In the past year or so, I have seen numerous cases of women being a victim of rape, harassment and abuse. To make sure that these issues get effectively resolved, here is what our government did. They laced the female section of our society with a variety of laws and acts at their disposal instead of fixing the problem at its very root.
What result are we seeing ever since these new laws to protect women have been in action?
One is, women feel a lot safer and confident in our country as they know that the government is ready to help irrespective of anything. Then the other aspect is something which most of us fail to notice in the midst of all the attention being given to the female section.
Empowering women is a good thing and in a country like India, it’s a must, but you cannot always ignore the cost at which you are going to do this. This paradigm shift in the recent past has led to the idea of extremist feminism in India, which is definitely a bad thing. It may not be very much visible right now but it’s bubbling under the surface and I can assure you, if we don’t keep a check on it now then it has the potential to cause extensive harm to our society. Today a girl is being given so much power that she can single handily destroy a man for any stupid reason even if that guy is completely innocent. She needs no proof whatsoever.
Don’t you think it’s the guy who is going to be victimized if such a thing ever happens? What will happen then, which law is going to protect him? None, because there are no such laws made in our country which have the potential to create a balance. If you are not convinced then let me share an incident with you which will definitely simplify things for you.
I along with five of my friends, were in an amusement park in Bangalore. We were having a great time sitting on all those mind boggling rides and strolling down the park. As the sun started to climb, we decided to move towards the pool.
As there were waves in the pool, I accidently collided with a girl and fell right on top of her. Before I could stand up and apologize, I got slapped right across the face by that girl. My friends were standing just a couple of metres away, their heads turned as they heard the sound of a hand leaving its prints on the cheeks. All of them were completely shocked with what had just happened.
Before they could come and ask me what the matter is, I completely lost my temper and got engaged in a fierce argument with her. I was furious by the way she reacted as I had done nothing on purpose, it was just a small accident. As we got out of the pool, the girl’s parents came rushing in to rescue her. Her dad was acting like a raging bull, with his nostrils flaring, frowning eyebrows and shouting as if I had committed a murder. I tried to explain the situation to him that it was all just a misunderstanding, I lost my balance and that’s why I fell on her, it was not at all done on purpose. But he was not in a mood to listen at all, before we knew it, there was a huge crowd surrounding us, wondering what had just happened. It was so embarrassing for me and I didn’t realize at that moment that there was still more to come.
The amusement park officials came immediately trying to get a measure of the situation. On one side was a group of 6 guys in their early 20s, and on the other side, were a middle aged man and a girl who was just being ‘harassed’. Whom do you think they are going to listen to anyways?
Of course, the girl!
It’s a stereotype that a bunch of guys roaming around here and there are ‘loafers’ and a girl can ‘never’ do anything wrong. We argued for a while but it was pointless, they were too adamant to listen to anything. The officials asked us to leave the amusement park if we didn’t want police to come.
Our first thought was to stay and fight it out but then we understood that it will be just like chopping our own legs with an axe. We knew it that even the police are not going to believe us. We saved ourselves from any more trouble and left that place with our heads buried in ground. I was feeling helpless, don’t I have rights too?
What I see today is that the essence of feminism is completely lost by the way in which people perceive it. The reason why feminism came into the picture was to use this extra benefit as armour and not as a weapon. I understand the good coming out of empowering women but for how long are we going to show our back to the harms which it has caused.
Was caste based politics not enough that we also gave gender based politics now. The propagandas of a party should be based on what problems they are going to solve rather than asking for votes just because they have a female politician who assures that she will understand the problem better. I don’t have any issues if a female leader can judge an issue better, my problem is that people will vote for her just because of the fact that she is a woman. Even if there is a guy who is more promising than the female candidate, he will be clearly overshadowed and I am completely against this biasness.
Our society is not ready to accept this and even if you say that we have accepted it, then you just cannot deny the fact that it is being misused. Be it the male section or the female section, they don’t know where to draw the line. We have to understand that a girl can be equally wrong as well, and we cannot allow such people to take undue advantage of the fact that she is a girl.
PS: I am nowhere against the rise of women in our society because it’s only possible for a country to develop if both its sections have an equal stature, all I want is balance.
