Rape -EXTRA ORDINARY ISSUE

Pritish Nandy

No shades of grey here

    There’s no sex in rape. No love. No pleasure. Except that which comes from inflicting pain. There’s no pride either, the pride that comes from killing someone for what you believe in. Rape doesn’t even empower you because power comes from defeating an enemy stronger than you. To inflict pain on someone weaker is an admission of cowardice, particularly when you attack her in a pack. So why do so many rapes, gangrapes take place every day, every few minutes in this country we so proudly call our own? And, as we all know, 85 per cent rapes are not even reported out of shame or fear of reprisal. Even when they are, in 50 per cent cases the police don’t file FIRs. As for Dalits, no one so much as raises an eyebrow when they are raped or killed. And when law makers and law enforcers do it, the State machinery goes into overdrive to deny it.
    In short, a rape doesn’t occur every 20 minutes as we claim. It occurs every 2 to 3 minutes. As for molestation, it’s nonstop. There are women I know who claim they face it every day, the moment they step out of their homes, and at times even at home. Crimes against women are not about statistics. There is a tragic inevitability about them. Women in India flirt with danger, not with men. What’s more humiliating, they have to hear homilies from those who inflict violence on them on how they ought to dress, walk, talk, behave and go to work.
    Obviously something is wrong. Either with us or our women who we love to rape, molest, kill. If numbers are any indicator, it would appear there’s no place for love, romance or even pleasurable sex in our relationships. How is that possible when so much of our religion, our culture, our literature celebrate love? Are our novels fake? Our movies too? Our music? Our poetry? Did Kalidas fake it? Have we been hiding a conflict for centuries? We worship so many goddesses. We respect our mothers, our sisters and yet when we have daughters we sulk for days on end. Our abuses are all vulgarly sexist.
    I guess the problem lies in hypocrisy. We lie about all things all the time. As a nation we live in constant denial. Or else the highest planning body would not argue that an urban Indian can get by on Rs 32 a day. We talk of GDP growth, FDI in retail, economic reforms but we can’t get the simple things right. Safety for women. Drinking water. Public toilets. Shelters for the homeless. Swift justice. And you can’t just blame the Government for it. They are a bunch of incompetent idiots, true. But even when they do some things right, we are the first to destroy them. We must be the only nation in the world that loves to vandalise its own heritage. The same guy who stabs his girlfriend when she turns him away, scrawls her name with the same knife all over a historic temple wall.
    Our disconnect is not only with women but with nature, wild life, street animals, children, forests, rivers, seas, hill stations, parks. Everything in fact. All things exist only to be raped, plundered, beaten or despoiled. You can make laws stronger. You can blame the system. You can demand the death penalty. You can ask for a ban on item numbers. You can demand censorship on Facebook and Twitter. But till we, as a people, learn how to respect what we have, nothing will ever change.
    Fear does not make the world better. Hope could. And we can only hope for a better, safer India if we stop blaming others and show more courage and self-esteem. The truth is if one of us had stopped that fateful night and picked up the girl who lay bleeding on the street for two hours, taken her to hospital, she would be alive today. We didn’t. We didn’t care enough. Not all the outrage, not all the candlelight marches can hide that simple, tragic fact — Rape is awful. Indifference is infinitely worse.
    (Views expressed by columnists in Bombay Times
    are their own, and not that of the paper.)