Aruna Shanbaug died this week. Officially. She now merits tributes and a formal farewell though cognitive and full-bodied life, as she knew it, ended in 1973. How can anyone make sense of how the light in her was snuffed out with a dog chain during a rape so ghastly that it rendered her comatose for over four decades? In her feeble clinging on to a semblance of life and in her decisive death, she was and is a living wound on our collective conscience.
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Be it Aruna’s tragedy or Radika Tanwar, a 21- year- old who was shot outside a college in Delhi in 2011 by a stalker, or Nirbhaya, or the futile suicide of Ruchika Girhotra, the law is a tardy, easily pacified entity in India. Though many women like Aruna and Nirbhaya continue to pay the price of being the wrong gender at the wrong place at the wrong time, justice and closure remain elusive. The man who assaulted Aruna and left her for dead, walked out of jail, unencumbered by law or conscience after just seven years.
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Would they have kept him in longer if she had died then? Would that have made his crime worse? Is one kind of death easier than another? Aruna was engaged to be married to the man she loved when following a minor spat, a ward boy attacked her and the details of that assault have been recounted many times. What we don’t know is how it feels to lose volition over life and limb. To never to be able to speak another word or see the world with a coherent gaze. To lose in one decisive moment, a lifetime of productive work, companionship, just the ordinariness of being married and raising children, brewing a cup of tea after a bath, feeling safe in the world.
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The fact remains that in the 42 years following Aruna’s violation, not many people asked whether the man responsible for her condition should have been let off after a standard sentence just because she had not died convincingly enough after being brutalised by him. When she was still trapped in the horror of that tragedy, why was the perpetrator free? Who is to say that Santosh Yadav, the rapist and murderer of Priyadarshini Mattoo will not be let off after a few years and allowed to go back to his family? Yadav had started a law practice and fathered a daughter by the time he was convicted. There is a terrible and obvious injustice in these cases.
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What is it about India that facilitates rape and assault and makes it easy for men in packs to drive around in cars with tinted windows on the streets of Delhi and look for a prey? Or for seven men in Bengaluru to attack two foreign women volunteers who had been working with villagers? Or for an eve teaser to think that it is okay to feel a woman up? There is a certain ease about the way laws are implemented and a certain lack of accountability. Violence is committed because it is easy to get away with.
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Even if you look away from the worst instances of rape and murder and just observe how certain sections of the media treat women who are supposedly achievers and safe in their own fame bubble, you will notice clear instances of bias.
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I remember the manner in which many TV channels went about asking people if Aishwarya Rai, older to Abhishek Bachchan by a few years, was a good enough catch for him when they were about to get married and the appallingly sexist remarks that were allowed to go on air. An article I wrote then asking why such questions were relevant today provoked a reader to ask why my newspaper was wasting time on women who according to him were no better than prostitutes.
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Check out a red hot, popular website where every snippet about Aishwarya has readers posting unmonitored remarks about her morals, her body and her age.
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Notice also the complete and total pandering by the press to the masculinity of a Salman Khan who despite having unresolved court cases against him, is never asked questions if all those reports of girl friend bashing, late arrival on sets and boozing are true. He once bullied an ex-girlfriend to the point of tears on the sets of a reality show and no one asked why because the sight of a grown man behaving like a vindictive teenager makes for good TV.
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Aishwarya Rai was also bullied out of many films a few years ago when her disruptive boy friend created a scene on one of her sets. The media did not stand up for her, neither did the industry. No heroine can ever create camps in the industry. She can only belong to one or the other.
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Notice also the bad press that women activists like Medha Patkar, a certain Ms Roy and Teesta Setalvad attract. The venom with which they are attacked has less to do with their ideology and more with their gender.
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Few heated debates with a woman in India can end without some kind of an allusion to her sex or her morality. A few years ago, a girl wrote to me to share how she and her friends were being bullied by a male professor. During a trip to Mangalore, the girl students were forced to share accommodation and even bathrooms with men. And the girls were too scared to even report such instances openly for the fear of jeopardizing their academic career.
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A woman I know was asked a few years ago by a male colleague to repeat the word ‘Hore,’ almost thrice. It was someone’s surname and had come up in the conversation but there was an obvious subtext here that she was forced to notice. Even in a seemingly clean and protected environment, women are suddenly and often reminded that they are a weaker gender. Remember Rupan Deol Bajaj?
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The Supreme Court says that under the country’s law, a person cannot be allowed to die. There is however no law to ensure that there will never be another Aruna Shanbaug. Or a Priyadarshini Mattoo. Or that eve teasers, molesters, rapists and murderers will ever have less freedom to do what they want. So much for equality.
**
Even if you look away from the worst instances of rape and murder and just observe how certain sections of the media treat women who are supposedly achievers and safe in their own fame bubble, you will notice clear instances of bias.
**
I remember the manner in which many TV channels went about asking people if Aishwarya Rai, older to Abhishek Bachchan by a few years, was a good enough catch for him when they were about to get married and the appallingly sexist remarks that were allowed to go on air. An article I wrote then asking why such questions were relevant today provoked a reader to ask why my newspaper was wasting time on women who according to him were no better than prostitutes.
**
Check out a red hot, popular website where every snippet about Aishwarya has readers posting unmonitored remarks about her morals, her body and her age.
**
Notice also the complete and total pandering by the press to the masculinity of a Salman Khan who despite having unresolved court cases against him, is never asked questions if all those reports of girl friend bashing, late arrival on sets and boozing are true. He once bullied an ex-girlfriend to the point of tears on the sets of a reality show and no one asked why because the sight of a grown man behaving like a vindictive teenager makes for good TV.
**
Aishwarya Rai was also bullied out of many films a few years ago when her disruptive boy friend created a scene on one of her sets. The media did not stand up for her, neither did the industry. No heroine can ever create camps in the industry. She can only belong to one or the other.
**
Notice also the bad press that women activists like Medha Patkar, a certain Ms Roy and Teesta Setalvad attract. The venom with which they are attacked has less to do with their ideology and more with their gender.
**
Few heated debates with a woman in India can end without some kind of an allusion to her sex or her morality. A few years ago, a girl wrote to me to share how she and her friends were being bullied by a male professor. During a trip to Mangalore, the girl students were forced to share accommodation and even bathrooms with men. And the girls were too scared to even report such instances openly for the fear of jeopardizing their academic career.
**
A woman I know was asked a few years ago by a male colleague to repeat the word ‘Hore,’ almost thrice. It was someone’s surname and had come up in the conversation but there was an obvious subtext here that she was forced to notice. Even in a seemingly clean and protected environment, women are suddenly and often reminded that they are a weaker gender. Remember Rupan Deol Bajaj?
**
The Supreme Court says that under the country’s law, a person cannot be allowed to die. There is however no law to ensure that there will never be another Aruna Shanbaug. Or a Priyadarshini Mattoo. Or that eve teasers, molesters, rapists and murderers will ever have less freedom to do what they want. So much for equality.
with The New Indian Express Reema Moudgil works for The New Indian Express, Bangalore, is the author of Perfect Eight, the editor of Chicken Soup for the Soul-Indian Women, an artist, a former RJ and a mother. She dreams of a cottage of her own that opens to a garden and where she can write more books, paint, listen to music and just be silent with her cats.