Delhi gang-rape: Here's what AP Singh needs to keep in mind the next time he speaks about women

AP Singh's deeply patriarchal comments are disturbing. But they aren't surprising. These are the kind of comments even the most educated and exposed men and women do not hesitate to make every day, regardless of their class.But as a woman, and even as a daughter, I take strong exception to AP Singh's comments.

Lawyer AP Singh, who was defending two of the four convicts in the Delhi gang-rape case, has said that he would have burned his daughter or sister if he were to find them going out late at night with (their) boyfriends or if they were to have premarital sex.

Many have also interpreted his comments as an insinuation that the Delhi gang-rape victim deserved the rape for having dared to be out at 11.30 pm and for having been with a boy. On December 16, 2012, a 23-year-old girl was gang-raped in a moving bus in Delhi.

Here's what  AP Singh needs to keep in mind the next time he talks about women and their place in society.Women are not pieces of property. They do not belong to the men in their families. As hard as it may be for you to believe, women are fully functional human beings, who come with and deserve the full benefit of agency. They have a right to choose whether or not they want to have pre-marital sex. As tempting as it may be to want to burn them for exercising their agency, try not to.

Similarly, neither the woman's nor her family's honour, rest in the woman's vagina. If a woman has had sex, she is neither maligned nor characterless. And if someone rapes a woman, it is the stigma that society associates with the crime that makes it worse.

Again as difficult as it may be for you to wrap your head around this, a woman actually has, and may want to have, an identity beyond being someone's daughter, wife and mother. It is neither her station nor her duty to be identified by and restricted by her relation to the male members in her family

You are yourself, Mr Singh, a victim of gender politics. You have said that you have the himmat and jazba (roughly, courage and gumption) to burn your daughter and sister if they were to have premarital sex. You feel the need to conform to a masculine identity; as someone who is in control of the women in his life, as someone who is duty-bound to protect their izzat. And of course protecting their izzat is far more important. So what if in the process they suffer a few burns and die?

If society is losing it way, please do not lay blame on the women for wanting to have liberty and choices. It would reflect very poorly on society, if in its ideal construction, almost one-half of the human community is denied its right to safety, freedom and full-growth.