(Image source from: Mulayam's comments reflect India's patriarchal society})
Gender discrimination is not new to India. Female foeticide and infanticide have been the by-products of this discrimination for generations in India's patriarchal society. So it should not surprise you when Samajwadi Party (SP) leaders like Mulayam Singh Yadav or Abu Azmi make their insensitive comments against women.
Yadav, while addressing a rally in Moradabad on Friday, said that he was against capital punishment to the rapists. The SP chief's statement came in context to Mumbai's Shakti Mills rape cases where the accused were recent awarded death sentence by a Mumbai court.
Yadav made the infamous statement that boys made such mistakes and should not be given capital punishment for it. He even pledged to change the anti-rape law if his party was voted to power, and went on to add that such stringent laws were often misused by women.
Within few hours of Yadav's statement, SP's Maharashtra chief Abu Azmi rubbed salt into wounds by saying that women should also be punished for being raped.
Mulayam Singh Yadav is no torchbearer for women's rights as the Women's Reservation Bill never got his support. However, Mulayam had cried himself hoarse criticising rape cases in Uttar Pradesh during the BSP regime. So people were somewhat taken aback by his infamous utterances. But one needs to see his statement from a larger political perspective. The patriarchal opinions expressed by Yadav and Azmi reflect the party's vote garnering campaign.
The statements are clearly a constituency-sensitive political gimmick. For soon after Abu Azmi uttered his senseless statement his son Farhan Azmi denounced it on Twitter. He twitter post says: "Hang a rapist a 100 times and give me the duty to do so". Farhan, who is SP's candidate from Mumbai North-Central parliamentary seat, had to denounce it as it's unlikely to be accepted in his constituency.
Mulayam Singh Yadav and Abu Azmi are not the only two political leaders to make such rabid comments. Such insensitive statements are made by politicians across parties for electoral gains. Congress MP Abhijeet Mukherjee infamously made the "painted and dented" comment right after the December 16, 2012 gang rape case. RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat had stated that crimes like rape take place in India and not in Bharat.
The insensitive statements by Yadav and Azmi's can be traced to their long-term political motive. Whatever be the motive behind their comments, the latest utterance by these politicians reflect India's patriarchal society where gender discrimination runs deep within its fabric.
(Picture Source: weekandtimes.com)
(AW: Pratima Tigga)
