By Lucy-Claire Saunders
Little did young Rupa realize that her decision to elope would sentence her to abuse and torture.
Rupa’s mother-in-law, sister-in-law, and husband took turns beating her. She was made to work like a slave for the entire family — cooking, cleaning, fetching water. Then they started starving her, forcing her to eat their leftovers.
Sometimes she’d go over to the neighbor’s home to eat. And that infuriated her inlaws even more.
By the time she was 15, Rupa was pregnant. She had a son — and thereafter the abuse intensified. She tried to run away on two occasions but was brought back by other villagers and severely beaten. The second time, they locked her in a room without food for seven days. When they found out that the neighbors had been sneaking food to her, the mother-in-law, the sister-in-law and the husband — all together — held her down and forced acid down her throat. They then left the house assuming that she’d be dead by the time they returned.
But Rupa survived. Her father finally rescued her with an armed police van.
That’s when Rita Banerji, founder of India’s 50 Million Missing, an international advocacy group, learned about Rupa and decided to take action.
Using Flickr, an online photo-sharing site, Banerji created a web space dedicated to women’s rights abuses in India, where dowry-related deaths, foeticide and domestic violence tarnish a country that prides itself on democratic principles.
With a growing number of members, the 50 Million Missing campaign has ballooned into a world-wide movement demanding change of a culture that devalues women when it turns a blind eye to domestic violence.
In British Columbia, Langara College instructor Suki Grewal, president of Vancouver’s South Asian Family Association, is now championing the cause of women like Rupa, and drawing the community’s attention to their plight — first officially recognized 22 years ago, yet largely ignored.
"We have female leaders, like Bhutto and Gandhi, yet there is no equality," said Grewal.
In 1986, the Nobel Laureate Dr. Amartya Sen, served India its first warning. He calculated that 37 million women were "missing" from the country — women who should have been part of the population, but could not be accounted for.
Today, it is estimated that about 50 million women have been systematically purged from India’s population.
The British medical journal The Lancet recently reported that at least 500,000 female fetuses are aborted every year in India. As a result, for every 1000 boys, there are at least 73 girls missing, according to a UN report released in 2005.
Pre-natal sex determination tests are illegal, but are not effectively enforced.
The female foeticide epidemic is symptomatic of a society that does not value women, said Banerji, who currently lives in India. In her quest to launch a grassroots women’s rights movement, Banerji decided to highlight Rupa’s case to draw the attention of the international community.
Her tale is "heart wrenching," said Mathew Coleman, a Flickr administrator on B.C.’s Salt Spring Island. "It’s such an unbelievable story you can’t help but get sucked into it and when the opportunity arose that we could actually help somebody in this situation, we did something."
The photography group raised funds to get Rupa medical care when she returned to her Calcutta home in the Fall of 2007. The acid had caused a lot of damage to her internal organs and for three months she could not consume food orally. She was ‘fed’ through a tube inserted into her stomach and lost a tremendous amount of weight.
50 Million Missing raised funds for Rupa and provided her with psychological and legal counsel. She was studying — improving rapidly in English, math, typing and computers to become an office assistant, said Banerji.
But then suddenly, without warning, she returned to her husband and in-laws.
"She couldn’t take the taunting of her community any more," said Banerji. "What I’m learning now is that a majority of women choose to return to their husbands’ homes even at the risk of their lives because there is social pressure in India for them to do so."
And therein lies the biggest challenge the 50 Million Missing advocates face: A brick wall of social and cultural values that normalizes, even encourages, gender inequality and abuse.
According to Rupa’s counselor, the girl did not have the psychological will to make an independent choice. Instead, she was dictated to by social conditioning, which holds marriage to be a woman’s greatest measure of worth.
"We have to empower women to think differently because certain traditions teach them from an early age what it means to be a woman — what it means to be inferior," explained women’s right advocate, Grewal, in Vancouver.
After hearing Rupa’s story, she was not in the least bit surprised by the mother-in-law’s complicity in the brutal case.
"The jails in New Delhi are full of mother-in-laws," said Grewal, originally from the nation’s capital. "They ask for dowry money and if they don’t get it, they burn their daughter-in-law and claim it was an accident."
Rupa’s tale of torture is far from unique. In 2002, there were nearly 150,000 crimes against women reported in India, with almost 7,000 involving torture, according to India’s National Crime Records Bureau. The reported cases are only the tip of an iceberg, rights advocates agree.
Like a steel chain, the cycle of violence is almost impossible to break.
An astonishing 56 per cent of Indian women believe wife beating to be justified in certain circumstances, according to a recent survey by the International Institute for Population Studies.
"When I saw that Rupa had gone back to her husband’s family, I wasn’t so surprised, a little disappointed, but these things take a long time when you’re trying to affect change that has been so culturally ingrained for thousands of years," said Coleman, a retired Yoga teacher.
How to create that change is open to debate. As in the West, abused women in India remain with their abusers for a variety of reasons that transcend economic status, education and religion.
Banerji believes there needs to be a thorough understanding of how men and women view gender dynamics in India. Recently, she started looking for Indian citizens to sit on the board of her newly created NGO. Their first project will be to undertake a national survey of gender concepts, attitudes and behaviours.
But India’s government typically takes a more economic approach in an attempt to create economic opportunities for women, which in turn will transform how women are viewed and how they view themselves.
In March, the Indian federal government announced its 11th Five-Year Plan — an attempt to improve women’s legal rights to land, installing them on villages councils, and giving priority to female-headed households.
Whether a top-down approach to change is really the solution remains a matter of speculation.
But women advocates around the world agree that the issue of dignity and power of womanhood will need to be redefined for each class and community in Punjab if India is to take its place as a true example of democracy in the 21st century.
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