I always had a label for every generation of people. For me, the people from my grandparents’ generation were caste rigid. They were so obsessed with it, that even religious bias came second. Caste, however, had mellowed down slightly in my parent’s generation. It wasn’t cool to be open about it. This generation’s biases seemed to be primarily that of religion.
As for ours, I thought we were the transitional generation. We were getting out of it all. Technology, widespread education, better gender equations. We were the change. That’s what I thought.
So every time somebody lamented to me about the condition of women in interior parts of the country, about rape and murder, about communaI attacks and religious riots, I was outraged beyond belief. But I always told myself, this will gradually die out. It’s all remnants of the previous generation. Our generation is better.
But now, a shocking new study shows that 65 per cent of our country’s youth ‘agree’ that boys and girls of different religions should not mingle. What’s worse, 50 per cent of them prefer a military rule in this country over democracy.
The survey was conducted by Children’s Movement for Civic Awareness (CMCA), a Bengaluru-based NGO, among 10,000 school and college students from 11 cities across the country. The survey also threw up other shockers. While more than half of the students surveyed believed that women ‘provoke’ men with the way they dress, close to half of them say women have no choice but to accept violence.
It comes as a shock, but the study report concludes that the youth have been unable to understand democracy as a principle. If we all previously thought that the newer generations are more open-minded and tolerant than the previous ones, then this study goes to show that it’s parental pressure and popular cultures of hierarchy, discrimination and lack of tolerance that seem to mark students of today significantly.
We are all by now well-tuned to reading news of violence, rape, discrimination and other similar outrages. The despair that we once felt has long since modified into a detached resignation. But now the results of this new study, it just makes me plain uneasy. Are we moving into even more disturbing times? I hope not.
Image Courtesy: BCCL
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