This week will be remembered for a while in India - this was the week when a girl was gang-raped in a moving bus in Delhi, the capital of India. While this is tragically and unfortunately, a very common occurrence in India (statistically, a rape happens in India every 40 minutes), the sheer brutality and disdain with which this crime was perpetrated caused a national furor and outrage. I got a chance to observe the events that followed this crime through the lens of the print/tv media and it left me with many questions and very few answers.
After watching hours of debates on national TV and sifting through many blogs/articles online, here are some of my observations regarding the incident and the actions taken in it's aftermath.
- The sheer violence of the act was unbelievable - why would any human being do this to another? The people involved in this act were not psychopaths and they seemed to know exactly what they were doing.
- The bus involved in this incident moved around the city for over 45 minutes, went through 5 police pickets without being caught at 9 PM!!
- The news media picked up this story and the extreme brutality and audacity of the crime triggered a strong response from people all over the country. Promptly, there were speeches in the Parliament condemning the crime and asking for capital punishment for the criminals.
- Almost spontaneously, there were protest marches all over the country from all sections of the society asking the government for better security for women and in general for societal reform to improve the plight of women in the country.
- What followed from here on was even more shameful than the crime itself - the pathetic blame-game tactics employed by the government, the opposition and the police, the ineptitude and insensitivity of the political class in addressing an angered people, the political means employed to side-track the issue and divert attention (this includes lumpen elements who made an otherwise peaceful protest violent, the extremely crude handling of the death of a police constable) and to top it off, we had the ruling party chief of Andhra Pradesh and the President's (of India, I mean) son make the following remarks just days after the incident!!
- “Do we roam in streets at midnight as we got Independence at midnight? It would have been better if the girl did not travel by a private bus at that time”
- "Those who are coming in the name of students in the rallies, sundori, sundori mahila (beautiful women), highly dented and painted, giving interviews in TV and showing off their children. I wonder whether they are students at all. What's basically happening in Delhi is something like pink revolution, which has very little connection with ground realities."
A very sorry state of affairs indeed. And it makes me wonder - how do you fix a system which is rotten to the core? Here is a fact - among the 550 odd folks who make up the lower house of the Indian Parliament (and who basically are responsible for the proper formulation, enactment and implementation of laws), almost one-third of them have been accused of criminal offences and many of them against women. The biggest deterrent against crime of any kind is a swift and efficient investigation and conviction process followed by certain punishment. Obviously, this is not desirable to any criminal and hence (not surprisingly) several loopholes exist in law which allow criminals to get away with literally anything in India. Consequently, there is no fear of the law and laws are broken rampantly and flagrantly. While there are many other systemic and endemic flaws in our society that result in a poor and disrespectful attitude of men towards women which need to be addressed, the key issue of the "rotten core" will remain.
Here is the final thought - surely this was not the India that our freedom fighters fought for and dreamt about. The only differences between the British rule and our so called independence is who is exploiting India and where the exploits end up - in one case it was foreigners and in the other it is our very own people. The "loot" went to Britain in one case and it goes to Switzerland in the other. Unfortunately, I am forced to admit today that maybe, just maybe, India would have been better off with British rule.
