By Rohit Singh:
Shame on all the men and women of India who worship goddesses, who have sisters and mothers and are still turning into gutless mute spectators to the devil like treatment that Indian women, are getting nationwide. One has no right to call himself a man if he stoops down to the level of forgetting what a woman’s dignity is. 16 December was the horrific night when a young brave girl saw what devils look like. Today, though she is no more with us, her courage made us see how petty we are and how impotent the law is; how crippled the Indian democracy is when it cannot protect its own women. Though the brutality which the 23 year old girl faced on 16 December, 2012 at the hands of those beasts, is incomparable, it should be noted that similar incidents are on a rise nationwide on an alarming rate. Following is a glimpse of the beastly behaviour against women nationwide:
16 December: Rape and brutal assault of a 23 year old girl in a moving bus by 6 men in the national capital.
21 December: A 40-year-old woman was allegedly gang raped in Welcome area of the national capital by three persons.
24 December: A 19 year old girl was molested in a moving auto rickshaw in Bhubaneswar and thrown out when she resisted and raised an alarm. The incident took place when she was going to the Master Canteen area from Barmunda Bus terminal.
25 December: A nine-year-old girl was allegedly molested by her employer in Govindnagar police area in the city of Kanpur on 22 December. Her parents lodged an FIR on 24 December after which the accused was arrested.
27 December: A 17-year-old in Patiala who had been gang-raped committed suicide because the police allegedly embarrassed her and refused to register a case for over a month.
A nine-year-old girl was found murdered with injuries on her face in a banana field in a village near Tirupattur in Vellore district in northern Tamil Nadu on 27 December night. The teen was sexually assaulted on Diwali by two men. Though her family was threatened by the alleged rapists, they decided to file a police case two weeks after the attack.
28 December: An eight-year-old girl was allegedly raped and brutally beaten to death after being lured by a local youth in Bilanda village in Fatehpur district of Uttar Pradesh.
Four youth allegedly abducted and gang-raped an 11-year-old girl for four days in Kanpur.
A school teacher was sexually assaulted in Amroha and a girl was raped in Muzaffarnagar in separate incidents reported from different parts of Uttar Pradesh during the past 24 hours on 28 December evening.
29 December: The accused in a case, Sabanna Nalappa Poojary (24), who is already married, kidnapped a 15-year-old girl from an agriculture field on December 19 in Handarki village in Sedam taluk in Gulbarga district of Karnataka.
A married migrant woman from the district Solan of Himachal Pradesh got gang raped in Amritsar, Punjab.
Fifty-two-year-old Mahasin Ali wakes up with a start every 15 minutes in his ICU cubicle at a hospital. Eyes wide open and gasping for breath, he kept asking for his wife, who was allegedly gang raped and put to death at Sonakharki in Barasat, West Bengal on 29 December evening.
30 December: A traffic police constable was suspended for molesting a girl who came to deposit her challan fee at the traffic police lines in Sector 29 of Chandigarh.
In Singrauli, district in Madhya Pradesh, an 18-year-old young tribal woman labourer working at the construction site of a major power plant project was allegedly gang-raped by four men just a few hours after the state director general of police visited the district on 28 December.
31 December: A girl passenger was allegedly molested by the bus conductor on board a mini bus in Baghpat, Uttar Pradesh at day time and in the presence of other passengers. When she raised an alarm, the accused assaulted her and started to push her off the moving bus. It was only when elder sister of the victim begged for mercy that she was spared.
This is just an overlook at the present scenario. A lot many such cases had been reported in the past few months or even before that. Yes, it is the duty of law and the government to protect every girl and woman of the nation but, it is also our duty to start working right from the base of the society. Blaming the law alone is not going to help us out. In order to clean the society, we need to clean it inside out. Even today, in this 21st century, we have people in the society who look down on the victim of rape or sexual assault. There are people who state that women dress provocatively which leads to rapes and sexual assaults. What needs to be immediately done is start teaching the males how to respect women, sympathise and help a victim rather than looking down on her and most importantly, voting for the right electoral candidate when elections come by. Many politicians act irresponsibly when in power and they should not be given another opportunity to crush the integrity of the common public and move over.
In the recent incident, where both ,Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit asked the reporters “theek hai?” after recording a statement read from the paper to address the public in accordance with the Delhi gang rape of 16 December, they made two blunders. First, they should not have read the address from the paper. If a person is leading such a huge mass of people and he /she cannot even talk for a brutally assaulted victim without a paper, then maybe it is time for him/her to step down from the seat of power. Second, if the two were really so concerned with the issue, they need not have asked “theek hai”, it just demonstrated that they were not handling the issue properly and were not involved with the public.
Lastly, all those men and women who turn mute spectators when something this atrocious is going on with a fellow human should be ashamed of themselves. One has no right to expect help in their need of time, if one intentionally, does not help another fellow who needs it. Why do you cry when your daughters are assaulted if you turned a blind eye to the assault of someone else’s daughter? Even after all this, if you are asking your daughters to dress to dress up from head to toe and come home early rather than teaching your sons to respect every woman, then you do not deserve a girl child. These barbaric crimes have tested our patience every now and then and this time they spat right in our faces. This is a crime against women and against humanity. What India needs to do right now is change the way the society looks at the victim, raise united voices whenever such crimes are encountered, make sure that the accused does not get away with it and make sure only a clean and right electoral candidate sits high in the seat of power who is genuinely concerned about the public. What the Indian law and government need to do right now is take full responsibility of the people, act strictly against such heinous crimes, set up speedy trials for crime against women and give the worst punishments possible for rapes and sexual assaults so that any man that walks on earth gets a gooseflesh thinking of the punishment.