By Sharanya Gopinathan
Don’t you feel proud when India makes international headlines?
Yesterday, UK-based The Independent ran a report on a statement made by BJP Union Minister Satyapal Singh on 11 December, along with a quick run-through of other ridiculous statements made by Indian politicians about women. He was addressing a group of students at the Maharana Pratap Siksha Parishad in Gorakhpur when he informed them that nobody would want to marry a girl wearing jeans.
He said, “Koi aadmi agar kehne lage ki main jeans pehenke kisi mandir ka mahant ban jaaunga to log pasand karenge kya? Koi pasand nahi karega. Ya koi ladki jeans pehenkar ke shaadi ke bedi pe jaayegi to kitne ladke usse shaadi karna chahenge (If a man says that he will wear jeans and become the ‘mahant’ of a temple, will people like it? Nobody will like it. If a girl wears jeans to her wedding ceremony, how many men will want to marry her?”).
It’s hard to imagine this proclamation being met with anything but ringing, dumbfounded silence, but we have no videos of the event yet to check and make sure.
Singh has a long history of saying completely inexplicable things. Before becoming a Union Minister, Singh was once the Police Commissioner of Mumbai. During his tenure there, in the aftermath of the horrifying gang-rape of a 22-year-old photojournalist in 2013, he did a phone-in session on women’s safety on NDTV. There, he announced that Mumbaikars need to choose between a “promiscuous culture” that allows public kissing, or a city made safe thanks to moral policing.
He added that he has no idea why activists keep complaining that the police engage in moral policing, asking whether they should engage in “immoral policing” instead. Ha ha. Ha.
So, considering his own dubious past, and the shocking things Indian politicians have said before about how to stop rape (by blaming everything from mobile phones to miniskirts to chowmein), it is of course not entirely surprising that he espouses these views.
Anyway, someone needs to remind Singh that he’s simply got his facts wrong here. Of course, men will want to marry women who turn up to the wedding in jeans. Did he not see that viral video of that Indian bride getting married in a choli and shorts?
https://twitter.com/Rajesh_Arora1/status/869609587237732352?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Also, for the record, what woman would want to marry a man who dictates what she should or shouldn’t wear?