Tragedy of the ‘Aam Aurat’

New years have always been a harbinger of hope, a reminder to forget past, good or bad, and to ride on new currents. New Year reminds of life. Every country welcomes new year in its own style. Here, in India, we have started a new tradition to welcome the New Year. Something which got culturally assimilated and became our very own, that transcends all kind of social, economic and regional barriers. This new ‘tradition’ is rape. And it’s not just rape, it’s a ‘Rape Culture’ that is our new patent. So, it does not matter if one is literate or not, house-maker or job holder, a bureaucrat, a journalist, or a plebeian. If she is a woman, enough chances are that she can be the next victim and if man, chances are he can be just another ‘proponent’ of the culture. Now, that is the gloomy picture the recent events portray.

New year 2013 was marked by an eerie silence. The country was mourning for Nirbhaya. She was the victim because, as a worshiped guru believed, she did not dub the predators as her ‘bhaiya’. Going contrary to the Guru’s belief, the people came on the roads and for the first time in Indian history, the crowd wanted to know, what led an innocent girl meet such a cruel fortune?  After witnessing this immense outpour of sympathy and emotions, and the government promising draconian laws for crimes against women, we believed that these incidents would reduce while we relax in the armchair. But it would be foolish to think that a blot that has stained mankind and stunted its growth since the advent of civilization could be wiped out by some regulations and two months of emotions. And so nothing changed. New Year 2014 with yet another rape, equal in brutality to the Nirbhaya incident. This time a teenage girl of 16 years was hounded and burnt alive.

The rape culture: A culture is a set of values, beliefs and ideas that define the characteristics of a society.  Then why say rape ‘culture’? Rape, people, is the climax of a play that was staged right from the beginning, right in front of us. It is not just the rape itself. The sexual innuendos, the stalking, the illicit commentary and many sights that we chose to ignore, all form a part of it. These issues do not make the headlines; they are not a cause of concern for the policemen or the security guards. It’s after the climax, that we like enthralled audiences start crying and shouting. Sometimes there is suspense in the play. People who were the advocate of equality and human rights, people higher than an advocate- a SC judge, a senior journalist, they commit a crime so heinous, that people lose trust in humanity. They are the wolf in sheep’s clothing. They are difficult to predict. The lesson to be learnt: Bad habits are to be nipped in the bud.

 Also, then there are the acid attacks, domestic violence, and multitude of other forms of crimes against women, that Indians can lay credit on. These cancerous cells have to be removed before they cause danger to our societal structure. The question is where the origin of these cancerous cells lie? In a country where even a ‘gashole’  husband is  to be treated as ‘Pati parmeshwar’ and Sita has to go through ‘agni pareeksha’ to prove her fidelity, it should be no shocker that we think males as superior, superior enough to treat the ladies as their possessions, and this mentality is the root cause of these problems. A culture as such breeds servile women and insolent men.

The misconception: With the recent gush of news of rapes and molestation, we get the idea that it is a 21^st century affair stemming out of western influence. Truth can’t be far from this. If history is considered, whenever wars have occurred, it is not only the men who suffered on the battlefield, there were women who were taken away by the victor as their possession. Then they were tortured, raped and were subjected to ghastly forms of atrocities. To escape this, Rajput women performed ‘jauhar’. Also, during India’s partition, the male head of the many affected family had slit the throats of the women of his family by his own hands. Going back further to the medieval times, in Europe, thousands of women were burned alive after outcasting them as witches, to which ‘chudail’ became the Indian counterpart. When societies further developed, superstition was blown away by science and rationality and edicts and decrees of kings lost relevance, things changed in various countries. India, then colonized and passive, did little to improve the conditions of its daughters. The forms of oppression on the ‘worshipped’ sex transformed. The crimes started taking place within the confines of walls, away from where the laws of the land can reach. These are the incidences we do not see and humans by nature challenge the existences they can’t see.  But now is the time, when we should not just see, but look and look closer. For when we look ,we realize what we didn’t see. Normally, we see a woman who got burnt because ‘she did not switch off the gas cylinder’. We see another woman who got severely bruised, because she fell in the bathroom. We see a teenage girl married to a rich man for a ‘better’ future. We see the miscarriage of baby girl embryo because of unsterilized injection. Next time, we should look and think, so that there is no next time. And still,if we let these things happen, we should be prepared to answers the questions that our coming generation will put in front of us  –How did we ever let that happen? We cannot say we did not know. For it is our responsibility to know. And worse answer would be I thought to control things around me , but I did not. For it is not at all important what we think, what matters is what we do. Therefore next time, someone passes a sleazy comment to a lady, or stares a college going girl, or touches a working women, abuses someone we know, we should not just think how indecent and uncultured the person is and ignore, we should stand and give him what he deserves.

When world war II was over, and the ghettoes, Nazis had placed, were to be destroyed, Charles de Gaulle, the French military general asked some of the camps to stay as they were, so as to serve as a reminder of the levels of cruelty that the times had reached and that such barbarity never occurs ever again. The candle flames, lit up in name of Nirbhaya at the India gate should not extinguish. Every 26^th December, people should assemble there and hold out ways to improve the present conditions. Not, just for Nirbhaya, but for the millions of oppressed women she represents, most of whose story dies with their cremation or in the womb.