Letters to the Editor
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Hmmm...
Of course presumption of innocence is preferable.
I wonder why they're doing it this way. I only have guesses until I pull up more articles.
The first it to prevent ten years of "investigating" after a woman is burned alive in her own home and then coming to the "gee, trail has gone cold" conclusion so nobody is ever prosecuted.
The second is that everybody KNOWS when a woman has been murdered by her inlaws, so just haul them all in and see if they can come up with some explaination that exhonerates them. Meanwhile, when the family down the block is locked up pending trial you're less likely to set someone on fire yourself.
Not saying either is justification, but I can see why they are tempting.
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enough multiculturalism
We as Americans need to come out and say it. Our culture may be f-ed up, but the cultures of a great many nations remain inferior to ours. Stop celebrating multiculturalim. Quite a few other cultures are bad and deserve no respect.
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I'm with you
People who insist in living in the Bronze Age need to stay there and we here who are enamored of exotic foreign cultures with funny headgear and historical violence need to join them. Eventually we will tolerate ourselves to death.
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Convenient
It really is convenient that some cultures are entirely bad and some are entirely good and we can unilaterally reject or accept them as is appropriate.
So much more efficient than seeing them as complex and made up of differing individuals.
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Christianity's secret
It's fashionable to bash Christianity and to highlight many of its developed misogyny, yet in the pagan culture in which Christianity arose it was an exception when it came to women. Read Rodney Stark's " The Rise of Christianity." Early Christians took upon themselves to rescue infant girls from exposure and women joined the new religion because of its view of marriage, one in which the woman had equal sexual and divorce rights. Then there are the annoying Christian missionaries, like Amy Carmichael who devoted her life to saving girls from temple prostitution in India.
When Christianity is true to its roots it's a great liberating force for women. When it adopts the surrounding cultures attitudes it loses it power. Today cultures that benefited from early Christian influence remain the most women positive in the world. Think about it.
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Yet another law?
India often goes way overboard in creating laws, especially when it comes to defending the "fairer sex". But, ultimately, that means zilch to the lives of women because laws in India are rarely meant to be executed.
You can escape the scourge of dowry if you are lucky enough to grow up in one of the more liberal metros where dowry is indeed a thing of the past, especally among the middle and upper classes. In the rest of the country, there are few marriages without some sort of dowry. Dowry is the reason for female foeticide (and a fat lot of good has been done by legislation!) - if you are unlucky enough to have a girl child, you spend your life saving money for her marriage.
We were told that education was our ticket out. Bullshit! In one of the premier technological institutions in the country, I watched my fellow students from the north spend their time preparing for civil services - apparently, in the hierarchy of dowry, civil servants were one of the top earners. In the silicon valley of India's south, I realized with horror that many female software engineers saved money to pay for their dowry. I know of a few of these marriages which ended in divorce - and the guys family walked away with the loot, laws notwithstanding.
However, for those of you who would use India's dowry system to crow about the superior culture of the west - give me a break! I had to travel all the way from the third world to the US to learn that it was uncool for a girl to study and enjoy studying math and physics.
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Think again...
I don't think the issue is really Western legal standards versus other cultures' circumstances, but rather about the unusual circumstances of trying to legislate cultural change. The presumption of innocence depends on the notion that innocence--compliance with the law--is assumed to be the normal state if the law enshrines the culture's own values. Deviance gets punished. But if the culture and all the weight of tradition support a situation that legislators are trying to change, then it makes sense to presume guilt, because statistically at least, "guilt" is still normal.
What they are doing is very ambitious, and we should get off our high Western horses.
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Yeh because
the Western conception of "uncoolness" is totally equivalent to infanticide, selective abortion of female babies, financial extortion, etc.
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Get Real
To Ms. Lloyd and other posters: a brief internet search suggests the spousal murder rate in the US isn't so much lower that we can brag (about 77 percent of India's).
And for India bashers who think we're so civilized, don't forget that we lead the world in: gun deaths, child imprisonment and executions. Also, since WWII, we have killed more people through direct or funded invasions than any other nation -- and that includes a lot of dead women, don't you know.
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Keep hacking at strawmen
Well, capitalist_pig....if you would really want to compare, maybe we could start comparing domestic violence between the two countries, date rapes, deadbeat dads, abortion rights (who ever thought that could be an issue in India?)....
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re: To Ms. Lloyd and other posters: a brief internet search suggests the spousal murder rate in the US isn't so much lower that we can brag (about 77 percent of India's).
Probably the immigrants from Inida and the Middle east!
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Take it easy folks
Seems like some posters have a chip on their shoulders.
Give India a break, they have come a long way in a short time, and are moving in the right direction. As the world's largest democracy, established thru non-violent means, surely they have something to teach us all. You simply can't expect a traditional culture to instantly modernize, these things take time.
Nor does anybody need to bash the US either. We've got our issues too, but we've also come a long way in a short period of time. It hasn't been that long since women couldn't vote, or segregation was in full swing. Don't worry, we'll get there - "there is nothing wrong with America that can't be fixed by what is right with America".
As for the dowry death issue, that law seems ripe for abuse. Have a business or political rival? Perhaps an old score to settle? Hire somebody to poison their wife within 7 years of their marriage, and they are out of the picture. How could they possibly have an alibi for an act that could have happened within the last few days when the person is somebody they sleep in the same bed with?