clothes, shoes and bag containing her travel documents and currency, as well as her seat soaked.
Shankar Mishra being brought to Delhi court. (ANI)
If that was not bad enough, the response by airline crew and the pilot fell far short of what would be considered basic decency, if not professionalism.
She was offered disinfectant, a fresh pair of pajamas and slippers. Her seat was covered with two sheets but remained damp and stinky and, when she refused to take it, was offered a crew seat, even though seats were available in first class, according to reports.
In her complaint, the woman wrote, she told the crew she wanted the man arrested once they landed. They said he had sobered up a bit and wanted to apologise. She said she was too traumatized to face him. They brought him to her nevertheless. He wept and said he was a “family man” with a wife and children.
After the flight landed, the man went off home. There was no one available to help the woman lodge a complaint. She wrote to Tata group chairman N Chandrasekharan and submitted a written complaint to Air Sewa. An email sent to Air India on November 27 went unanswered.
Then the story broke in the Times of India and in the public outrage that has followed, Delhi police has arrested Mishra from Bengaluru on various charges including obscenity and molestation. The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has called the airline’s handling of the incident “unprofessional” and has issued a show cause notice.
Mishra has reportedly been sacked by his US-based employer, Wells Fargo even as his father and lawyers have issued statements, hinting at blackmail and denying that the incident could have taken place.
Fear of flying
Badly behaved Indian male passengers have been in the news even before the holiday season kicked off in December.
On December 16, an incident on an Istanbul-Delhi IndiGo flight of a passenger screaming at a woman cabin crew, calling her his “servant” went viral. Apparently the man was incensed when he was handed his pre-ordered sandwich and not a hot meal as he demanded.
On December 27, a male passenger on a Bangkok-Kolkata Thai Smile flight, a subsidiary of Thai Airways, refused to put his seat in the upright position as the plane was taxiing for takeoff. There was a scuffle between him and some of the passengers. “Such behaviour is unacceptable,” Union minister for civil aviation Jyotiraditya Scindia tweeted.
In May 2022, a man got drunk and misbehaved with crew, forcing an emergency landing on the Doha-Bengaluru route. Another misbehaved with a woman crew member on the Indigo Srinagar-Lucknow flight in July 2022. Earlier, in April 2021 a passenger stripped on AirAsia’s Bengaluru-Delhi sector. And yes, even back in September 2018 a male passenger peed on his woman co-passenger on Air India (again) on the New York-Delhi route (again).
Unruly passengers
Under the aircraft rules, an unruly passenger is one who fails to respect the rules of conduct or follow the instructions of airport staff or crew members. The use of threatening and abusive language towards crew or other passengers is also unruly.
In 2017, India issued norms barring such passengers from flying for a minimum of three months to more than two years depending on just how badly they had behaved.
The problem isn’t just the booze, which anyway isn’t served on domestic flights.
Snapping your fingers to summon crew, refusing to switch off phones when asked to, and jumping up from your seat to retrieve bags stored in the overhead bin before the seat belt sign is switched off, is par for the course.
“For some Indian men with feelings of insecurity, there is a perverse exhibition of bad behaviour in unfamiliar situations,” said Prof Rajat Mitra, a clinical psychologist.
The boom in the aviation sector that currently handles 121 million domestic and 41 million international passengers led to the “democratization of air travel”, said an industry source who didn’t want to be named. “There are a lot of first-time travellers who get on a plane, see women in uniform and have no idea about flying etiquette,” he said.
When you combine that with how many men grow up with a sense of 100% entitlement and 0% respect for women, the combination can be deadly. “You’re in an enclosed environment with no cops and there’s an attitude of ‘what can these women do’?” the source said.
The problem is exacerbated by an ingrained sense of class. Most people would be subservient to people they perceive to be in authority, but cabin crew, and for that matter most employees in the service sector, are often spoken to rudely in the belief that they are paid to serve and treating them with basic decency is not part of the deal.
A post pandemic world can add a sense of just letting go that comes with a vacation after over two years of being locked down and shut in. For far too many male passengers, the party begins as soon as they board the plane. We now know that it can have disastrous consequences.
IN NUMBERS
Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino
Over 80% of directors of the top 1,500 films from 2007-2022 were white men. Just 4% were white women and only 1% were directed by women from under-represented groups.
Source: Inclusion in the Director’s Chair.
GOING PLACES
Capt Shiva Chauhan of Fire and Fury Sappers.
The deployment of Captain Shiva Chouhan at Siachen, the world’s highest and, at -60 degree Celsius, coldest battleground, marks yet another crack in the military glass ceiling. This is the first time the army has deployed a woman officer at the glacier and Chouhan underwent a month’s special training before heading out to serve three months at Siachen. From the Corps of Engineers, Chouhan’s deployment comes weeks after the Air Force and Navy have allowed women officers to join their special forces units.
Seen and Heard
Source: HT File Photo
“Do not discuss small issues like roads and sewage…if you are worried about your children’s future, and if you want to stop love jihad, then we need BJP.”
— Karnataka BJP president Nalin Kumar Kateel at a meeting for his party’s cadres ahead of the state assembly elections.
From the courts
The Karnataka high court has ruled that the exclusion of married daughters of former service personnel from getting dependant cards violates the Constitution. “If a son remains a son, married or unmarried; a daughter shall remain a daughter, married or unmarried,” said Justice M Nagaprsanna while hearing a case filed by the daughter of a subedar who was killed in action.
Under existing defence ministry guidelines, sons remain dependants until they turn 25 but daughters cease to be dependants once they marry. The judge also advised the government to change the term “serviceman” to “service personnel” to avoid “a misogynous posture of an age-old masculine culture.”
The Allahabad high court has held that a divorced Muslim woman is entitled to maintenance from her former husband for life, unless she remarries.
The Supreme Court on Friday transferred to itself all the petitions filed in various high courts seeking legal recognition of same-sex marriages . It has asked the Centre to file a response by February 15.
In another matter, a public interest litigation was filed at the apex court by the Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind challenging anti-conversion laws in five states, reports Bar and Bench. These laws in Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Gujarat are meant to harass interfaith couples by implicating them in criminal cases and are being misused by disgruntled family members, contends the plea.
…And the good news
Pratima Devi, aka Dog Amma, wasn’t taking the demolition of her shanty by the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) lying down. The 80-something-old waste-picker who moved to Delhi in 1984 from Nandigram was left homeless – and so were the 200 or so dogs under her care when the MCD turned up, without notice, on January 3, on one of the coldest winter days this season.
A day later, with the help of activists, Dog Amma went to court saying the demolition was illegal. Justice Manoj Kumar Ohri of the Delhi high court has ordered a status quo, asking the Delhi government and the MCD to explore the possibility of rehabilitating her and her beloved dogs.
Field Notes
We know that the time spent by married women on household chores adversely affects their ability to work outside the home. Less is known on how social norms impact women’s work choices before marriage.
A study of an online marriage market platform finds that employed women receive 14.5% less interest from male suitors. Moreover, women employed in “masculine” professions like technical supervisors are 3.2% less likely to elicit interest from suitors relative to those in “feminine” occupations like teaching.
Conducted by Farzana Afridi, Abhishek Arora, Diva Dhar, and Kanika Mahajan, the study highlights the strong effect of gender norms and patriarchy on marital preferences, especially amongst dominant castes in north India. This in turn likely influences women’s labour force participation and the choices they make before marriage.
AROUND THE WORLD
In Los Angeles, Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey who starred when they were 17 and 16 in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 adaptation of Romeo and Juliet are suing Paramount for more than $500 million saying they were made to enact a semi-nude scene after being assured that it would not be necessary. Will movie production houses be hit by a wave of lawsuits—think Brooke Shields in Blue Lagoon and Pretty Baby, Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver and Kirsten Dunst in Interview with the Vampire—asks Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian.
Credit: Amazon
In the US, retail pharmacies will be allowed to dispense abortion pills under new rules by the Food and Drug Administration. Patients will still require a doctor’s prescription but the rules will significantly widen access to abortion medication that is already used in more than half of pregnancy terminations, the New York Times reports.
In Cuba, a recent rule change will finally allow women to compete in boxing, giving them a chance to prove their mettle on the international stage, reports BBC. Women’s boxing was introduced as an Olympic discipline in London in 2012.
In France, the Cesar awards, the country’s version of the Oscars, will bar anyone who is being investigated for allegations of sexual misconduct from its ceremony on February 25. Read more in Variety here.
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| That’s it for this week. Do you have a tip or information on gender-related developments that you’d like to share? Write to me at: namita.bhandare@gmail.com. |