JAIPUR, (India ) - Mevar was a typical Indian bride four years ago: a bit apprehensive but very excited about the life ahead of her. But it did not take long for her dreams to be shattered.
** On her wedding night her husband Rakesh came with a skein of thread to determine whether she was a virgin. Minutes later, he emerged from the room and announced loudly to waiting relatives and friends: “She’s impure.” **
The 19-year-old bride’s ** pleas of innocence were ignored and she was beaten and dragged to a village council for a public hearing and demands that she name her supposed lover.
“When the torture became unbearable I took the names of youths who came to my mind – dozens of them,” she told Reuters. ** “But they wanted me to name my sister’s husband, a police officer, as my lover and I refused.”
Mevar is just one of the women belonging to the nomadic Sansi community in India’s desert state of Rajasthan who are subjected to ** such crude virginity tests, which assume that only an unbroken hymen is proof of virginity. **
The centuries-old “Kukari ki Rasam” (Thread Ritual) is not used only to torture women. It is also a money-making tool. “Impure” brides are beaten to reveal the names of their “lovers” who are then forced to pay big sums to their husbands’ families. Sansi women like Mevar often name any man to end their ordeal.
An 18-year-old from Alipura Chhan village, for instance, buckled under the pressure and named two innocent men as her lovers, one of whom paid 25,000 rupees ($535) and the other 60,000 rupees, locals told Reuters.
“It’s irrelevant that she privately says she was forced to name these men,” said Ramavtar (one name), a school teacher. “Here the brides are beaten to make them admit to affairs.”
Virginity tests are common among the Sansis, said Zakiya Inam, state minister for women’s development. But police say their hands are tied.
“It’s more of an immoral thing then an illegal one,” said S.N. Jain, deputy inspector general of police in the state capital, Jaipur. “Virginity tests are not covered under the Indian Penal Code and as such cannot be considered a crime. So how can a case be filed?”
GROWING SPIRAL OF VIOLENCE
Although Indian women have made enormous inroads in fields from corporate finance and politics to diplomacy and the arts, violence against them is not uncommon. A recent government survey showed 20 percent of women have been beaten or otherwise abused since the age of 15, most commonly by their husbands.
But the tourist state of Rajasthan, better known for its palaces and forts, has a particularly horrifying track record. ** In the late 1980s, a young widow jumped on to her husband’s funeral pyre following the banned ritual of sati, triggering a furious debate over whether she had been drugged and pushed. **
Under the centuries-old ritual,** a widow is supposed to immolate herself on her husband’s funeral pyre,** a tradition started in medieval times to keep wives of slain warriors from falling into enemy hands.
** There are also continued reports of infant girls being smothered to death by traditional families who consider girls a burden because of the huge dowries they must pay for them. **
Officials say the main reason for such crimes in the state is a low literacy rate of only 38.5 percent in the last census. Literacy among women was particularly low at 20.4 percent, the lowest in India and half the national rate of 39.3 percent.
Virginity tests can only be abolished through education, women activists say.
“There are conspicuous disparities in the literacy rates in urban and rural areas and among males and females,” said Nirupama Banerjee, a women’s activist. “Illiteracy is a major cause of ills against women in Rajasthan.”
Though women’s organizations are active in Rajasthan, moves to abolish virginity tests have yet to take off.
Mevar, who dared to file a police complaint, is an exception among Sansi women. Others suffer the humiliation in silence rather than face the fate of Mevar, who was made an outcast and lives in penury. No action was ever taken against her husband.