India: Releasing female prisoners must be a priority during COVID-19

A sexist and prejudiced article by Gopalkrishna Gandhi, advocating women to be treated as first-class prisoners and men to be treated as second-class prisoners. This is the kind of anti-men and biased attitude still prevalent in India. Excerpt:

'The first reason can, for sheer simplification of argument, be called ‘biological’. Though crime is crime and a prisoner is a prisoner, the woman does happen to be different from the man just ‘in the way she is’. I am not attempting a biomedical stance here, nor entering some arcane zone of biochemistry. And I am not portraying her as the ‘weaker sex’, the quintessential abala. Women are in a sense less strong than men but they are not weaklings, or less ‘abled’ than men.

I am only adverting to the norm of civility that makes men in a sinking ship or a crash-landed aircraft have the evacuation principle of ‘women and children first’. The norm of women (and inseparable from them, their children) being given the privilege of monitored release for obviating Covid-19 priority continues the same norm. And this has to have stemmed from the fact that women menstruate, can become pregnant, lactate, undergo menopause. And in all those recurrent and inescapable conditions are inherently enfeebled and vulnerable to physical distress including, very specifically, emotional distress. Her physical and emotional constitution entitles the female of the species to a level of care above that of the male.'