By Tanaya Singh:
May you get the peace you deserved,
may you smile in some bright land above.
May you talk to the almighty to send
some powers down here.
Powers for us to fight, fight till
the bravery of your last breath is claimed,
with the punishment for thoseÂ
whose hands are red.Â
The 23-year-old girl who was brutally raped in Delhi, took her final breath in Singapore’s Mount Elizabeth hospital, today at 4:45 am. This is one of the saddest days in the history of India. She was a warrior. After being left on the streets of Delhi, torn apart, she fought and she fought courageously with just the desire to live. But today she is no more.
There will be political statements that peace must be maintained, and fake tears from those who could not come up with a punishment for those responsible for her condition, in the past 13 days. But NOTHING will change the fact that she did not get the life she deserved, the life her parents had dreamt of, the life she had imagined.
As a citizen of India, the same country she was born in, the same country that helped her dream and the same country that killed her, let us pledge to make this day the beginning of the change that the nation has been fighting for. Mere tears will not justify her death. In fact nothing will justify her death. But our fight will give a meaning to her death. Fight against every living being who looks at a woman with a monster’s eye, fight against every mentality that says woman should be locked up in houses to be safe, fight against governments that fail to punish the criminals, fights against all those rapists who kill a woman in India each time they are out in the open, who sometimes kill the body and always kill the soul.
She fought for 13 days. Maybe the beacon of hope that kept her alive was the desire to see the rapists convicted. LET US NOT LET THE FIGHT DIE. JUSTICE IS STILL NOT OBTAINED. Don’t let a few discussions and condolence speeches end the protest against wrong here. The end is not here.