A spate of rapes: This is no country for women
In the protests over the December 2012 gang-rape of a physiotherapy student, we didn’t ask about her religion. We didn’t put labels on our fellow protesters’ ideology. And we certainly didn’t entertain any of the usual questions about what she was wearing and why she was out after dark.
Our collective anger resulted in a new law and while we believed that mindset change would take longer, we trusted that it would inevitably follow.
How far we’ve descended in six years became clear as news of the premeditated gang-rape, torture and murder of an eightyear-old girl in Kathua began to gain traction.
In the long course of a brief fortnight, rapes of minor girls are being reported from Unnao in Uttar Pradesh, Surat, Kulgam in Kashmir, and Nagaon in Assam. Rape and its attendant brutality is now an everyday crime, grotesquely ordinary in its routineness, recounted in almost dull, graphic detail. This is the India we now accept.
But Kathua tells us something more. It tells us that there is no room for debate on a crime as awful as rape. It exposes the deeply polarised fault-lines that were absent in 2012.
One side is out on the streets protesting from Delhi to Kochi, agitating, organising, venting.
The other side functions as rape apologists, not bothering to conceal its support for rapists and rape culture. Where in the civilised world do you have marches in favour of those accused of rape? The two BJP MLAs who attended the Hindu Ekta Manch rally have now resigned. But no action has been taken against the Kathua Bar Association lawyers for physically trying to prevent the police from filing a charge sheet? This is unprecedented.
How do we explain the fact that we no longer speak in one voice to condemn an outrageous crime? Do we really need to append our conversations with a ‘but’ and a ‘whatabout’?
Does it take days for Prime Minister Narendra Modi to issue a statement with all the usual platitudes about justice for India’s daughters?
How do we understand Rahul Gandhi taking his own time to finally descend to India Gate with his candles and his belated outrage?
When Bollywood actors post selfies expressing their outrage, we question their motives; or why one of them was wearing make-up? This is our discourse? And then a male journalist tweets: “When your cup size dwarfs your IQ.” This is our understanding of women’s dignity and self-assertion?
The past two weeks have been a sombre and depressing lesson to the women of India. It tells us what priority politicians accord to us. It shows us how our bodies, even those of our children, are so easily dispensable. It confirms rape culture has seeped into the very soil of our nation.
It shows the absence of leadership and the decline of basic decency. I fear for my daughters, and yours. If we want to be successful in life we should dream big. I tell youngsters if they dream big they can achieve their goals. Of course, merely dreaming big will not work but they have to work hard, too. Once I was talking to a young guy. All of us were waiting for an author, who was the chief guest of the event.
The guy looked disturbed and when I asked him the reason, he told me that he does not want to wait for the chief guest but wants to be the chief guest. I was amazed by his big dream and asked what he was doing to achieve his goal. He didn’t have an answer. He was just dreaming but not working hard for it.
We hear stories of successful people who’ve chased their dreams despite facing adversities.
Albert Einstein was a late learner and couldn’t speak till the age of four. Despite this he went on to discover the photoelectric effect and relativity theory. Although small dreams are important, we should chase big goals to be successful. If we dream to touch the sky, we may touch the skyscraper, and if we dream to touch a skyscraper we may end up touching only a small building.