GENDER INEQUALITY AS A HUMAN RIGHTS ISSUE: ROLE OF CUSTOMS AND BELIEFS IN OPPRESSION OF WOMEN

Human rights deal with various issues like trafficking, refugees’ crisis, labourers problems, genocide, war crimes, sexual crimes, lgbt rights and many more. However, the gender inequality problem has been one of the issues that has existed for a considerably long period.

Even in this modern era, it is not accepted by the ‘whole’ world that gender equality is a human right. India faced various dimensions in gender justice. There are a lot of changes in the number of rights given without any gender biases provided before and now in India. Because when it comes to the context of India, it is said as one of the countries which was underdeveloped in the past for various reasons, however one of the causes was the setup of patriarchal society of India. In this article it is discussed about the status of gender equality in the past and the legal changes brought up. There is a role of customs, beliefs and practices for the unempowered situation of women of India. Culture and religion are treated as crucial institutions in Indian society. Thus, are any beliefs followed in the society being a cause of Gender inequality? If it is, then what are the practices that bring underdevelopment to women and what legal implications are there? These are the matters which are to be analysed in this article.