Woven into the nation’s constitutional framework are a host of legal provisions that supposedly guarantee women safety and security, and an assurance that justice will be served to the victims of violence. No other country possesses the same depth in terms of legalities. Even so, these promises remained largely on paper, either as age-old Bills, floating in Parliament, waiting to be transformed into an Act, or they got tangled up in the web of politics, former chairperson of the Kerala State Women’s Commission D. Sreedevi has said.
She was speaking at a ‘Table Talk’ on core women’s rights issues and possible solutions, a discussion convened by the State committee of the Welfare Party of India.
She spoke about how an endemic patriarchal mindset in the country was quietly irked by the protests sparked off by the recent gang-rape of a student in New Delhi, protests that largely figured women at the vanguard.
A reaction to this could translate into even more attacks, Ms. Sreedevi said, urging those present to keep the movement alive, until the question of women’s rights was stripped of all political baggage and considered top priority on the agenda of both the Union and the State governments.
She said more discussions needed to be held on what had led to such a dire situation.
