We Are complicit When We Look Away

I dreamt of many  young girls who looked exactly like each other. All wearing purple. All playing , holding hands and perhaps singing on the roof of a Sufi dargah. The sky had birds, pigeons if I recall correctly. My dreams bring me peace when life can’t. I can’t even meet her eyes in that picture that is everywhere now.
No, I haven’t read the details of what happened to her. Those should never have been printed in the first place.
If we need to know about the extent of brutality a child or a woman had to endure before we can accept her as a valid victim, we are not really where we should be as a race on the scale of evolution if there is still one remaining. As my professor from college pointed out,  the lawyer defending Nirbhaya’s rapists had talked about what he would have done to his daughter if she had dared to go out at night with a boy who was not her brother or father. And we had recoiled. His bitter ugly face, we thought was an anomaly.

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His words may have revealed the mindset of a certain section of men in India who think of daughters as disposable liabilities or meek bundles of honour that must be destroyed at the first sign of defiance. But the outrage against him was much louder. A wrong had been done and it had to be set right despite a section of society that that facilitated and condoned what had happened. And before Nirbhaya, had facilitated what had happened to Mathura on 26 March 1972, when she, a tribal girl, was “allegedly” raped by two policemen on the compound of Desaiganj Police Station in Gadchiroli district of Maharashtra. And we have forgotten Bhanwari Devi who even after being raped  by  her high-caste neighbours almost a quarter of a century ago, is still  waiting for justice. Remember the  Kunan Poshspora mass rape that occurred on February 23, 1991 in Kashmir? The naked protest of Manipuri mothers? Remember all the times, we heard of rapes in India’s receding tribal belts and shrugged? Remember Kausar bi? She  was “allegedly”  raped by a sub-inspector, who was part of the ATS team involved in the Sohrabuddin encounter case. Remember Bilkis Bano who went through the horrors of the 2002 riots in Gujarat and battled for justice for over 15 years? And yes, there is the  blatant obstruction of justice in Unnao.

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The story of Asifa is not an exception. Be it in J&K or Bastar or Unnao or Haryana or the brutalised lives of those made vulnerable by their poverty or religion or caste or gotra or any other excuse in this country, human rights more often than not are only for the powerful. We look away whenever we don’t want to go against the narrative of patriotism.

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One thing that was exceptional though about this story is that the victim was  a child. What is exceptional is that for three months after the crime had been committed, we sat by and did nothing . So yes,  the rot has spread. And we cannot escape the blame for letting it spread unacknowledged.

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Compare our prolonged silence to another story.
Sometime in January, citizens across the length and breadth of Pakistan, including its most famous men and women stormed the streets and airwaves asking for justice for a six-year-old girl child Zainab who had been kidnapped, raped and killed by a monster. And then thrown in a garbage heap. To shake the law enforcers into action,  citizens clashed with the police and two people were killed. #JusticeforZainab took over television studios and every media platform. Within weeks, her killer was arrested. In less than a month, news reports will tell you, the court handed him four counts of the death penalty, one life term, a seven-year jail term and Rs. 3.2 million as fine. Kasur, where this atrocity took place was earlier rocked by a child sex abuse scandal but in this case, the whole country decided it had had enough and united to introspect, grieve and express outrage.

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Back home, we may have thought that post Nirbhaya, we had learnt some lessons and seen the worst aspects of our national character in the unforgiving daylight but even before Asifa,  there was a Baby Falak, a Jisha and many many  crimes where what happened to Nibhaya was used as a template to inflict not just indignity but torture upon women.
It has just been a few years since Nirbhaya and we already are so jaded that a new low had to be touched before we could react. It took us almost three months to do so. Like Zainab, Asifa too was abducted and killed in January. In the months that passed, our media did not wake up to the enormity of the inhumanity she had suffered. Neither did we.

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Compared to that one lawyer who defended Nirbhaya’s rapists, we have had marches in which ministers, lawmakers and yes, citizens have taken part to defend the rapists of an 8-year old  in the name of the flag, the ekta of their religion, even Bharat mata.
Suddenly a dead child was turned into a pawn in the Us vs Them game that has been orchestrated systematically by certain media channels, IT cells and even celebrities who stay mum and take sides only when it is convenient.

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This, India, is a travesty. The kind we should not forgive ourselves ever for. The meek acceptance with which we have allowed our prejudices or  apathy to govern our sense of right and wrong has impacted how  we vote. And with our silence,  we condone acts of videotaped and flaunted violence against the “others’,  allow fake Whatsapp forwards from relatives and friends to pollute our mindspace,  do not stand by those who fight for our freedom of thought alone , allow our educational institutions to be vitiated by caste and religion centric politics. When we do all of the above and also do not think beyond our urban reality about a distant India, slowly but surely falling off the map, we allow predators of all kinds in spaces that were safe once.
What happened to Asifa is not an anomaly. It is now the norm. And we should be afraid. And hang our heads in shame.