So in Delhi there has been a Nirbhaya Redux. A young girl was brutalized and raped for months by a person who stayed in her neighbourhood. As if that weren’t horrific enough, the girl was fed fruit juice laced with acid repeatedly, eventually corroding her from within. After suffering for over a month, the girl died on Sunday, pining for justice. Sadly, justice is the last thing she will ever get. Even as she was breathing her last, politics had begun to be played. Newspapers screamed that she was a Dalit, as though, her belonging to another caste would have reduced the severity of the crime.
The ineffectual Delhi Commission for women lashed out at Delhi Police and Union Home Ministry for failing to provide adequate security to the victim and for their failure in apprehending the suspect. Over the next few days, tweets will be exchanged wherein Kejriwal will blame Modi, BJP will blame Kejriwal, and our media will have a field day interviewing politicians and the victim’s family, boosting their TRPs. Soon, another high profile crime would happen elsewhere and Nirbhaya II would be forgotten, just as we have forgotten Nirbhaya and countless others like her.
The victim’s family will be hauled before the courts, where the lawyers and the judges will ask them all sorts of lurid details. The accused, whose human rights would be upheld as paramount, will stand in a corner, sniggering as the case would drag on for days, months and years. 10, may be 20 years later, you and I would not even remember the case and the accused, who would have spent may be a year or two in jail would be released.
Raped by Society:
As a society, our conscience is dead. Objectification of women, glorification of sex, dependence on booze and drugs among other things have resulted in the zombification of Indian society. We have become okay with the levels of crime in our society. Senior citizens are routinely butchered, drunk drivers casually overrun people, young girls are commonly raped and the only reaction we hear is how awful it was.
Instead of taking control of the society, of which a home is a building block, we expect our overworked policemen and our opportunist politicians to tackle the situation. We would rather have our children step on others to grow and blossom, rather than teach them about the values of compassion. As a society, we have imbibed the worst features of the western civilization and have given up on most of our indigenous virtues.
For instance, a beggar is someone who is supposed to be detested and shooed away and not looked at as a human being in need of support. A road accident victim is to be seen as a liability which might invite doing rounds of police station and not as a person who needs urgent help. There are countless other examples of how dehumanized we have become! It is no wonder that such a society has a high incidence of crime, simply because our society has allowed crime to become a part of our daily life.
Raped by Politicians:
The objective of all politicians is to succeed at politicking. Indian politicians are a little different from other politicians in the sense that they thrive on identity politics. A country like India, which is riven by identities, provides fertile grounds for politicians to thrive. A sad side effect of identity politics is that unless a person has a desirable identity in terms of getting votes, he/she is of no use to politicians. Thus, when a woman gets raped, it is important to know whether the woman belonged to the upper caste or was a Dalit.
A raped upper caste woman might be of limited use to our politicians, whereas a raped Dalit woman can serve as a powerful symbol, uniting all politicians. Similarly, crime against people from North East in the national capital serves very limited political advantage, whereas a crime against a religious minority can serve as an effective vote-getter. This way, a crime does not remain a crime in the eye of the politicians but becomes an effective implement to win votes. It is this that motivates someone like Kejriwal to blame Modi for rise in cases of crime against women, this serves as a potent tool in hands of BJP to castigate Kejriwal and so on.
By carefully intertwining crime and identity politics, our politicians are able to meet their vested needs. All this is over and above the revolting politician-criminal nexus that is rife in the country. No wonder then that politicians have failed to counter crime. Voters, unfortunately continue to vote based on their identities, allowing politicians to flourish.
Raped by Media:
Mainstream Media has for years failed to behave responsibly. Instead of increasing the awareness of the common man, Media serves to please its political masters. Hence, the brand of identity politics practised by our politicians is reinforced by the media. The caste of the victim, the caste of the perpetrator and other such identities are prominently highlighted in headlines. An upper caste assault on a Dalit woman, for instance serves as a more powerful headlines than the other way round. Instead of dealing with issues objectively, our media persons colour them with their ideological preferences.
Rape cases in one state for example sometimes serve as more useful statistics than in others. The timing of news items is also carefully controlled in a way that benefits media’s political masters the most. All in all, Media merely serves as an arm of the politicians and vested interests. In this age of TRPs, media holds on to an issue till such time it can be milked to generate eyeballs. Media’s sole focus is on being the first to report. Truth, unbiased coverage, comprehensive coverage etc. are trivialities that are ignored. The fact is that our Media is not mature enough to follow up on an important news story so that it creates a positive impact. News channels will deplore Nirbhaya II for a couple of days before talking about perhaps Digvijay Singh’s comment on Modi, or KRK’s remark on SRK.
In the decades that have followed independence, as India has moved away from its centuries-old values and morals, it has become a prisoner of many -isms. Most of these -isms perpetuate a narrow understanding of the problem and provide an ineffective solution. For instance, rape cases are viewed through the narrow lens of Feminism. The reality is that the monster who perpetrated the act is not just an evil man, he is unfit to be a human being.
Similarly, the lens of Casteism makes one judge the severity of a crime based on the caste of the victim, which in itself is inherently unfair. Another -ism, Liberalism, extols the virtues of alcoholism and drug abuse as symbolizing freedom but refuses to see the grave challenges they pose to the society. As a nation and society, we have shamefully squandered away the opportunity of self-introspection provided by the brutalized body of Nirbhaya. Aside from lighting a few candles and holding a couple of marches, we have done nothing. The reality is we have spat on her memory and the struggles of her last few days. Nirbhaya II is another wake up call. Unless we want to leave behind an India that traumatizes our future generations, an India where nobody is safe, an India where life is cheaper than dirt, we must act now. We owe it to the Nirbhayas of the country. We need to be the change that we wish to see in our society.
As for Nirbhaya II, as a nation, we beg for your forgiveness!