And it starts again. Smriti Irani waving soap operatic fingers. Sanjay Raut blaming it all on Bangladeshi immigrants.Ministers reducing rape to rhetoric, screaming at each other in Rajya Sabha. People on the streets waving banners. Mumbai being labelled as a city of Maximum Horror just as Delhi was named the Rape Capital after the Nirbhaya tragedy. We are frothing at the mouth again. It’s all so familiar. We have been here before. We will be here again maybe tomorrow, maybe the day after. Maybe everyday because gender crimes don’t stop in India. They reach new highs. And lows. And the cycle of ebb in outrage and sudden outpourings of anger will go on.
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Time however will stop for a while for the young girl who was out on a shoot with a male colleague before she was raped by five men in Mumbai. She will not work for a while perhaps. Her body will not look or feel the same for a long time. Hopefully she will heal. Hopefully, she will realise that she is bigger than her violation. That what happened to her was not her fault. That not every man she encounters on a street in the future is a potential rapist. That she is still a whole, inviolable person entitled to a full, fearless life. That as actor Rajat Kapoor wrote on his timeline, “fear is not an option.” That she is not a victim but a survivor. But these are words. Hollow and meaningless because none of us were there when it happened. None of us are inside her head right now, going through her trauma. None of us are her.
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The irony. That after 66 years of freedom, a woman photographer going about her work becomes the target of mindless, random, sexual violence. That even after 66 years of this so called freedom, we still wake up to the news of an anti-superstition activist being shot to death. To rhetoric that confuses religion with nationalism and yet, has people responding with cathartic glee as if they have lived in suppression for far too long and it’s time to exhale. To the news of jawans being butchered across the LOC, more than a dozen sailors dead in a submarine disaster. 80 per cent spurt in dengue cases because we cannot manage our garbage, water logging and well yes, the mosquitoes in our backyards. Forget the bigger issues like gender violence across the country. .
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66 years of freedom. From what? As one issue after another, brings us to the boil, right from the undignified scramble for Prime Ministerial candidature, to the fall of the Rupee, to surly neigbours across the border crossing lines in more ways than one, scams and political mongering over every single thing, we may ask ourselves this. Post independence, have we really left behind the demons that split us apart? Or have we created new ones?
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It still takes just a token gesture of hate to start a riot. A film with a controversial subject to be banned across a state. A spirited retort to invite an acid attack. Rape needs no excuse. It happens because it can. Anywhere the perpetrators choose to commit it..
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The other day during a panel discussion about how safe women really are in Bangalore, in the studio of a local TV channel, the mother of a young girl who was almost kidnapped by an auto driver, said over the phone that she would not file a police complaint because the driver knew where their house was. Who would protect them if the guy got vengeful after a police complaint? A retired police officer sitting next to me said that men were basically beasts looking to hunt so what more could we expect from them? College girls spoke about their concerns as they had to commute everyday without reliable and safe public transport. The auto drivers were blamed. The police was blamed. And the question we forgot to ask ourselves was this. When we demand day and night patrolling of our streets and ask for accountability, what do we do when we suffer a gender crime or see it being committed? Do we file a report, help the victim or do we just take refuge in silence because it is much safer to pretend nothing happened? I just saw a young woman on TV saying women in professions that require them to move around should not dress to “attract” attention. This reminded me of a certain Asaram Bapu who had suggested that if Nirbhaya had pleaded for mercy and called her rapists ‘bhaiya,‘ they would have spared her. It reminded me of a lawyer in Delhi who said that no “decent” woman is ever raped!
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This in a country where Asaram himself is facing charges of sexual exploitation of a young girl. And five year olds, who do not even know the meaning of rape or provocation are violated. Don’t we pass on gender prejudices to our children? Do we not teach our daughters to be always afraid and never “ask for it” because that is what it has boiled down to, isn’t it? It isn’t about this city or that, It isn’t just about good or bad policing. It is about who we have become. What our culture has been reduced to. Who are we teaching our boys and girls to be when we enjoy sexual violence, sexist ads and item numbers in cinema and watch regressive soaps without blinking?
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When popular websites do not filter gender insensitive remarks on posts about women, they know the less they interfere, the more visitors they will get. And how many of us replayed the video grab of a North-Eastern girl’s violation outside a pub even though we were so livid when our ministers were caught surfing porn? Who posted pictures of random young girls.. passing them of as Nirbhaya and then of Nirbhaya herself on Facebook, detailing the December rape in the guise of a sympathy note? Why was that post shared again and again? And when culture terrorists clamp down on love marriages, dating and healthy interactions between young boys and girls, beat women who visit pubs and blame victims of gender crimes for being provocative, how many of us protest?
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We forget to look in the mirror while looking for someone to blame for the state of this country. We all have opinions but few of us will have the courage of Reuben Fernandez and Keenan Santos who were killed in Mumbai, in 2011 for daring to protect the women with them. Last year, Nirbhaya and her friend were thrown off a bus after the rape and not one citizen in Delhi stopped to help while they lay by the side of a road, bleeding and naked.
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Like photographer Shalini Sehgal, also from Mumbai, posted on Facebook, “A city is not safe or unsafe. Its people are.” She did not mean that the entire onus of safety is on us, the people. But WE are part of reasons that make crimes against women possible. Yes, crimes also happen because women have become more independent while a large percentage of men want to see them in subservient roles but do we not in our homes, allow such prejudices to fester? Yes, law enforcement is usually an afterthought rather than an efficiently functioning system but as citizens, when we witness something as routine as eveteasing, do we intervene? Yes there is no accountability anywhere, yes the media is out there in a vigilante mode after a big case and does no substantial follow ups as is obvious from the lull on the Reuben Fernandez and Keenan Santos case but are we not the same? We are angry today but we will be back to square one tomorrow..The biggest revolutions begin with the citizen on the street when enough is really enough. Change will come when we change too but yes, we live in a complex reality where many Indias co-exist and not all of them can or will change together.
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So why don’t we start small? With us? With the sons and daughters at home? With the knowledge that we need not either be passive victims or detached bystanders? So yes, fear is not an option. Neither is angry oratory. Or finger-pointing. Distributing blame cannot dilute the collective shame of watching gender violence from the sidelines. Because, it happens all the time doesn’t mean, it should. Just because it hasn’t happened to us doesn’t mean it won’t.
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Reema Moudgil has been writing for magazines and newspapers on art, cinema, issues, architecture and more since 1994, is an RJ, hosts a daily Ghazal show, runs unboxed writers, is the editor of Chicken Soup for The Indian Woman’s soul, the author of Perfect Eight (http://www.flipkart.com/perfect-eight-9380032870/p/itmdf87fpkhszfkb?pid=9789380032870&_l=A0vO9n9FWsBsMJKAKw47rw–&_r=dyRavyz2qKxOF7Yuc ) and an artist.