A group of about 40 people allegedly beat up youths in Pune’s Pimpri on Sunday night after they raised their voice against their caste panchayat conducting a virginity test of a bride on the first night of her marriage. The youths are a part of a WhatsApp group called ‘Stop the V-ritual’ that spreads awareness about the evil practice in the area.
According to a report by The Indian Express, Prashant Ankush Indrekar, a resident of Bhat Nagar, had gone to attend the wedding of a Kanjarbhat couple with his family. After the wedding was over, he saw the panchayat holding a discussion supporting the virginity test of the bride, claiming that it was a part of their tradition. Here’s what he said:
“We did not oppose anyone on the spot. But, they knew that my friends and I are part of the WhatsApp group ‘Stop the V-ritual’. So, they got angry and questioned us and then 30-40 youths, including Sunny Malke, the brother of the girl who got married on Sunday, attacked Saurabh Jitendra Machale and Prashant Vijay Tamaichikar. When I intervened, they also started beating me up.”
Members of the WhatsApp group have filed a complaint at the Pimpri police station. 40 people have been booked by the police and based on his complaint, two arrests have been made so far.
Kanyadaan
Similar protests in the past
Virginity tests have spurred protests across India in the past as well. Activist groups and people at large have come together to fight this evil practice which puts women through unnecessary pain and trauma. According to Womensphere, nearly 150 people from seven organisations had gathered in Jantar Mantar, New Delhi to protest against the Shivraj Singh Chouhan government conducting virginity tests of 152 women prior to their mass wedding back in 2009. Despite the protests, the Madhya Pradesh government conducted ‘virginity test’ of nearly 450 brides before their mass marriage in 2013.
Controversial history of ‘virginity tests’ in India
For ages, virginity tests have been employed in India to test a woman’s ‘purity’. Ironically, not just the society, but even the government has used such tests to test to ascertain rape. Examples of such incidents can be found in abundance.
A 20-year-old woman from Maharashtra’s Ahmednagar district was deserted by her 25-year-old husband after she allegedly failed the virginity test. Both were from Maharashtra’s Kanjarbhat community.
In 2017, a government medical college in Patna required its employees to declare if they were bachelors, widowers or ‘virgins’. The declaration was later amended, changing ‘virgins’ to ‘unmarried’.
When will we stop virginity tests?
The stained bedsheet test and the two-finger test are two of the most common virginity tests in use. While the former checks for blood stains on the bedsheet of the married couple after they consummate, the latter, which involves a doctor inserting two fingers in a woman’s vagina to test the laxity of the hymen, was banned by the Supreme Court in 2013.
Even as the Supreme Court has held that the two-finger test violates the right to privacy of rape victims, this practice continues to violate women in our country.
Even though there is an increased awareness about the entire ‘concept of virginity’ which is based on the assumption that women ‘bleed’ after having sex for the first time, not just the uneducated but even educated men and women refuse to change their outlook. This can be ascertained from the fact that women are increasingly going under the knife to ‘restore’ their virginity thanks to a procedure called ‘hymenoplasty’. As per a DNA report, while private hospitals have been performing such surgeries for a while, an increased demand has led to government hospitals opening their doors to the service.
Call it our obsession with the so-called ‘sanskaars‘ or the myopic outlook of our society, at a time when women are fighting for equality at work, our country is still stuck in an age when a woman is judged by her ‘virginity’.
