Editorial: Girls just wanna live

The increasing frequency of crimes against women must be a top priority concern for any country aspiring to be a modern society. The occurrence of several such crimes in just the past 30 days is a poor commentary on the safety and status of women in India and begs a far firmer and multi-pronged institutional response than we have been able to muster so far.

India has been left shocked by the brutal killing of national-level tennis player Radhika Yadav, who was fatally shot by her father at their residence in Gurgaon. Radhika, 25 years old and aspiring to personal freedom, was in the kitchen when her father shot her five times from behind. Reports suggest complex familial and patriarchal dynamics, but the sheer horror of the case lies in a successful young woman being killed by her closest kin — an act that echoes Indian boomer males’ deeply rooted sense of entitlement over the lives of their mothers, wives, sisters and daughters — a control exercised from birth to death regardless of material circumstances.

In another incident, a chilling tragedy unfolded at a college in Odisha when a 20-year-old student, after months of making sexual harassment complaints against a professor, set herself ablaze on campus. She died after struggling for three days in intensive care. Her desperation highlights a typical systemic failure in India: Women’s complaints often run into a wall of inaction. The aftermath of this case saw public outrage, but no post-facto response can undo the trauma rooted in a toxic cultural climate where young women’s pleas are routinely silenced.

Less than a month ago, in Nuh, Haryana, a 19-year-old Dalit woman was raped and brutalised by a group of upper-caste men, eventually succumbing to her injuries. Her family was denied basic rights, including the ability to mourn her according to their social custom, and faced severe intimidation to remain silent. The case spotlighted both the intersection of gender and caste discrimination and the recurring reality of sexual violence against India’s most vulnerable women.

Stats from the annual National Crime Records Bureau capture this cold reality. The latest edition reports that 4,45,256 FIRs of crimes against women were registered in 2022, averaging about 51 per hour. The vast majority of them can be directly attributed to one aspect of patriarchy or another: Cruelty by husband/relatives, such as the Radhika Yadav killing, accounts for 31.4% of the cases, assault and rape 26%, kidnapping/abduction, frequently attributable to gender issues, 19.2%, and dowry killings 4%.

The policy response to this phenomenon has predominantly been legislative, legal or welfarist. There’s no quibbling about the need for that, but there's a need for a more robust response to the cultural aspect of this — which truly is India’s disgrace. These crimes stem from a profound cultural malaise in which patriarchal norms exercise a right over the whole gamut of a woman’s life, ranging from her birth to her nutrition, education, occupation, selection of partners, reproductive choice and economic freedom.

The murder of Radhika Yadav captures the death hold male India has on its female aspect. Whether expressed as a father shooting dead his daughter to assert his manhood to society, or as female infanticide, or as a ‘love jihad’ lynching, its origins are cultural and therefore need a thorough cleansing of every textbook, every grandparent’s story, every film, every vocabulary, every poem and every thought.