Hasan Suroor, an Indian Muslim immigrant to United kingdom, who used to write for the Hindu and other mainstream media publications like The Guardian and is a millionaire, has been acquitted from the charges of paedophilia and sexual grooming of a young 14 year old girl. The 65 year old Hasan Suroor is a Islamic scholar and a self appointed “social critic” who is very well known for his Modi baiting articles and his condescension towards Hindus and pro-Hindu politics. He was caught in a sting operation by an anti-paedophile group on video engaging in sexual grooming of a 14 year old girl, with the intention of having sex later, which as per British law would constitute statutory rape, with or without consent of the girl.
Here are a few lines from the video which pretty much lays out in the open what Hasan Suroor was going to do to the 14 year old girl:
Man from the anti-paedophile group: Are you a British citizen or are u on a visa? Hassan Suroor: I am a British citizen. Man in the video: when did you come here? Hassan Suroor: Fifteen years ago Man in video: Therefore you know this country and are more than aware of the laws of this country, yeah? Hassan Suroor: yeah I know. But I have never been involved in grooming before.
The article argues that this undoctored video was not sufficient evidence for the judge to convict Hassan Suroor. It then criticizes a defence published in Outlook India that compared stigma against paedophilic desire with stigma against homosexuality.
The author argues that the leftist cabal in India protects its own sexual offenders and turns the issue into an abstract debate rather than focusing on child protection.
The article concludes by arguing that this incident exposed double standards in the leftist media and their willingness to protect their own even at the cost of children.
When the initial reports of shootings at a gay club in Orlando came up, there were very little details on the identity or ideology of the shooter involved. The brave objective Muslim journalist and a known liberal and secular Islamist Rana Ayyub decided to use this opportunity to mock Americans for their Islamophobia by asking them what they should call this terrorism.
She seems to have spoken a little too soon. Because news started coming in that the shooter might have been a Muslim and she went completely silent on the issue for sometime to await further details of the shootings. Turns out that once again the shooter was a Muslim, an American citizen who was born to immigrants from Afghanistan.
To whitewash Muslim crime, Ayyub started her usual tactics by claiming the existence of homophobia in all religions. As soon as news broke out that it was indeed an Islamic terror attack, she started tweeting about how gun control laws are bad in USA, which she had conveniently forgotten when she asked about how they should name the current terrorist attack.
It is indeed sad that instead of crying and mourning the innocent people who died in the attack the closet jihadists like Ayyub are busy building apologia for their barbaric death cult which executes gays and lesbians with impunity.
There is a mass exodus of Hindu families from the town of Kairana in western Uttar Pradesh and it has been sad news circulating in social media for the past few days. But none of the mainstream media picked up the story or ran it in the news despite reports that over 350 families have been forced out of their homes from Kairana in western UP. Apparently, the Idea of India and national integrity, secularism etc. doesn’t matter to the communist cabal in the media when Hindu lives are at stake. Media ran a story of a cattle thief being killed because the police were not taking action — the thief was a Muslim. But now 350 families or nearly 1500+ Hindus have been forced out of their homes from the Kairana town of Uttar Pradesh by the Muslim majority of the town, and it has been consciously ignored by the mainstream media.
Despite using Hindu sloganeering to come to power during elections, BJP too has conveniently forgotten its promises to Hindus after elections and has left them to rot. The recent example for this trend is the way BJP has behaved in the recent Kairana exodus of Hindus from Uttar Pradesh. BJP, true to its secular credentials and newfound minority love and development agenda, has decided that thousands of Hindus being displaced from Kairana is not worth its time nor attention and hasn’t called on the State government to take action nor made it an issue in the country. Somehow, 300 Hindu families being driven out of their homes is not worth their time.
If it had been any other community — Christian or Muslim — there would have been massive outrage by now in the communist and human rights cabal of India and the mainstream media. But since the victims here are only Hindus, they have as usual kept their mouth shut and are consciously avoiding any mention about the exodus of Hindus from the town. This is just the Kashmiri Pandit saga all over again — with Hindus being driven out of their hometowns as soon as they reach minority and Muslims reach a majority, just like it was in Kashmir. While it is expected that the Hindu-hating communist and Congress cabal is not going to help Hindus or even squeak about it, the silence of BJP on this issue is even more pathetic.
Either BJP seems to have forgotten that it is in power in the central government and is obligated to help the Hindus there as they are citizens of India — or they have sacrificed tens of thousands of Hindu citizens in the town of Kairana in the name of preserving peace and secularism. Is this what the “vikas vikas vikas” of BJP looks like — where Hindus do vikas and then get thrown under the bus to save artificial secularism so that Muslims can come and take over the generated wealth? Is this the reward BJP is going to give to a state which gave them 73 MP seats out of 80?
Kairana is less than 100 km away from Delhi, which makes this exodus even more shameful. It can only happen in India that such grave human rights violations are happening so close to the capital of the country but none of the mainstream media wants to cover it. The only mainstream channel to cover this exodus is Zee News:
The events in Kairana are a sign for the future of western Uttar Pradesh which is sitting on a demographic time bomb due to rapid explosion in Muslim population. Muslims in Kairana town must be made to pay for their atrocities against Hindus there — but unless Hindus find a proper pro-Hindu party, they will keep losing their land to Muslims like they are losing since 1947 from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Kashmir to present-day Kairana. Next time the secular communist cabal and the media shouts intolerance, remind them that if being intolerant is the only way to save Hindu children, sisters and daughters, then it would be better to be intolerant Hindus than to be media pimps who don’t think twice before selling out Hindu society for their ideologies.
The last article in this series talked about low sex ratio and dowry. Now, lets look at some other common salvo fired by feminists to support their presence in India.
Poor literacy among women
This problem is very similar in its origin to poor sex ratio- that is women are privileged that they are not required to work and provide for their families or the families of their in laws. A man in India, if he is married, is expected to find work and break his back to provide for his parents as well as his wife and children. The society actively chastises men who are dead beat and can’t earn a proper living for themselves and live either on their parent’s or their wives’ money. But this is not the case for women in India. Women in India have the privilege to either go to work and earn for their families or stay home and raise their children. No one can force them to work and if it is done, the society see the husband as evil while if the genders are reversed, and the wife forces her husband to work, then the society sees it as right and just. This is the reality of Indian society and there is no point getting around it and mincing words will not change this truth. This privilege women have in not being expected to work is also the reason why the female literacy rate in India is lower than male literacy.
Consider a poor family, who barely manage subsistence level lifestyle and have one boy and one girl child. Suppose that the family is poor and can afford to send only one of the kids to school(of any kind). What will make logical sense for that poor family to do? Sending their boy to college/school or their daughter? As far as the poor family is concerned, their son, if educated will have to work his back off to provide for both of them as well as earn enough to marry his sister away into a good family. But if they educate their daughter, not only does she will leave them and go live with her husband and his family, she is also under no obligation whatsoever to work for the family(be it the husband or the parent, since if the husband makes her work, he can be arrested for torture under Indian law).
Also, given the way majority women and their families usually select their husbands, it is harder for a poor family to find her a suitable husband because the educated woman and her family usually will not like marrying a sub par husband who is uneducated. This is another conscious decision on the side of the girl’s family to prefer to educate their son over their daughter. Logically too, this also makes the most sense. One can mince words from their ivory towers on why this is wrong or patriarchy or whatever, but this is the ground reality for most poor and lower middle class parents. Hence the notion that women are not educated because of misogyny is pathetic. If anything, the fact that women are given so many privileges including the privilege of not being mandated to work is the reason why many poor parents don’t send their girls to education compared to their sons, who are mandated to take care of their sisters and parents. And no, only lunatic feminists can claim that not being “mandated” to work is misogyny or oppression. Conventional or normal logic is that men working their backs off to provide for their women and children is not oppressing the women who live off their husbands work, taking care of their children. In the end, both husband and wife themselves have to decide what is best for their families on whether if wife raising kids from home is better or if both working to earn more money for their kids, albeit leaving the kids to rot alone without any guidance is better . Of course, the husband and wife can decide to both work and let their grand parents take care of their children. It will be a win win situation for everyone, but it is a topic for different day.
So, one can clearly see that this gap in education between women and men in India is because of poverty and other social realities including the fact that women are assigned no responsibilities whatsoever to take care of their parents, for the most part, and not because of misogyny as the feminist lunatics claim. Also, for fixing this problem, one has to fix the root of the problem which is poverty. Of course, when parents are wealthy, they obviously are going to send both of their children for studies and so fixing poverty would help solve most of the problems. The second step is to assign responsibility for women to take care of their parents in the society so that parents don’t feel that educating girl child is a wastage of resources for them, specially when they barely scrape by daily. This of course is not going to be accomplished by upper and middle class entitled feminist princesses who whine about patriarchy on internet everyday and use nonsensical terms like mansplaining, oppression, victimhood etc. Ever wondered why none of the poor women take these professional victims seriously even though all these feminist lunatics claim to fight for them? When was the last time you saw a poor girl holding placards shouting down with patriarchy in the streets? And seriously, is whining and bitching about patriarchy going to solve the poverty problem in India or are feminists ever going to increase responsibilities for women in India seeing as they themselves are after more power over men and society and are not really interested in taking responsibilities? Also generally the poor women hardly complain about not being able to work because they usually have to work to support their family unlike the middle class women who have the choice to not work and still claim victimhood on behalf of their poor sisters who don’t have this option.
It is also worth noting that as the Indian society will become richer, the emphasis on girl’s education will also go up naturally as a by product of prosperity. Why? Because more and more household works will get automated due to inventions like mixer-grinders, fridge, washing machine etc and hence many families will come to realise that a working wife is better for the collective good of the family than the husband working alone. This change can already be seen in states like Tamil Nadu, Maharastra Gujarat etc, where groom’s prefer working wives more than the ones which will be housemakers. As the success of two income households starts to show in comparison with the single income households, the neighbouring single income households will start to pick this idea up and become increasingly demanding for working and educated brides. This of course will have a huge impact on poor ignorant families in India because educating their daughters will then help them in getting married to a better groom in this changed societal reality. This can already be inferred from the increasing enrolment of women in the colleges in richer states.
This again demonstrates that society evolves because of natural social realities and economic progress and not because of feminist hysteria. One can objectively compare which would have made more impact on the rising levels of education among girls- changed social reality that working husband and working wife ensure better outcomes for family life or because of feminist hysteria against patriarchy? A poor family which understands the reality that two income households are much better at dealing with economic problems will be much more inclined and convinced to invest in education of their girl child rather than believing the virtual reality of angry feminist lunatics posturing in the media and academia.
Malnutrition
Malnutrition in girl children is another bogus argument the feminist love to bring up in a debate on why their man hating family destroying cancerous cult needs to exist in India. Although there is some gap in nutrition outcomes of girls and boys but malnutrition is not specifically a girl child problem but rather an Indian child problem. It is a cruel joke to insinuate that Indian girls are malnourished because of misogyny when 50% of all kids in India are malnourished and India does poorly on every social indicator for all children irrespective of their sex. The malnutrition problem in India is not because of misogyny but rather because of poverty. It is interesting to note that while the feminists harp about how misogynistic Indian society is, women in India live on average 6 years longer than men. What kind of misogynistic society is India where its women outlive men by 6 years? This is another example of how facts are manipulated to suit the feminist agenda and narrative. This narrative is really damaging because it takes focus away from important problem of poverty and low nutrition outcomes among Indian kids.
Rapes
Well this point is the worst among all the arguments presented for defence of feminism in India. Firstly, there is hardly anyone in India who supports rape. It is considered one of the worst crimes and the big crowd which emerged to protest in the aftermath of Nirbhaya case should settle the doubt in anyone’s mind on where the average Indian stands on the issue of rape. Secondly, feminism has not been able to do well on this issue in its origin countries. West has much higher rapes per capita than India, almost to the tune of 1000%. So if feminism is the antidote to the problem of rape, why does the west have such high numbers of rapes as compared to India? In fact, all the Asian countries with strong family values and Dharmic culture from India to China to Japan have negligible per capita rapes as compared to the west. None of these countries practise the militant feminism as in the west. So the real question should be- should India export some cultural values to the west to civilize them or blindly import another western ideology when it has failed in its own society?
Conclusion
The above examples clearly show that the feminist agenda in India is driven by those sitting in the ivory towers, the people who have little to no understanding of the ground realities of India. Given how feminism has failed the western countries and created a permanent wall between the two sexes, India should be very careful in importing these cultural memes which will destroy its family system thus paving the way for it to become a failed society. Thankfully the common people are much smarter than the local feminists and very well understand that destruction of family system will wreak havoc on their lives specially when there are no social security nets in this country.
Audrey Truschke profile is rising fast among the secular cabal in India and in the West. She has been in the limelight after publishing her book “Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court” about the Mughals. What gave her immediate fame was her defence of Aurangzeb as she tries hard to whitewash his crimes and give them a non-religious colour.
While as a scholar she is free to hold any views that she wants, her regular diatribe against Hindus in general is nauseating. This can be seen from the views she regularly expresses about Hindu nationalism, like here:
“Hindu nationalism has a particular history that is deeply tied to colonial ideas, as I have written about elsewhere. Hindu nationalism faces a significant problem, however, which is that it advances historically bogus claims. Hence the need to rewrite history arises.”
So essentially what Truschke wants to do is paint all reasonable attempts by Hindus to rewrite their history as bogus. While she agrees in some cases that there is a problem with the Marxist lens of history currently used in scholarly circles, she wants to replace it with something even worse by completely whitewashing the bigotry of Aurangzeb. Her double standards become clear by looking at the below tweet on Savarkar. While she wants to give alternative explanations to Aurangzeb’s bigotry and potentially hide it, she does not think twice before tweeting a half-baked article about Savarkar, which twisted his words to justify rape.
Her efforts to malign current Indian PM Modi can also be clearly seen in many of her writings and endorsements. All this raises important questions about her motivations behind the inane diatribe she vents against Hindutva politics and Hindus in general. So, what is her interest in India and Indian politics? Why does she continue to do hit jobs against an elected PM, that too based on frivolous charges which were completely rejected by no one else but the Supreme Court of the country?
Normally, in cases of conflict of interest, people generally declare their associations so that their views can be discounted given their personal interests in the issue. It is a general practice in financial dealings as well as increasingly in the media. For example, while reporting news about Reliance, Firstpost usually mentions its connection with Reliance to let readers decide how to weigh the views expressed in the article. Sadly, there is no such practice for scholars and they hardly ever disclose details of their personal associations or the donations they might have received.
Given that Audrey Truschke is becoming the next darling of the sickular media in India and her intense hatred for all issues related to Hindus, it becomes essential to look at her background and see whether this hostility is generated by an inherent bias against Indian civilization. Why else would a scholar take so much pain to whitewash the bigotry of Aurangzeb and pontificate to others about looking at the other sides of an individual who himself claimed to be a Ghazi and slayer of Kafirs?
So, who are the people behind Audrey Truschke? She is related to Pastor Nate, a soul vulture trying to win India for Christ as pronounced in the vision statement for his organization called Bless India.
Audrey Truschke is married into the Rehn family, to the son of Pastor Nate, whose original name is Nathan Rehn, and the family hails from Monterey.
Audrey Truschke herself comes from the Deep South and Bible Belt of the US, regions which are known for their bigotry and support for fundamentalist Christian networks. Both her husband, Thane Rehn, and father-in-law, Nate Rehn, belong to the fundamentalist Christian organization which wants to win India for Christ. Having connected the dots, it becomes amply clear that Audrey Truschke is a core member of this Hindu-hating soul-vulture Bible club. Since conversion in India essentially means conversion of Hindus, her views and writings are deeply biased due to her fundamentalist Christian connection. Her research thus seems to be motivated by the intention of denigrating the last pagan stronghold in the world by subverting Indian culture and history.
The cheap conversions these venomous snakes, like Truschke and her relatives, promote are pushing India into a civil war by changing demographics. Many people don’t know that the reason North-East India faces so many problems is because the Church and Christian majority there actively fund separatists. By pushing conversions, they wish to break India into several pieces since India is now growing into an unstoppable force to be reckoned with in the world. Wise Hindus should learn to look at these anti-Hindu forces and their backers in India like Congress and Communists and expel them or at least censor them from the country. A strong India needs a strong culture, not the poisonous conversions these people bring to our society.
To summarize, the background information on Truschke also raises serious questions about the credentials of big US universities like Stanford, which, even after knowing the truth about biased scholars like Truschke, kept appointing her. The least they could have done is force Truschke to declare her connections so that an unbiased reader can judge her hostility toward Hindus in light of those connections. The US showers praise on Modi and India in public, but behind the scenes funds such anti-India and anti-Hindu studies to break it apart. It accomplishes this by funding anti-Hindu figures like Truschke to build a narrative against Hindus. Truschke represents the real and ugly face of Christian and American secularism. For them secularism only means the right to convert Hindus and destroy their culture. The sooner Hindus realise this, the better. People like Audrey Truschke are mere pawns in this global jihad of Chrislamists against pagan India.
Credits: The story is based on the background work done by @peaceandy11 and @aparna. You can follow them on Twitter.
This article is written in response to the fact highlighted by Livemint today on the 50th anniversary of second rupee devaluation when Indian Rupee lost 57% of its value against Dollar and went down from Rs 4.76/dollar to Rs 7.50/dollar in one day.
What triggered the crisis?
Rupee was pegged to Pound which meant one could exchange fixed amount of Rupees for Pound as guaranteed by the RBI.
The 1965 war with Pakistan increased government expenditure. Foreign aid was cut down, Indian imports were higher than exports and pressure built on foreign reserves.
RBI could no longer guarantee the fixed exchange rate due to depleted reserves.
What did RBI do?
With one stroke of pen, it changed the exchange rate from Rs 4.76/dollar to Rs 7.50/dollar. This eased pressure on reserves in the short run but did not give any long run benefits.
Did it help Indian economy?
In normal circumstances exchange-rate devaluation helps the economy by boosting exports. But India did not gain much at that point because it was still a Licence Raj economy.
To exploit a weaker currency one needs domestic industry which can produce competitive goods for export. Indian firms were not allowed to start or expand production without government approval.
In a floating exchange-rate regime, which India uses now, the exchange rate depends on demand for the currency in international markets. Central banks can smooth short-term volatility but cannot control the currency indefinitely.
P.S. Look at the date of devaluation. Can 6/6/66 be put under 666-ie number of the beast?
The above poster is more than enough to explain everything that is wrong with feminism. The problem can be described in one word-entitlement. The entitlement of the entitled middle class princesses.
But for the rest of the article, lets forget about entitlement and analyse some of the problems in India and see whether feminism can be an antidote for any of them.
The often cited reasons for the existence of this movement are gender gap or poor sex ratio, poor child education rates, practice of dowry, etc. However, if one takes a closer look at these issues, one would find that all of these issues are result of poverty and not really misogyny as claimed by the feminists.
Poor sex ratio or female foeticide
The article argues that the root cause of female foeticide lies partly in poverty, weak social security and the expectation that sons will support parents in old age.
It claims that population-control campaigns encouraged families to have fewer children, which intensified sex selection when parents still felt they needed at least one son.
The article points to Tamil Nadu as a place where attitudes have shifted because daughters increasingly support their parents and some parents live with daughters and sons-in-law.
It concludes that solving skewed sex ratios requires either removing stigma against larger families or making daughters equally responsible for elderly parents.
Dowry
Dowry is described as one of the traditional ways of sharing paternal property with daughters. The article argues that abolishing dowry without changing inheritance and marriage-market realities may not improve the position of the girl child.
Does education breed terrorism? The simple and non-politically-correct answer is yes. The politicians around the world are busy selling the snake oil that poverty and low education is behind the rise of Muslim terrorism around the globe. But the facts and actions of very well-to-do and educated high-profile terrorists do not support their claims. There are plenty of examples to show that education among Muslims increases the number of terrorists as well as their sophistication. For example:
Osama Bin Laden — son of a billionaire and earned an engineering degree according to some sources
Ayman Al-Zawahiri — born in an upper middle-class family and was a surgeon in the Egyptian army
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi — PhD in Islamic studies
These are the top masterminds, but even the foot-level soldiers who engage in suicide bombing are usually fairly educated as well, including the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) and Indian Mujahideen (IM). Peter Bergen and Swati Pandey looked at the education profile of terrorists involved in high-profile terrorist attacks like 9/11 and Bali bombings and found that most of them had decent or high education.
Source: Bergen and Pandey
These attitudes towards terrorism are reflected even better in a detailed study by Krueger and Maleckova done on Palestinian suicide bombers. Based on rigorous sample data, they find evidence for higher support for terrorist activities among educated Muslims. This can even be seen in places like Palestine, where labourers and craftsmen — the poorest in Palestinian society — support terrorism significantly less than those who are educated. Claude Berribi, in his 2003 study, found that most of the suicide bombers were educated and had a high percentage of those who went to some university.
Alen Krueger, who served under Obama as Assistant Secretary and can be expected to be politically correct while giving out the results of his studies, had to say this on the matter of terrorism:
The evidence suggests that terrorists care about influencing political outcomes. They are often motivated by geopolitical grievances. To understand who joins terrorist organizations, instead of asking who has a low salary and few opportunities, we should ask: Who holds strong political views and is confident enough to try to impose an extremist vision by violent means? Most terrorists are not so desperately poor that they have nothing to live for. Instead, they are people who care so fervently about a cause that they are willing to die for it.
— Alen Krueger
Why does this phenomenon occur? It is simple — the poor are usually less fanatical about religion because they don’t have a full stomach with which to contemplate the idea of Jihad against the kafirs. They are usually more worried about their daily food which is hard to come by. So it is usually the middle and upper class Muslims — free from the need to fight starvation — who can think about religion and culture. Sure, poor Muslims do go out and engage in riots as a pack of hyenas scavenging on their group mentality, but it is the middle class which helps them do it and engages in terrorist activities across the world.
The rich Muslims need to prove their Muslim identity, which results in ensuing conflict with their national and cultural identity — and they become more and more radical, emulating the example of their Prophet. This is the reason why middle-class Muslims act like Arab wannabes throughout the world and are the biggest supporters of Jihad. And of course, seeing how British and French Muslims are 30 times as rich as Indian Muslims, shouldn’t France and Britain have Islamic pestilence 30 times lower than India? But none of the research shows that — and the prevalence of Islamism among British and French Muslims is not any lower compared to Pakistani and Bengali Muslims. Doesn’t this blow up the whole “poor Indian Muslim terrorist” narrative of the secular and leftist Indian idiots?
Although support for terrorism is high all across the entire Muslim world, the support that terrorists have among educated Muslims is particularly worrying. This might seem counter-intuitive to many who have heard the lies and propaganda about education solving terrorism, but for any rational mind it would be very obvious and logical. The truth of the matter is, any Jihadist attack requires a massive amount of technological mastery to pull it off. A common poor Muslim peasant will not be able to work with and successfully explode sophisticated bombs, nor would he have access to or ability to use the high-tech gadgets needed to co-ordinate the attacks.
Most terrorist attacks happen due to intelligence lapses — meaning that most terrorist attacks slip through intelligence agencies which are themselves very well equipped. To launch an attack, terrorists need a high level of sophistication to slip through the intelligence network. Operating this equipment requires reasonable technical skills which the uneducated poor usually lack. Also, unlike the poor, the middle-class Muslim doesn’t have to worry about feeding his family, which leaves him free to rush and die for the cowardly Jihadist acts in the name of their psycho god.
Indians are just waking up to the menace of Islamic terrorism and have been thoroughly brainwashed by the media into believing that the source of Muslim extremism is poverty and lack of education. But the studies above clearly show that more educated Muslims will only make the problem even more severe. The educated Muslims will be more inclined to use violence to attain the political aim of Dar-ul-Islam in India. Jinnah, who was a barrister at the time of independence, very well defended the rapes and murders unleashed by the Muslim League on Direct Action Day. One should not expect it to get any better in the future.
The list of Indians travelling to Syria to fight on the side of ISIS has been going up for some time. If you carefully look at the education and social background of these wannabe toilet-cleaners (oops — Jihadis!) of ISIS, you will realize that all of them come from well-to-do families and have higher education. Mehdi Masroor Biswas, who was handling a pro-ISIS handle on Twitter, was a Bangalore-based engineer.
So while India’s leaders might try to sell the snake oil that everything will be fine once all Muslims are educated, it is only going to get worse as they learn better bomb-making skills in government-funded engineering schools. The large number of well-educated European-bred ISIS terrorists, born to second or third generation immigrants, should open the eyes of secular Indians that their fate would be no different. Indians can pretend that Islamism and terrorism will suddenly vanish through economic growth, but it is just wishful thinking. If anything, the arguments and data presented above only show that the real Islamic threat to India will only worsen as economic growth picks up and Indian Muslims become wealthier to wage war for their barbaric ideology without worrying about daily bread and butter.
Dowry is the favourite topic which raises immediate alarm among deracinated Indians, specially the youth who are brainwashed into believing that dowry system is evil and misogynistic and why we need feminism to fight against it. More often than not, these people tend to be young with no sense of real world and live in an urban area. They can be heard and seen writing against how evil dowry is on the internet and how they will neither give nor take it. But dowry is a lot more nuanced issue than many think it to be. It is not all black and white and is certainly not evil as displayed in media, academia and films. It is a sad commentary on how badly the narrative is rigged and dominated by the lunatic feminist academia and mainstream media. Even very simple analysis of the dowry system will poke holes into the whole propaganda, including the claims that it is a war on women. The propaganda is so massive that governments after governments refuse to even look into the issue even though the lopsided 498A law has sent millions of families to ruins since overwhelming majority of cases registered under 498A are false, to the tune of 90%. So, what is the truth behind dowry. Let’s analyse:
Dowry is girl’s share in paternal property
In the original Hindu culture (and indeed most religious customs), sons inherited most of the wealth of the parents. The parents of the bride used to give dowry to their son-in-law, as they would transfer their own wealth to their sons. For example, if a family has a total wealth of 10 lakh Rupees, they will give 5 lakh Rupees as dowry to find a groom of similar status while giving 5 lakh rupees as inheritance to their sons. Of course, the son being the presumed owner of 5 lakh inheritance, he usually received 5 lakh as dowry for himself when he gets married. So in total the wealth remained more or less equal, provided everything was equal- the status of bride and groom. But this dowry system could also be used in a way to give a better life to daughter by finding a better groom for 6 lakh dowry rather than just 5 lakh dowry, thus leaving the son with only 4 lakh inheritance and hence only able to get a girl of 4 lakh dowry for himself. Given that Hindu society of the old was agricultural in nature and had strict laws against marrying within ones village, dowry was a perfect system to keep ancestral property i.e. land with the sons since they did not leave the village. While girl child would get gold and other transferable property, the son usually got the land.
Some people might object to the division of ancestral property in the above example as equal while it is unequal in the real world. But in the same real world, girls were also not supposed to take care of their old parents. Since the sons were supposed to help their old parents, they naturally got higher share in ancestral property. Also if a girl got lower share in her ancestral property through dowry, her husband got higher share in his ancestral property thus nullifying the overall effect on their family wealth.
If dowry objectifies women, it equally objectifies men
While this system on surface seems like it is objectifying women by associating a price for their marriage, it is very far away from truth. The price tag of dowry does not come from wealth alone. If a groom is very good guy with no bad habits, a good job and a good degree, then he is much more likely to get a better dowry than simply because of his family’s wealth. This is exactly opposite for the groom, who is a known alcoholic with no stable job and is general burden for the society. He is unlikely to get any dowry at all for his marriage. Actually it would be a great achievement for such a person to get married!! So if dowry is objectification of women, then it should also be seen as objectification of men. Men are objectified for their behaviour, job, wealth, status and family wealth. The truth of the matter is, the bride’s family is willing to pay the bribe precisely because they think the groom is worth the dowry they pay him. Isn’t that objectification of groom by putting a price tag on him? So why don’t the men go around complaining that they are getting objectified?
The truth is, the world sees someone for what he/she is worth to the world. This is reflected in the dowry system too. A groom with good looks, good job, good status, good family will be more guaranteed to provide a good life for the bride and hence the bride’s family tries to lock him up for their daughter with dowry. Similarly beautiful, more cultured girls, and these days even working girls with good education (specially in more developed states like Tamil Nadu, Maharastra, Gujarat etc) etc will have higher demand than the ugly or uneducated girls and hence would be able to match with ideal grooms with much less dowry than ugly and uneducated girls. While it is politically correct to mince words on this issue and dance around this fact to protect the presumed sensibilities of the easily offended snowflakes, who prefer emotions of how innocent all women are and how evil all men are, it is much more important to confront this issue.
Hence, dowry is a complex system of measuring and price gauging both bride and groom’s worth and is a way for the parents to give their girl children their wealth. But since dowry always goes from brides to grooms, does this not mean that dowry is inherently misogynistic? Of course not. The groom already brings his own inheritance as wealth to the family the new couple will start while the bride doesn’t. So the dowry which the bride brings is only a fair contribution which the bride makes to start a new family. In simple words, grooms do bring dowry to family in the form of inheritance while brides bring dowry and no inheritance.
Changing inheritance laws will change system of dowry
But now the inheritance laws have been changed so that daughters have equal share in the properties of the parents. This largely negates the need for dowry, since bride herself brings inheritance, much like how groom’s used to bring their inheritance for starting a family. Also in some cases, the girls family might give more dowry over the inheritance if they find the groom to be worth it and it should be completely fine. They are not being forced into marrying a groom who asks for dowry but are choosing him after fully knowing that he is asking for dowry and then deciding that it is worth giving the daughter in marriage to the guy because he will take care of the girl better than some other guy who doesn’t take dowry. This is perfectly fine as long as it is voluntary.
This is also another example where it is easier to see the baseless propaganda against dowry. Lets say that there are two families A and B and they want to get married. A has 20 lakh of wealth while B has 30 lakh. A decided to marry off their daughter to son of family B giving family B 20 lakhs as dowry. As per the present propaganda, this practice of dowry is evil. Now let’s take another example where there are two families C and D where C is worth 20 lakhs while D is worth 30 lakhs. Then family C gives their daughter in marriage to son of family D but without any dowry. But after the death of family C, the daughter and hence the son-in-law inherits all the money/wealth of family C which is again 20 lakhs. Is the latter case any good or better? Is there any difference in the reality of former case of dowry vs the latter case of inheritance? Of course not, at least for people with normal logic except brain dead and brainwashed feminist zombies. So why is dowry demonized by media while inheritance of property by bride/daughter is seen as triumph of women’s rights? Does this make any sense?
Is the dowry system perfect?
If dowry is not that evil as it is portrayed in the media, does it mean it is perfect? Of course not. The problem with dowry isn’t what the feminist lunatics and social justice warriors in academia and media cry about. The problems with dowry system is the break of trust after marriage or at the cusp of marriage- whether on the groom or the bride side. Some times, the bride’s side decides to dupe the groom’s side into thinking that they would give a much larger dowry while actually they don’t. This of course is morally wrong for any unbiased observer (except feminist harpies) because it is plain cheating and breach of trust.
To put this into perspective, imagine a groom’s family cheating the bride’s family by claiming they are billionaires before marriage but the falsehood comes out before the time of marriage or after marriage. Wouldn’t the bride’s family be pissed off at groom’s family for cheating? And if the brides family comes to know that the groom isn’t as qualified as it was advertised to them or that the his claim of being a billionaire is a lie, isn’t the bride’s family justified in cancelling the wedding to save their daughter from a bad deal? Fact is neither the society not the law would think that such a cancellation of marriage was inappropriate or wrong. But imagine if the bride’s family makes false claims, including but not limited to a dowry of certain amount, and the groom’s family comes to know about this fraud, why should it be wrong for the groom’s family to cancel the marriage? Is it any different from the previous scenario except for the gender swap? So why is the latter punished for asking dowry, when girl’s family voluntarily agrees to dupe the groom’s family?
Post marriage demand of dowry is unethical
This leaves the last issue related to dowry and the one where state can intervene. The real problem with dowry starts when the groom’s family asks for more dowry from girl’s family after marriage and wilfully creates problems for the girl. This of course is completely wrong from a moral point of view as it amounts to breach of contract. Any such incidents should be punished by law without fail, if proven in court. This is where the article 498A should come into play, even though it needs tweaking in the current form to prevent its abuse. This is the only part of dowry which causes deaths and hence should be strictly prohibited and punishable.
Dowry helps less worthy girls get better grooms
But what about the fate of poor women who can’t give dowry? This is a false question designed in a way to prey on the inherent biases humans have to favour the problems of women over men, the reason why most people in India still support article 498A in current form even though it destroys nine “innocent” men for every woman it avenges, which is completely antithetical to the idea of innocent until proven guilty.
There are countless men who would of course marry without any dowry but one does not see girl’s parents queuing up to marry them. Why? Because the girl’s parents want their girls to get a good husband for a cheap price (yes, dowry is objectification of men for their job, wealth, family, status, power etc) and that’s why there is so much propaganda about the poor man not being able to find a groom for his daughter. The proper sentence or issue here is not that the poor man is not able to find a groom because of dowry, it is that the poor man is not able to find a high quality groom as per his wish because he cannot afford the high quality grooms. Of course there are men who are unemployed bums and drunkards who would be willing to marry for nothing. Why don’t the poor guys marry their daughters to them? Wouldn’t that automatically solve the dowry problem without any state intervention?
They want their daughters to marry doctors, government employees, civil servants and engineers at a low cost. But the problem is, there are other girl parents who are willing to pay lot more dowry than what the poor father will pay for these professional grooms from rich families. The statement or complaint that dowry cause poor girls to not find grooms is analogous to saying poverty ridden people in India cannot afford to buy Audi and hence Audi sales is evil. It may not be politically incorrect to say so, but this is the ground reality.
The hysteria against dowry system without actually understanding what it is is another example of how cancerous feminist ideology and women’s groups pushing for more 498A style laws in India are. They just want to increase the power of women at the expense of men. This can be demonstrated by the fact that the same anti-dowry activists who see that a doctor demanding dowry from the girl should be punished don’t ask for the punishment of the girl for insisting on marrying the doctor without bringing anything worthwhile to the table. This is not to say that money is everything and dowry has to take the form of money alone. Money is but one form of dowry, the other being good qualification, good looks of the girl etc. If the doctor demanding dowry to marry a particular bride is wrong, isn’t it equally wrong for the bride to insist on marrying a doctor i.e. a person with lots of money and respect in the society? Should men take the route of these women empowerment groups and start demanding that women marry them regardless of their qualifications and family status? If that position is ludicrous, shouldn’t the position that all dowry is evil also equally ludicrous? And if Indian parents are more than happy to put in effort and money to ensure a better future for their daughters, why should feminists complain? The west has a broken family system, but it does not mean that Indians who have good family support should also reject it.
Also read: The Entitled Middle Class Princess Syndrome
And this is another example of intellectual dishonesty by feminists. They claim that dowry is misogyny and affects only women. But they fail to acknowledge that dowry objectifies men as well, because women and their families see men as wage earning, high status serving machines which come with a price tag. Turning it into gender war is completely bogus. How is dowry, which is for the overwhelming majority, worked and earned by men (brother or father of the bride) and given to groom’s family (usually the mother of the groom) oppression of women?
For all the loud noise made against dowry for the past 50 years, fact is that the propaganda did not change zilch on the ground. This itself should have forced any sane academic to re-analyse their theory but not feminists. The simple reason that dowry still exists is that it provides a good market mechanism to match brides and grooms. For the ivory tower feminists, it might seem as oppression but the parents who want better life for their daughters use dowry as a way to marry them with better groom in a better household. Since they care for reality rather than ideology, they hardly pay any heed to this intense propaganda.
In case you want to know what dowry you should demand, check this. Also watch the below video by Madhu Kishwar to get more nuanced idea about this issue. In one part of the video she calls it groom price rather than dowry!!
The liberalization of world trade under WTO has made the policy of tariff barriers redundant. Countries are no longer allowed to impose discriminatory taxes on imports to help domestic manufacturers or favour specific countries or regions.
Given the inability of countries to support their home industries through direct tariffs, there has been a rapid increase in use of non-tariff measures (NTM). Some NTMs are instruments of commercial policy, while others are justified through non-trade objectives such as environmental protection or food safety.
One of the early examples cited is a blanket restriction on Ayurvedic medicines in the US and Europe based on safety rules and minimum years of documented use.
The article also discusses US restrictions on Mexican tuna based on dolphin-protection rules and the requirement of a Dolphin-Safe label.
These examples show how countries can invoke domestic standards to discriminate against imports. NTMs require careful planning but can still restrict the free movement of goods.
Technical Barriers to Trade and Sanitary and Phytosanitary standards may erode the competitive advantage of developing countries in labour-intensive and agricultural exports.
The article argues that the West has promoted free trade through global bodies such as the WTO while simultaneously developing indirect mechanisms to protect domestic industries.
