Women in India are safe and happy

Women in New Delhi protesting against the city’s unsafe conditions. PIC/PTI

Sometime around 2017 or 2018, the term 4B began to emerge on social media platforms in Korea. This happened after a highly publicized murder where a man killed a woman because she had ignored him. At around the same time in other parts of the world, the #MeToo movement had begun to gain momentum and women in Korea decided that enough was enough.

4B refers to ‘Four Nos', and proponents of the movement do not date men, marry them, have sex, or children with them. It is their way of fighting back against a system that they believe has long been unequal towards them. Some people (all male, I presume) have dismissed the movement since then, but others have also linked it directly to South Korea's dropping birth rates and claim that it has prompted a real change in how men perceive women.

I thought about that movement a few weeks ago when newspapers in India on one particular morning appeared to feature more stories about violence against women than usual. I acknowledge that such stories don't attract much attention anymore, probably because we have finally accepted misogyny as our birthright and an intrinsic part of Bharatiya Sanskriti. And yet, I couldn't help wondering why Indian women weren't considering anything as radical as 4B or expressing their anger on the streets. I thought those disturbing stories would lead to an outpouring of rage, but the response was surprisingly muted.

It also reminded me of the Nirbhaya case that is now almost 15 years old, and how women took to the streets in various parts of the country demanding reform. No one believed it would happen, and nothing much changed on the ground over the following months and years, but at least there was a palpable sense of disgust which I believe counted for something at the time. I couldn't account for the relative silence that greeted this year's examples of disturbing behaviour, so the only explanation I could come up with was that the situation for women may have changed for the better without Indian men noticing. Maybe it showed that women are finally happy with the status quo and feel no need to voice any kind of complaint anymore.

There is no way of proving this hypothesis but, if it is true, I think the government should advertise this a lot more. It should launch a marketing campaign to counter those thousands of annoying female tourists on social media platforms who say that Indian men don't know how to behave respectfully around them. With the right kind of money invested in publicity, one of our many advertising gurus can easily come up with an intelligent slogan like ‘India: Safe For Men And Also Many Women.' It's the sort of genius work that advertising professionals are always highly paid for.

This absence of anger also compels me to believe that India may be a lot more impartial towards women than a lot of other countries, and we don't talk about this enough either. Take Iceland, for instance, which once saw women in that country go on strike for a day to protest wage discrepancy and unfair employment practices. 90% of women left their jobs on that designated date and handed their children's care over to the fathers. The move was so successful that it inspired women in other countries to take similar courses of action over the following years.

In Argentina, women launched Ni Una Menos, a mass mobilization movement in response to systemic issues that proliferated violence against them. Latin America has struggled with incredibly high rates of femicide, and some studies show that at least 12 women suffer from gender-based violence daily. India does not track femicide as a separate legal or statistical category, unfortunately, but even if it did, I'm sure it wouldn't reveal more than the usual examples of femicide we have all grown used to by now, from dowry deaths and honour killings, to that ancient habit of female foeticide and infanticide.

The point I'm trying to make, by citing all these examples, is that we appear to have become a better country for women, despite all the facts and figures that dispute this. It's almost like magic, where seeing isn't believing, and that fits right in with the rose-tinted glasses so many of us have donned over the past decade. I'm starting to think that India may be the world's only remaining First World Country in a year or two from now. Jai Hind.

When he isn't ranting about all things Mumbai, Lindsay Pereira can be almost sweet. He can be contacted at www.lindsaypereira.com
Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.