Lessons from the Delhi Gang Rape
By Mahi Pal Singh
The gang rape of a young girl of 23 years in a moving bus in New Delhi, her subsequent death and the massive and spontaneous protests in Delhi and all over the country which followed the incident expressing the anger and the outrage among the people, particularly among the youth of the country, once again exposed the ability of the police to ensure safety of women, the patriarchal mindset of the society in general and the hollowness and hypocrisy of the political class in ensuring a place of dignity and equality to women.
Men continue to be what they have been for centuries – dominating and patriarchal in thought and behaviour. So no surprise when Mohan Bhagwat, the RSS chief, said that rapes do not take place in rural but urban India and further, “A husband and wife are involved in a contract under which the husband has said that you should take care of my house and I will take care of all your needs. I will keep you safe,” following it up with, “So, the husband follows the contract terms. Till the time, the wife follows the contract, the husband stays with her, if the wife violates the contract, he can disown her,” or when President Pranab Mukherjee’s newly elected Congress MP son, Abhijit Mukherjee remarked that “dented and painted” women were protesting against the gang rape in Delhi, or when a CPI (M) leader in West Bengal, Anisur Rehman made a highly offensive remark against Mamata Banerjee, the woman Chief Minister of the State, hurting her dignity as a woman. When Khap Panchayats issue diktats to girls and women to wear one kind of dress and not the other or about who to marry or not marry, it is the same mindset which is reflected. They want to remain masters of their destiny and their bodies and to treat them the way they want. That is the reason why they commit murders and rapes and the most powerful amongst them get elected as legislators, the position which shields them from law. And then they become arrogant also not caring for the people who elect them. They themselves require Z-Plus security with scores of gun-toting commandos for their safety and to-hell with the safety of women, young girls and the aam-aadmi. Are the political parties not abetting crime and crime against women when they gave Lok Sabha election tickets to six persons and State election tickets to 27 such persons during the last five years who had declared that they were charged with rape, of which six MLAs actually represent people in State Assemblies today? Is it any surprise that they go scott-free after long trials in a country where conviction rate is so low that out of 1,26,753 rape trials in 2011 only 5724 accused were convicted; where the police connives with the accused and either does not register an FIR and the victims have to threaten to immolate themselves for an FIR to be registered, as happened in a recent Punjab case, or if registered, the case is made out to be weak or the policemen themselves pressurize the victims on behalf of the accused to withdraw the charges, of course not before their palms have been sufficiently greased. And if you protest against a rape case, as happened at India Gate on 23rd December 2012, be ready to be brutally lathi-charged or face murder charges against you if a policeman dies for other reasons during your protest, and it does not matter whether you are a student or a girl or an old man or woman and have come out spontaneously on the streets to sympathize with the victim and to demand safety to women on the roads, which otherwise also is the duty of the police and the political leadership. But they have other important things to do like accusing you of creating a law and order problem and the movement being a motivated one. That is the reason why, in spite of your being near the seat of power, no political leader of the party in power or anyone from the government stepped out to meet and listen to what you and the other young boys and girls had to say, not even Rahul Gandhi, the young leader of the party who is being projected as the sole leader of the youth of the country and the Prime Ministerial candidate of the party in the 2014 parliamentary election; not even anyone else from his youth brigade. In fact, till date, not even in the speech he made on 20th January 2013 at the Jaipur conference of the Congress party named ‘Chintan Baithak’ after being elected as its Vice-President, has he uttered a single word condemning the incident or of sympathy for the young victim or about ensuring the safety of women. No surprise then that the Women’s Reservation Bill for granting 33% reservation to women in Parliament, hangs in uncertainty even after being passed by the Rajya Sabha after long years and the ruling party does not show any urgency for it though it easily manages to get the FDI in Retail Bill passed by both the Houses of Parliament in spite of huge opposition from most of the political parties and the public alike. The leaders of some other political parties, like the Samajwadi Party and the Rashtriya Janata Dal, will continue to block the passage of the bill in the name of providing reservation within reservation to minorities or OBCs. Of course, the ladies of their own families enjoy the benefit of top priority in nomination for elections and get elected. So long as they can do this, how does it matter for them whether other women reach our legislatures or not? Socialism for them ends there and this is how they pay their tributes to the socialists of yesteryears like Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia, Jayaprakash Narayan and Madhu Dandavate. Is it not surprising that in a democratic country where the President was a woman till recently, the chairperson of the UPA, the ruling formation at the center, is a woman, the leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha is a woman, the Speaker of the House is a woman and three Chief Ministers of the big and numerically important States, namely, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and U.P. have been women, of which two are still ruling, and every political party declaring again and again that they want to pass the women’s reservation bill, but still the bill remains un-passed in Parliament?
But what pains any rational human being more is that even women Members of Parliament, who are supposed to lead the movement to ensure equality and safety to all women, show insensitivity towards their plight and concerns. When Sushma Swaraj, the leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha showed her anguish at the incident of rape in the capital, her heart went out in sympathy for the victim and she demanded death penalty for the perpetrators of the crime like many of her counterparts in the ruling Congress. Let us forget for some time the rapes and murders that took place in Mumbai during the 1992-93 communal riots or what happened to girls and women in 2002 in Gujarat because reference to those communal incidents will be uncomfortable to her. However, even her slightest attention did not turn to Soni Sori, a tribal girl, who was stripped naked in a police station in Chhattisgarh, a State ruled by her own party, and stones were thrust into her private parts in a gruesome manner, not by some lawless citizens but by policemen, supposed to be the protectors of law and the life and dignity of the people, and when the Superintendent of Police under whose jurisdiction it all happened was honoured with a ‘gallantry award’ by the State. Nor was she reminded of the gang rape and gruesome murder of Thangjam Manorama, a Manipuri girl, by the personnel of the security forces in 2004 facilitated by the immunity provided to the security forces under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which she and her party have been vociferously supporting, and which is in force in Manipur and the Kashmir valley, where also hundreds of rapes and killings at the hands of the rogue elements in the security forces have taken place. The question is: Why did she not demand the same punishment for those policemen and the Superintendent of Police concerned, or to the personnel of the security forces who committed rape and murder of Thangjam Manorama? Her head also did not hang in shame when many women of Manipur stripped themselves stark naked and demonstrated in front of the Assam Rifles headquarters in Manipur, whose personnel were involved in the gang rape and murder of Manorama, with banners ‘Come and rapes us too!’ in protest against the non-action against the perpetrators of the crime. Perhaps because the girls of Manipur and the Kashmir valley are not her and her party’s constituency.
Another female MP from the Samajwadi Party wept out her outrage in the Rajya Sabha and outside in front of the media cameras but even she did not show the courage to ask her party leader to expel her party MLAs in UP who face similar charges against them and even now they and their close relatives continue to perpetrate such atrocities on women in UP, the State ruled by her own Party, even after the Delhi rape case. Dr Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar, a senior leader of the Trinamool Congress party and a Member of Parliament, herself a woman, said that the Park Street gang rape case of a young girl in West Bengal, which is ruled by a woman Chief Minister, Mamata Banerjee, of her own party – in which the woman was raped by five men after she came out of a nightclub – was not a case of sexual assault but a misunderstanding during a deal between a woman and her “client”. She was merely toeing the line of her leader who was accused of shedding crocodile tears while offering support for making strong laws in the wake of the Delhi gang rape while, as many people felt, her own government was trying to cover up the Park Street gang rape case in her own State because perhaps the perpetrators were her party sympathizers. After the remark by Kakoli Ghosh, the rape victim in that case told the NDTV, “I cannot imagine how a woman can say something like that about another woman, about me. Here I am waiting for justice and she has gone ahead and said something so insulting.”
These are women MPs, who, at least, are supposed to be sensitive and vocal, rising above party politics, on inhuman crimes against women. Is it not surprising, too, that none of them have ever thought of demanding 50% reservation for women in legislatures, as has been provided in Panchayats in many states, or in their party posts, even though they form almost 50% of the population of the country? If that happens, women by themselves will be able to decide what police, judicial or administrative reforms or laws are necessary for them to live as equal citizens of the country and they will be able to take decisive action in all matters pertaining not only to their safety but also to their education, employment, healthcare and social security in all other matters. But what they indulge in, like their male counterparts in the party, is mere politics and sheer hypocrisy! Perhaps they know better than us that their male counterparts in their own political parties will not let them do so, or maybe, they tacitly support them by bowing before their male hegemony, or probably they dare not do so for fear of losing their own personal position in the party for the sake of lifting the status of all women in the country, and to continue to use it as a slogan to promote their own politics. Hypocrisy thy name is Politics!
Nothing seems to have changed in the last one month after the Delhi gang rape and the following protests. Rapes continue to take place, the attitude of the police and the politicians remains the same, the perpetrators of the crime in the Soni Sori, Manorama and thousands of other cases like theirs in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Kashmir, Manipur, Haryana, U.P. and elsewhere, including Delhi, the rape capital of the country, continue to roam free. The AFSPA remains in place providing immunity to the personnel of armed forces and Iron Sharmila continues to be on fast even after 11 years demanding repeal of the draconian law, politicians continue to enjoy the powers they have sitting on the heavenly citadels of power and the security of commandos (for them the God is in the heaven and all is well), and holding conferences planning strategies to remain in or come to power in the 2014 Lok Sabha election, and to pay lip service to the victims while defending their party colleagues by repeating their oft quoted remark that they are ‘innocent till proved guilty’ and ‘the law will take its own course if and when they are proved guilty’, instead of expelling them from their parties or denying them party tickets for elections. However, the angry protests by young girls and boys in New Delhi and other cities of the country, as happened earlier in the movement against corruption led by Anna Hazare and his team, which too was sought to be demonized by the ruling dispensation because that too targeted their vested interests, show that the youth of the country has decided to change things and will no longer tolerate the callous attitude of the law enforcing agencies and the political class as a whole towards protecting women and their honour and giving them their rightful place as equal individuals in society, is a beginning in the right direction and it cannot but have its effect sooner or later, the sooner the better. The determination of the youth as reflected through these protests shows that they want change in attitudes and the society, and that is a positive sign, which cannot be, and should not be, brushed aside. It is the women themselves who have to understand that by virtue of being born as human beings, they too are born with the same human rights as men and they are fully entitled to choosing what they wear and who to choose as their life and/or sex partner and to lead a respectful life with dignity and safety in accordance with their own free will as any other individual. Nobody else will change things for them. They themselves will have to rise to the occasion and lead the nation towards the change they visualize. The march towards that end has only begun…..