“A Seat at the table” - Lilly Singh

Domestic violence against women is high everywhere and let’s not just go with statistics because a lot of women don’t report what happened to them. So the numbers are not always accurate. I would say multiply that by 2

Australia does not have millions of missing baby girls like India, South Korea and China. Australia did not have legal marital rape up until a couple of years ago. Australia does not have dowry deaths. Australia does not, and has not ever, advocated for women to burn themselves on the funeral pyres of their husbands. Do not compare a monsoon to a light drizzle. Women face many, many injustices in the western world too, but don’t try to obfuscate the facts in an attempt to proclaim Jai Hind. I love India and my heritage but I’m not blinded by it. I wish my story was as rare as you think it is, but the data simply does not agree with you. You are speaking about a very select community that does not represent the reality for women across India. Even in Kerala and the likes, women’s education does not make them immune to sex based violence and discrimination. There is immense shame in india when a woman is raped, and she is less likely to report it, she’s less likely to be believed to have been a victim of sexual or physical assault at the hands of her husband and god forbid she goes out alone at night. The Gulabi Gang wouldn’t exist in india happened to be such a magical place free of misogyny and violence. You are either arguing in bad faith or your patriotism is blinding you. Australian girls are not relegated to menstruation huts or subject to “Eve teasing” on a regular basis. I can admit when my country lacks in fairness or acceptable treatment. 2 women die weekly in Australia from domestic violence and I speak out about it whenever I can as this is a terrifying trend. Why can’t you see the very misogyny before your eyes in your country? Your statement is basically the equivalent of saying Americans have no problems with gun control. Perhaps you feel safe going out alone in india, wearing clothes that you see fit, but I assure you, you are only speaking for yourself and a select minority of women. I visit india yearly and don clothes that would rarely be necessary in Sydney or Cairns per se and have still been stalked by groups of men and then blamed for it bc my jeans were “too tight.”

You mention that millions out of 1.2bn don’t count, yet you forget only half of those are women (Or less considering how often Indians abort female foeti or kill infant girls - Modi has incentivised birthing female children, and why would this be necessary if the sex ratio wasn’t so badly tampered with) and the VAST majority of them do not live in your dreamland. You’re speaking for about 1-2% of the population but go off, I guess.

ETA: no woman will ever experience true freedom, but the west is a lot closer to it than India, Saudi, Iran, Iraq etc etc, literally just look up the gender equality index to see how incorrect your assertions are,

No. Half a billion healthy women who chose to be in India would like to disagree with you. I am among them and would rather spend my days in India (wfm, work is flexible). Women's issues are a global thing. If I'd tell the things I hear done to white women by their men, you wouldn't believe but hell if someone pointed out the struggles of our mothers to maintain the status quo in India. Again, scrotes from some parts of these regions migrate and not all of the whole country. Wanna know why? Let's agree to disagree. Freedom for women is still the best in India, granted if they are free at all and we do our best to make other cultures within India more inclusive of women.