- Saturday, April 27, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
INDIA’S political leaders are known for making controversial remarks now and then. Some of them are even accused of being misogynistic. And the latest name to get added to the list is Dr K Sudhakar, the health minister of the country’s southern state of Karnataka.
The minister on Sunday (10) said during addressing an event to mark the World Mental Health Day that the modern Indian women “want to stay single” and are unwilling to give birth even after marriage and desire children by means of surrogacy. He also said that it is “not a good thing”. The minister’s remarks at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurological Sciences (NIMHANS) in Bangalore, the capital of the state, earned a massive backlash.
Sudhakar, 48, said, “Today, I am sorry to say this, lots of modern women in India want to stay single. Even if they get married, they don’t want to give birth. They want surrogacy. So there is a paradigm shift in our thinking, which is not good.”
Ah! The modern woman of India, source of all problems.
If only women would marry and stay at home we would solve unemployment, poverty, petrol and LPG prices, lack of hospital beds, potholed roads, electricity shortage, crime and hunger. https://t.co/1GxJCgMsx3— Faye DSouza (@fayedsouza) October 10, 2021
How to deal with mental stress? Just put the blame for everything on the woman. Easy. Classic solution. https://t.co/FhKC8C7f7H
— Sanghamitra (@mitraphoenix) October 10, 2021
Ruing the “western influence” on Indian society, the minister said people are not willing to let their parents be with them.
“Unfortunately, today we are going in a western way. We don’t want our parents to live with us, forget about grandparents being with us,” Sudhakar said.
Speaking about mental health in India, Sudhakar said every seventh Indian has some kind of mental issue in varying degrees. He, however, said that stress management is an art that Indians do not need to learn but need to preach to the world on how to handle.
“Stress management is an art. This art we need not learn as Indians. We need to preach to the world how to handle stress, because yoga, meditation and Pranayama are the wonderful tools that our ancestors had taught the world thousands of years back,” he said.
Sudhakar, who belongs to the Bharatiya Janata Party, the party of prime minister Narendra Modi, faced wide criticism for his remarks. All India Democratic Women’s Association vice president Vimala KS told Indo-Asian News Service (IANS) that it is a woman’s choice whether they want to have children or not and such a statement coming from a health minister is not right.
“It is the freedom of women whether to have a baby or not. He must have forgotten that a large section of women in this country do not have the rights over their bodies,” she said. “Being a minister, issuing a sweeping statement is not good and while being a health minister, is not acceptable. Let minister Sudhakar prove his statement. How many women have these choices? Like women, many men do not want to have children. Why does no one say anything to them?” Vimala asked.
Brinda Adige, an equal rights activist, told IANS that Sudhakar’s statement is “sexist, patriarchal and unbecoming of a minister”.
