The recent rash of sexual assaults and atrocities against women and teenage girl children in the state of Haryana (pop. 25.3 million) which has shocked the nation, is a severe indictment of the education system in this north Indian state. The outcome of decades of neglect of civic, gender and liberal arts education in K-12 curriculums is rampant lawlessness and domination of society by primeval and patriarchal khaps (village councils), comprising illiterate and quasi-literate elders. It’s patently obvious that progressive values such as respect for the autonomy of women and gender egalitarianism are conspicuously absent in school curriculums of this benighted state which ironically borders Delhi, the national capital. And if further proof of the deep illiteracy malaise afflicting Haryana — and the BIMARU (Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh) states of the Hindi belt which host an aggregate population of 443 million — is needed, it is provided by khap leaders who propose lowering the legal age for marriage of women to 16 as the antidote to the rising incidence of sexual assaults and rape of women in Haryana, already bedeviled by the country’s lowest gender ratio (833 women per thousand males). Complex issues such as the impact of lowering the marriage age upon the education and personal freedoms of women, population control etc, are too difficult for their under-developed minds to grasp. The easy option is to sentence women to purdah, because according to a Congress party leader, women who step out of their homes are inviting sexual misconduct. It’s a bitter truth that Haryana and arguably the BIMARU states, are illiterate societies ruled by leaders with little or limited learning. Although radical reform of school education countrywide is a necessary condition of abating the tide of crimes against women, it’s insufficient. Modernisation of school syllabuses and curriculums needs to be complemented with rigorous implementation of law and order and gender justice in particular. Therefore reform of the nation’s over-hyped justice system which curiously seems unwilling to mete out speedy exemplary punishment for gender crimes as a deterrent to potential offenders, as also to policemen who aid and abet these life-scarring crimes by their sloth and ineptitude, is also an urgent national priority. Yet the plain truth which needs to be highlighted is that ill-designed K-12 education compounded by early streaming and archaic higher education study programmes have ensured that the establishment is dominated by narrowly-educated technocrats with not more than cursory acquaintance with the liberal arts and humanities which teach human rights, gender equality, their historical evolution and philosophic foundations. In sum, while the indignation of television anchors and editorial writers over under-reported atrocities visited upon women citizens on a daily basis provides the country’s middle class some catharsis, the rising incidence of gender crimes is unlikely to abate unless the nation’s outdated education system is radically reformed and overhauled. Resurgent fundamentalism spectre The murderous but abortive attack on Lt. General (Retd.) Kuldip Singh Brar in London by four suspected Sikh terrorists, viewed in the context…
