India is on the road of penalizing for female genital mutilation
Clitoris ablation is extended among Bohra Muslims. Although the phenomenon has been the main reason of fights through the years in the entire World, being a common practice in many countries of Asia, Africa and Middle East, members of that community still travel to India for their daughters to be mutilated.
The procedure is considered a serious violation of the human rights, and many people internationally at world level they take years demanding a law that criminalizes it. Now, the prayer seeks to be made echo the Indian Government.
After the last formal petition to penalize the female genital mutilation in India, the State General Prosecutor, K. K.Venugopal, responded that practice is a crime that can be punished with seven years of jail under the existent legality,because, although there’s no any normative that punishes that exact procedure, it can be considered a crime because it produces serious damage.
Zeenat Shaukat Ali, expert in Islamic Studies of the University of Saint Xavier from Bombay, explained that at the moment just the Muslim Bohra carries out that practice that has no base on the Islam, but in tribal patriarchal African traditions. That Shiite sect, that has its origins in Yemen, is a minority inside the Muslim Indians, which represent 14,2 percent of the 1.300 million Indians registered in the last census. In India live around a million of them of the 1,5 million distributed in the entire world and Bombay is headquarters of their administration and religious leadership internationally.
A coalition of women Bohra contrary to the clitoris ablation financed the first study on genital feminine mutilation in India at the beginning of year. The study was made by independent investigators and the survey confirmed the maintenance of this practice among the members of that community in five States of the country. The 75 percent of the interviewees belonging to this group, 84 women and 11 men, admitted having been victims or to have subjected their daughters to the ‘khafd’ or ‘khatna’, the Arab terms to denominate the polemic phenomenon.
The magistrate declarations constitute an advance step because, until now, the Indian Government had refused that genital feminine mutilation was practiced inside the Asian territory.
