Dear Indian fathers,
Every day there is a new and gruesome way in which your daughters are killed. As I think of what I’m going to write without you calling me someone who’s ‘playing victim’ and abusing me in the comments section, a daughter is being killed by an intimate partner or family member somewhere in the world.
Eleven minutes. That is the interval between our murders, UN Women said in 2022.
Even amid these brutal statistics, Indian fathers have hall of infamy status. You think of daughters as sub-human. We are property, something that can be discarded, sold, beaten, controlled, locked up at home and/or raped—by you or anyone else. One teenage athlete in Kerala was raped by 64 men over a period of six years—they were neighbours, coaches, father’s friends.