MPs complain of sexism

British women MPs have claimed that they are routinely subjected to sexism, writes Vijay Dutt.

Our Indian MPs are saints if the claim by British women MPs are to be believed. They have claimed that they are routinely subjected to sexism and mockery in the House of Commons. And I believe that our MPs back home have lesser average age now than their counterparts here.

Senior women MPs have in a series of extraordinary interviews told how they have been patronised and ridiculed by misogynist colleagues. They have exposed the sexist culture at Westminster in more than 100 hours of taped interviews for a study by Birkbeck College.

The May 1997 election, which brought in Tony Blair also brought 120 women MPs who were later nicknamed Blair babes. Some of them now claim male MPs suffered a huge culture shock and could not shed their old-fashioned attitudes.

Male MPs expected that the women would restrict themselves to traditional women's issues like health and education. One former woman Lib Dem MP claimed a leading Tory MP gave a running commentary as women MPs took part in debates. His remarks she recalled were " maybe about someone's legs or someone being a lesbian". The same MP it is alleged announced while drunk in the Chamber, that he would like to "roger" a nearby woman MP.

Another one said that Westminster to her felt like a public school full of teenage boys. I suppose when our MPs come here late January as part of parliamentary exchange programme, they could hold a session to lecture on equality of sexes.

How long the honour-killings?
The title of Clint Eastwood film Good, Bad and Ugly, I feel could describe the week during which we saw very little of the Sun, that was bad but also fortunately it did not drizzle, and that was good. And it was ugly to hear that almost 122 young women might have perished in the last 10 years simply because they did not marry according to the wishes of their family. Imagine a parent sending away his daughter out of the country just because her lover sang a love ballad in her name on a radio network.

Not satisfied with banishing her, he allegedly hired a contract killer to follow and eliminate her. No one knows what really happened but the police said the girl was never heard of. Her family too left the country a little later. Such grisly incidents are reported every now and then, more frequently for comfort. A sociologist told me that this was indeed a suicide in reverse, that is instead of themselves taking their lives because of the shame they feel, parents and relatives tend to have their erring children "taken out". They would possibly not feel much pain if such children committed suicide. But when they do not, their elders get the job done.

The belief expressed at a recent seminar was that such incidents of so-called honour killings, which are indeed most brutal and callously executed, could, go down once the communities that came in the late 60s or 70s get into third and fourth generation and the original ones disappear. This is why such tragic incidents are now very rare in Indian communities, for most of the families from India are now well-integrated and educated in British colleges and universities. The Gujarati families that came from Africa more recently were already quite worldly-wise, having done well financially and socially integrated in the more liberal societies there than Mirpuris and such like who came from very strict and closed societies.