None of us are strangers to the ways of a khap panchayat or the kind of cruel punishment it metes out. We’ve heard it often enough in the news. But it was still shocking to hear of a father chaining his teenage daughter to a wooden log in iron chains!
Vasantbhai Rathwa took this horrific step after his 19-year-old daughter refused to go live with the family of the man with whom she had been forcibly married, Indian Express reported.
The girl had escaped from her husband’s home earlier as she was married against her wish. The girl’s family was afraid that she would try to elope with her lover again for the third time.
The family married her off to a resident of Maninagar in Ahmedabad three months ago. Her in-laws were supposed to come and take her back on Sunday. Fearing she would try to run away again, she was confined in the backyard of the house by her father.
“Her father locked her legs using an iron chain in such a way that she could not move,” B.D. Shah, a local police official, told Indian Express.
The teenager was rescued after a social worker called 181, the women’s helpline number, which sent an ambulance to secure her release and take her to the hospital on Tuesday.
Such was the village’s resolve in protecting the father’s ‘reputation’ that the police had to intervene to bring the girl out for treatment!
This is the second such story in the past couple of months that has all the earmarks of horror. In March, passersby in Bangalore found a young woman being mercilessly beaten up by her father, who is a cop, because he suspected her to be dating a boy.
The father, a sub-inspector with the Madurai Police, travelled all the way to Bangalore because he had heard rumours that his daughter was dating someone and decided to take out his anger on her in the middle of the road. While bystanders watched, it was left to two women to intervene and rescue her.
“We were shocked to see this man, well-built, kicking a girl in her groin repeatedly in public. We got off the car and my friend tried to push him away, while I tried to remove his hands from her hair,” Niveditha said.
Despite progress on so many fronts, we still remain backwards when it comes to our attitude towards women. Marriage for women is still considered to be a family’s social prospect rather than her personal choice. A woman’s ‘reputation’ and virginity are still over-zealously guarded before her marriage to the point of actually being cruel to her. And god forbid, if she ever happens to fall in love, then it is an affront to the entire family and community.
Women’s lives come cheap to many of these people. The very fact that they think nothing of beating her up, chaining her up or subjecting her to other forms of torture and humiliation just to protect their standing in the society shows that they probably don’t even consider her as a human being with feelings, just their property. She is her father’s property before marriage, her husband’s property after.
Any significant progress in the issue is still confined only to the urban milieu. In rural areas and small towns, this form of abuse still remains the way of life. And many of them are educated women too, or literate, to be more precise. Clearly educating the woman alone is not enough. Local education authorities need to conduct family intervention programs too at an early age to prevent such cruelty.
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