In the previous post I talked about violence against women, including the practice of Sati, a funeral practice among Hindu communities in which a recently-widowed woman would either voluntarily or by use of force made to immolate herself on her husbands funeral pyre. This woman apparently was tortured and in the end killed by her tribesmen in Delhi; her crime was that she refused to perform Sati.
No culturally relativistic argument can justify such an act of brutal violence; no virtuosity of semantics or cultural self-defence can condone such acts of nihilism and debasement. Any cultural tradition that sanctifies the death or humiliation of a human being is totally unacceptable.
