Questioning The Quota

This had been carried by Firstpost in January, but I had forgotten to post it here.
Why we should junk the idea for 33 percent women’s quota

The brutal gangrape of, and what has turned out be fatal assault on, the young Delhi woman has given rise to a welter of demands relating to women’s safety and sexual violence – capital punishment for rapists, castration/chemical castration, emergency session of Parliament to pass tougher laws, fast-track courts, to name just a few. Some of these, like tougher laws and setting up of fast-track courts, are justified and have been brushed under the carpet till now. Some are clearly an over-reaction. Worryingly, the incident and the public outrage it evoked are being used to push through ideas that should be junked.

One such idea is reservation of 33 percent seats in legislatures for women. The Hindu in a front page editorial on 30 December, titled No Turning Back Now, argued that “the Indian political system would not have been so indifferent to the problem of sexual violence if half or even one-third of all legislators were women”. The early passage of the Women’s Reservation Bill, the editorial noted, could be “Parliament’s way of honouring the death of the Unknown Citizen”. That same evening, the BJP’s Shaina NC was also making much the same point on news television.

I am worried that an emotionally charged atmosphere could well see the Bill being given the green signal by the Lok Sabha (it was passed by the Rajya Sabha in 2010).

Some ardent advocates of the Bill say it is flawed in its current form. I am not going into that. I am questioning the very concept of reservation of seats for women in legislatures on two counts.

One, that there needs to be a law to get more women into politics. Women have stormed male bastions in several professions and carved a niche for themselves without the benefit of gender-based reservations. In each, one generation of women has struggled and made a space for itself, thereby creating room for the next generation to struggle and make some more space. Sometimes this has been achieved with some noise, but mostly it has been done silently, away from the headlines. Why should women politicians have it easier?

Two, that getting more women into our legislatures will result in more women-sensitive laws and policies.

Yes, there is clout in numbers but do those who make up the numbers exercise the clout they have?

Is it the lack of a Women’s Reservation Act that prevented women politicians cutting across party lines from coming together and addressing the protestors at Raisina Hill, or promising the nation that they will ensure the passage of tougher laws against sexual assault?

Have we forgotten that some extremely insensitive statements about rape and rape victims have come from women – Mamata Bannerjee, Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar and Rita Bahuguna Joshi (Joshi made a comment about Mayawati similar to the one Anisur Rahman made about Mamata last week)?

Who stood up to Rajiv Gandhi on the Muslim Women’s Bill? One man – Arif Mohammed Khan. What were all the women politicians in the Congress – many of them enjoying significant political clout – doing? If they had all come together and lodged some form of protest, would the party have gone ahead with the Bill?

The case for a Women’s Reservation Bill is based on certain assumptions that are, to my mind, flawed.

One is that women will vote as a homogenous mass. That is based on another flawed assumption – that women’s issues are devoid of ideology. Women from the extreme left and the extreme right of the political spectrum will have completely divergent views on the role of women in society. One set will want laws that make divorce easier. The other will say divorce should be made more difficult. How can these two opposite views be reconciled into one Woman-Friendly or Gender-Sensitive stand?

The third assumption is that women will act as women and not as members of a particular party (in cases where there is no ideological divide). When a party issues a whip asking its members to vote for a law that is detrimental to women, will the women MPs oppose the party whip, which will invite disqualification?

Besides, has the performance of women in Parliament given any hint of promise that they will do good by their gender, if elected in larger numbers? Have they done the utmost that their less than 10 percent presence lets them do? As a journalist, I once researched a story on the performance of women parliamentarians. The picture was not very encouraging. PRS Legislative Research worked out some figures for the newspaper I wrote for that showed that while attendance levels were more or less the same, the participation of women Lok Sabha MPs in legislative and non-legislative debates was less than men.

Women politicians have an answer to all this. Party leaders don’t give women a chance to speak. The party leadership doesn’t give tickets to women and that is why this Bill is needed.

I ask them and those who endorse their views – if you can’t fight for yourselves within your respective parties, how are you going to fight for all of us in state legislatures and Parliament?

Till they do that  – fight for their voices to be heard within their parties – nothing will change for women regardless of the number of seats they occupy in our legislatures.

Don’t Make Nirbhaya an Industry

This is a slightly longer version of a piece that was published in Firstpost. Giving the link to that here.

So Delhi’s December 16 gangrape victim who died in Singapore is to get a “Women of Courage’ award from the United States government. This is in addition to the Nirbhaya fund that the finance minister announced in the 2013-14 budget, a MIG (middle income group) flat from the Delhi government for her family, refund of her fees by the physiotherapy institute she studied in, a science institute being named after her, the ancestral village which she didn’t like visiting being promised a primary health centre and probably a job for one brother and scholarship for another.
All this makes me uneasy. And this uneasiness overrides the horror, anger, fear and despair I still feel over the incident.
Notice that I say “Delhi’s December 16 gangrape victim” and not Braveheart or India’s Daughter or Nirbhaya or Amanat. That is because but for the brutality of the incident, she would have been just another number in Delhi’s rape statistics. The brutality grabbed the headlines, hyperactive television news channels and social media networks fuelled protests, and these had an irrational snowballing effect, resulting in the rise of what I call the Nirbhaya Industry.
Lost in all this are the stories of other rape victims – including the three-year-old who was raped in her playschool even as crowds protesting the December 16 rape laid siege to Raisina Hill. Does anyone even know what happened to that case? Does anyone even care?
The victim of the Dhaula Kuan abduction-cum-rape case has been sacked from her job, has got no government aid and her case has not made much progress. Read this interview of hers to understand the unfairness of the attention being showered on the December 16 victim.
Also completely ignored is the plight of the young woman’s friend who was with her that night. He also fought the rapists and sustained serious injuries. But even as the woman’s family is being gifted a Rs 50 lakh flat and her brother being promised a job, no one is helping him with his medical expenses or ensuring that he won’t lose his job because of his frequent trips to hospital and to court to give evidence. This came to light in an interview with Firstpost. His testimony as the sole witness will be crucial in deciding the fate of the case. What if he decides that this fight is not worth the toll it is taking on him and says he doesn’t remember anything? All of us will rush to condemn and ridicule him and then feel smug about ourselves, just like we did when Shayan Munshi backtracked in the Jessica Lal case.
The US State Department has said “for millions of Indian women, her personal ordeal, perseverance to fight for justice, and her family’s continued bravery is helping to lift the stigma and vulnerability that drive violence against women”. Today’s Times of India has a front page interview with US Secretary of State John Kerry saying he is inspired by Nirbhaya’s determination to bring her assailants to justice.
The State Department and Kerry probably do not know about another young girl who went to Buddha Jayanti Park with her boyfriend one afternoon in 2006. They were assaulted by a group of the President’s Bodyguards and the girl gang-raped. She wasn’t left half dead. She didn’t die. The young couple could have gone home quietly and left the matter unreported (and thus avoided raised eyebrows and unwelcome questions about their relationship). But they went to a police station and reported the case. They persevered till the accused were sentenced.
Equally brave was the student of Maulana Azad Medical College who was raped in a tomb on the busy Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg. She too could have gone home quietly and hushed the matter up. She too did not. Her rapist too was sentenced. There are several other rape survivors who have persevered and brought their rapists to book. Or the Dhaula Kuan victim who is persevering but not getting anywhere.
Aren’t these examples of perseverance? Don’t their families deserve a salute for not let letting the fear of stigma overpower them and supporting their daughters’ fight for justice?
Would the victim of December 16 have persevered like this had she lived, without the case having grabbed the headlines the way it did? Would her family, commended by the State Department for its `continued bravery’, have allowed her to? Two media reports make me doubt this.
One, soon after her death the family lamented that only a few immediate neighbours and relatives knew their plight and that the visits of VIPs had revealed their identity to everyone. To me, that’s a sign that for the family, the incident was something that needed to be hidden.
Two, in another interview, the father dismissed stories that she was planning to marry her friend. The boy was of a different caste, he said, so where was the question of them marrying. His daughter, he said, was a good girl and would have married someone the family chose. Would someone who couldn’t countenance his daughter marrying someone from a different caste have let her fight a rape case? We don’t know for sure and we never will.
The December 16 incident undoubtedly shook all of us up in a way that other rapes have not. But showering awards on the victim and goodies on her family does disservice to countless other rape victims.  By constantly praising the way she fought her rapists, aren’t we implying – and assuming – that other victims did not fight strongly enough? Is that fair to them? Why shouldn’t each one of them – and future rape victims – be given similar compensation in cash or kind?
Quite parenthetically, in her interview, the Dhaula Kuan victim, says she was quizzed about how hard she resisted. So now, is Nirbhaya going to be the touchstone of the way women resist rape? If they are not left half-dead, they will not be seen to have resisted enough?
If Braveheart/Nirbhaya/Amanat is to be immortalised, let it be in the form of better laws, better enforcement of these laws, better policing, improved social attitudes, safer public and private spaces. Let the voices that spoke up for her also speak up for the Suryanelli rape victim and the three sisters in Bhandara and for all future victims of rape. A church in Kerala has banned the Suryanelli rape victim's family. Why is no one protesting about that? Let those who kept vigil for two weeks in central Delhi keep similar vigil on other cases and on laws being drafted and passed.
Let Nirbhaya not become an industry but a catalyst for change.

The Conundrum of Choice

At a time when sexual harassment and violence are taking increasingly horrific forms, should we continue with the idea that sex obtained on a false promise – especially that of marriage – is also rape?
The Delhi High Court held a few days back that if a man has consensual sex with a woman after promising marriage and then later backs out, it amounts to rape.  The same high court had passed a similar order in another case in February 2010. However, the Bombay High Court took a different tack in June 2010, when it said that a sexual relationship on a false promise of marriage is not rape.
Apparently, Section 375(4) of the Indian Penal Code states that consent for sex obtained under a false pretext amounts to rape.
But if the sex is consensual and the woman has not been subject to physical violence or other forms of coercion, why should the genuineness (or lack of it) of the pretext matter? Blackmail and blandishment are two different things. When a woman gives in to a blandishment – a job, a promotion, a role in a film, marriage – she has exercised a choice in the hope of a future gain. She continues voluntarily in that sexual relationship as long as the gain is in sight. If that gain doesn’t materialise, to my mind, it was a wrong choice on her part. How does the sexual relationship then become a forced one, which is what rape is?
When someone pays in advance for a good or service and doesn’t get it, that becomes a case of cheating. Shouldn’t this also then be a case of cheating, instead of rape?
I am particularly intrigued by the false-promise-of-marriage line. Doesn’t it amount to saying that a sexual relationship is okay only if marriage is the ultimate objective? And that once a sexual relationship has been established, it has to result in marriage? Does this have a place in a modern society?
Consider a situation where a couple is engaged and they decide to get intimate. No force was used. The woman wasn’t drugged. She knew exactly what she was doing. At some point, the man realises that the relationship is not going to work out and that the marriage will be a disaster. So, instead of marrying and then divorcing, he decides to end it before the marriage. That could make him vulnerable to a rape charge by a vengeful woman. Would that be fair?
I think this provision stems from the mindset that a woman who has slept with a man is `spoilt’ and her life is finished because no one else will marry her. It is this mindset which prompts judges to broker compromises in rape cases, with the rapist offering to marry the victim. It is the same mindset which, therefore, says if a man `spoilt’ you by promising to marry you and then doesn’t, then he has ruined your life forever and so he should be considered a rapist.
Would it not be better for women to be counselled to accept the fact that they made a wrong choice of potential life partner and if the man had exploited them, they were better off without him and they should get on with their lives?
I realise it is not such a simple issue. Uneducated women or those from poor backgrounds may not be making an informed choice when they get into a sexual relationship with someone who has promised them something. There may definitely be an element of exploitation there. There is the example of the girl who was being sexually exploited by a councillor or MLA whom she had approached for help in getting a ration card. Such women need some kind of protection and relief and such men definitely need to be punished. But is Section 375(4) the right way to go about it?
I just feel that this IPC provision betrays an outdated mindset and takes away from the seriousness of the issue of rape, especially the brutal and perverted forms it is taking these days.
Perhaps mine is an armchair, ivory tower, even urbanised view, which is not in sync with ground realities. This post is really just to flag an issue and I would love to hear what other people, especially women, feel. Those reading this, please comment and please share so others can comment.
But please don’t make sexist or abusive or vulgar comments. Comments are moderated and such comments will not be posted.

A Red Rag Called Modi

Two things have prompted this post.
The first is an article a friend posted on Facebook. It is an open letter to Madhu Purnima Kishwar by a Gujarati Muslim writer, Zahir Janmohamed, in kafila.org. Kishwar had apparently visited Gujarat recently and posted favourable tweets about Gujarat under Narendra Modi. Janmohamed details all that is wrong in Gujarat, especially the status of Muslims there. The friend who posted this article had this to say in his status message: “A must read for 1. all Modi bhakts 2. all poor sods who believe in activists.”
That reminded me of an incident that is the second reason for this post. Last week, a report, Economic Freedom of the States of India, 2012, was released. Gujarat topped in that. At the launch ceremony, the noted agricultural economist and currently chairman of the Commission on Agricultural Costs and Prices, Ashok Gulati, was speaking about the role of rural infrastructure in promoting agricultural growth and mentioned that the rate of growth of agriculture in Gujarat was 9.6 per cent a year for six years, which was unheard of. A friend sitting next to me, scoffed and whispered, “then how come BJP didn’t do well in the rural areas in the elections?” I pointed out that Gulati was citing figures. “No, but I’ve seen villages in Gujarat, some are worse than Bihar.”
The sub-text in my friend’s status message, Janmohamed’s article and my other friend’s refusal to accept agricultural growth figures for Gujarat is the same: How can anything good be happening in Gujarat, considering Narendra Modi is the chief minister? How can a man, during whose reign the 2002 riots happened, ever do anything good at all?
The way people get worked up whenever something positive is said about Modi or about Gujarat under his rule reminds me of the reaction in the Congress whenever the Gandhi family is criticised. All sense of perspective is lost as people scramble to deflect criticism (or praise in the case of Modi). Facts are ignored or (if they can’t be) some completely unrelated fact is quoted as a counter.
I am not getting into a debate on the facts about Gujarat. For one, I don’t know enough about the state. Besides, this post is less about Gujarat or Modi and more about how we refuse to accept facts if they don’t confirm our perceptions about something. I am using the Modi example only to show how a phenomenon that was largely limited to those committed to an ideology or political party has extended to general discourse.
Take Janmohamed’s open letter. He starts by saying he was keen to meet Kishwar because he had heard that she had once signed a petition calling for Modi’s dismissal after the 2002 riots. Shouldn’t that establish the fact that she is no Modi admirer and she is definitely not endorsing his government’s failure to control the riots? Why does the fact that she was once critical of the Modi government mean that she should not give credit where she thinks it is due?
Or take the case of my friend, who questioned the figures on Gujarat’s robust agricultural growth only because the BJP fared poorly in rural Gujarat. So now the soundness of official data has to be tested against electoral verdicts? Besides, why can’t Gujarat have a 9.6 per cent agricultural growth rate and also have villages whose conditions are worse than those in Bihar? How does one fact disprove the other? Going by that logic, India could not have posted over 9 per cent growth for three years in a row because there are parts of the country where conditions are worse than in sub-Saharan Africa. India is a land of contrasts and nowhere is this more obvious than in the economic condition of its people. If Mumbai can have an Antilla and Dharavi, why can’t Gujarat have both great agricultural growth and pressing poverty?
Take also the reactions when Tata Motors shifted its Nano plant from Singur in West Bengal to Sanad in Gujarat. (See my 2008 post on this.) Industrialists hailing Modi as prime minister material and king of kings is sickeningly over the top, yes, but what is wrong if they decide to put their money in a state with a good business environment? I am surprised that even people who criticise CSR (corporate social responsibility) as a concept on the grounds that businesses should be concerned only with profit are uncomfortable with Corporate India’s endorsement of Gujarat as an investment destination. If companies’ sole motive should be to run a business profitably, why should they bother about the ideology of the government in power? If they can invest in China, why not in Gujarat?
This kind of double standards does not augur well for debate and discussion in the country. When an innocuous tweet about Ahmedabad’s auto-rickshaw drivers going by the meter is seen as an endorsement of Modi, when his disgusting comment about Sunanda Tharoor is linked to her being groped (it turned out later that the groping happened before), it’s time to stop and reflect. Isn’t there a danger of such constant, and at times unfair, bashing backfiring? It allows Modi to paint himself as a victim of a biased mindset and, worse, convince people of the fact.
Keep the heat, by all means, on Modi on the 2002 riots and discrimination against Muslims and other real failures. But give credit where it is due. And don’t paint everyone who talks about one positive aspect of him or of Gujarat under him as a Modi admirer or BJP-RSS supporter in denial about the riots.
Kishwar also tweeted: “If I as much as say Gujarat roads are best in country, see Modi’s inclusive development for urself I become political untouchable. Why?”
Why, indeed?
Many readers of this post would have stopped reading mid-way, convinced that I am a Modi-bhakt. Earlier, whenever I would counter such biased views, I would preface my statement by saying I am not a Modi supporter, but today I wondered why I should do it. This blog is called Beyond Labels and the reason I started writing it is to air my views without the fear of being labelled (see Why this blog and why this name?). So go ahead and call me a Modi-bhakt. Because the Modi-bhakts call me a pseudo-secular. Chew on that.

My Goodbye to the Braveheart

The sun stayed away and a biting icy wind blew as the family members of India’s Braveheart collected her ashes from the crematorium at Dwarka where she was cremated yesterday under a blanket of fog and policemen.
As I reached the crematorium, the first sight that met me was khakhi uniforms of the police. There were ten of them from constables to the assistant commissioner of police, Dwarka. Two constables stood guard at the gate as the family members performed rituals at the platform where she was cremated, not allowing anyone inside. Apparently, the police had kept watch all night as well.

The police outnumbered the others present there, six journalists (four of them photographers) and a couple of others who appeared to be with Congress MP Mahabal Mishra. Mishra was  was there helping the family, coming out briefly to discuss various arrangements with the ACP, especially about facilitating the family’s travel to Varanasi. 

Soon the girl’s family came out with the urn wrapped in a white cloth. It was a very small group, less than ten of them.  `The ashes should not be taken to the home,’ Mishra explained to them as he instructed police officials to make arrangements for the urn to be kept at the police post in Dwarka Sector 1, close to Mahavir Nagar, where her family stays.
The family looked at us gathered there. Perhaps they were wondering who we were and why we were there. The expression on one young boy’s face – a mixture of bewilderment and grief.
I couldn’t bring myself to say anything to them. After all, I was an interloper in their grief.
So why did I go?
When news of the girl’s death broke, I had posted on Facebook that I hoped the media would give her family privacy and not hound them during the cremation. But the manner in which the cremation was orchestrated by the police and the government angered me. Pressuring the family first to cremate her in Ballia, and then to cremate her before dawn (against Hindu custom where it has to be done after daybreak) just so that people don’t come to know (even as political heavyweights attended the funeral) disgusted me. She was a victim of utter indignity before she died. Couldn’t she have been given some dignity in death?
One battle that all women who complain about any form of sexual harassment wage is that of being labeled as the problem. By first making her father issue a statement asking for calm (when the protests were going out of hand), then taking her to Singapore and then cremating her in such a hush-hush manner, the government and the police sent out only message - that she and her dead body were a problem that needed to be disposed off without a fuss.
I went today to say in my own way that she was not a problem. To salute her.

The Particular and the General

It often happens that a particular incident turns the much-needed spotlight on a larger issue that has been swept under the carpet for long. The brutal gang rape in Delhi on the night of December 16, whose victim is now unfortunately dead, did that to the issue of safety of women and laws relating to sexual violence.
There are the stray voices asking why the rape of a girl in Delhi should do this, and not the many rapes in other cities or in the deep, dark interiors of the country. There are also people saying where was such outrage during the Gujarat riots when worse was being done to women.
That is not a relevant question. There have been other shocking rapes in Delhi earlier – the gang rape by members of the President’s bodyguards in Buddha Jayanti Park, the rape of the medical student in the afternoon in a Mughal monument on the busy Bahadurshah Zafar Marg, the abduction from Dhaula Kuan and gangrape of a call centre employee – but they have not evoked the reaction that this one has. The `why now’ does not matter. What does matter is that the issue has been highlighted as never before and the focus on it should remain.
But when the particular and the general start getting mixed up, there’s a problem. There is serious danger of that happening in this case.
Let’s take the particular in this case. A girl was brutally assaulted and raped in a moving bus on the night of December 16. Her male friend was also beaten up badly. They were stripped of their clothes and dumped on the road.
The crowds thronging Vijay Chowk and India Gate started with calls for justice for the young girl and steps to ensure safety of women in Delhi in future. All the rapists were arrested in less than a week (four of them within twenty-four hours). The case was given to a fast track court, which is to hold hearings on a daily basis. Now after the girl’s death, they will also face the charge of murder.
The government also announced some steps to ensure safety of women in Delhi – more policing, more buses at night, removing dark films and curtains from windows of buses and making it compulsory for them to keep lights on inside at night. Three police personnel who had been on duty that night were suspended. A man the rapists had robbed earlier that evening had approached them and they had brushed him off. If they had acted, that young girl would not have been battling for life. So they were rightly punished.
The particular incident, therefore, has been addressed.
So why are protestors out there demanding justice for the braveheart, death for the culprits? I’ve got bizarre sms-es saying the culprits should be hanged by the end of the year.
So then we are told that this is about the larger issue – harsher laws, better enforcement, changing the medieval mindset, judicial reforms, police reforms. Sure that needs to be put into focus. But it can’t be done overnight. The protests will help if they keep the pressure on to get these issues addressed, as they must.
But why make it a Congress issue? Why ask for chief minister Shiela Dixit to resign? Why mock Manmohan Singh for not shedding tears like Barrack Obama did after the school shooting in the United States?(Let me hasten to add that I am no supporter of the UPA government or of the Congress party.). How will this larger cause be helped if police commissioner Neeraj Kumar is sacked?
They may currently be the symbols of al that is wrong with the way women’s issues and law and order issues are handled. But concentrating on attacking them will take the focus away from the need to address far more fundamental issues.
We need to separate the particular and general for any lasting solutions to emerge from our anger.

Stop this hysteria

Sunday’s gangrape incident in Delhi is so appalling that it’s easy to go over the top in reacting to it. It makes one feel angry, helpless and extremely vulnerable.
But I am tired of seeing hysterical crowds screaming about death penalty, castration and demanding that everyone from the police commissioner to the chief minister resign.  
The main target of public ire is the police. There are calls for the police commissioner to be sacked. He has to explain to the High Court why the bus passed five police pickets without being stopped. One lawyer is planning to initiate action to ensure that policemen who were on duty on the stretch that the bus drove on that night are penalised. CPM leader Brinda Karat is also the same.

But this is one case where the criticism of the police is totally. Here’s why.
One, there was nothing – absolutely nothing – to arouse suspicion about the bus and the horror being perpetrated inside. It was a luxury bus, with tinted windows and drawn curtains. That’s quite normal. So how can anyone, police included, know what was going on inside? It probably was being driven in a way that it doesn’t attract attention. That could be the reason why the bus passed five police pickets without arousing suspicion.
Two, the police acted promptly once they were informed about the incident. No one is saying there was any delay in the police reaching the scene where the girl and her friend were thrown out of the bus. The bus was traced within hours and four of the rapists were arrested within twenty-four hours. What more could the police have done in this case?
In fact, the real indictment should be of the public. According to a story in yesterday’s Indian Express, when the police reached the spot where the girl and her friend had been thrown out, they found people just standing around, looking at them. “Not one of them took off a jacket or piece of clothing to cover the victims. There were women in cars that had pulled over but they did not approach the victims,” a policeman was quoted as saying.
When people scream into television cameras that women are being raped every day and the police is not doing anything to check it, do they even know what they are saying?
Even as people rallied at India Gate, protested outside the Police Headquarters and the chief minister’s residence, a three-year-old girl was raped in a playschool by the husband of the woman who ran it. In an overwhelming majority of cases, rapes are committed by people known to the victim. A neighbour/colleague/classmate who offers a lift. A family friend/relative who drops in home. A teacher in school or college. How can such rapes be prevented? Who can anticipate them to prevent them from happening? What is important to see is if the police acted promptly in each case. If it did not, then, by all means, ask for action against the police.
Preventing rape cannot be a police responsibility alone. It is also about having well-lit roads. It would make far more sense for resident welfare associations to fight for roads around their colonies to be well-lit, instead of lighting candles for the victim.
Preventing rape is also about good public transport. Why did the girl and her friend board that bus, which was not a regular public transport vehicle? Let me make an educated guess. There is no bus from Saket (where they had gone to see a movie) to Dwarka. So they took an auto-rickshaw up to Munirka from where there is a bus to Dwarka. Given erratic bus timings and the fact that it was getting late, when a bus taking passengers for Dwarka came, it must have been a blessing in disguise at that time. It would be far better for Brinda Karat to press for a proper and reliable public transport system that can ensure that Delhi-ites can travel safely at any time of day. Let’s just keep aside the inconvenient fact that women are groped and molested even within buses in broad daylight for the time being.
Preventing rape is also about each one of us being alert. But we are so inured to irregularities happening around us all the time that we just don’t react. So a bus not authorised to pick up passengers openly does so; we see it and keep quiet. Even if the bus had been driven in a rash manner, that is so common a sight that nobody would have thought of informing the police.
Above all, we don’t want to get involved. Even if someone had seen something amiss, they would have preferred to look the other way.
Perhaps the only person who made sense in the charged-up crowds at India Gate protesting the horrific gangrape was a young long-haired man who asked – can all of us who are gathered here take a pledge that the next time any of us see a woman being harassed, we will not remain silent and will go to her help?
This was perhaps one of the few voices to articulate what is being lost in the hysterical responses across the country – that all of us are responsible for what happened that day.
But it is so much easier to take one day off, scream at rallies and blame the Authorities and the System for everything, isn’t it?