Delhi gang rape: Terror 16/12

Has the scourge of rape, like corruption and environmental degradation, gone beyond any hope of damage control? Will the ailing system ever get healthy enough to be in a position to drive the fear of punishment in potential rapists?MEENAKSHI RAO explores

If I am ever raped — who knows who’s next — here’s what I should expect (going by what I have seen and heard in these last few days, here goes the list: 1) At least one speech in Parliament, of course by a woman while the men can keep watching porn; 2) Water-shelling on anyone who bothers to be vocal; 3) Top cops getting kudos for outstanding performance; and 4) More helplines for women set up where you can call for an update on K-serials for sure, but just try asking for help!”

So screams a post on Facebook which has gone viral with outrage over the December 16’s brutal rape of a 23-year-old paramedical student hailing from Dehra Dun.

Outside of the cyber zone, Delhi’s streets have been spilling over and even fighting pitched battles with  cops in their bid to keep the case vocally alive, hoping for a watershed that will blow away the scourge of rape once and for all.

But is this insanity of hope? After all, if prostitution is the oldest profession in the world, rape has been the oldest crime. In the millions of years that have passed by in the interregnum, this crime has only grown, not just in proportion but also in violence, impunity and shock value, a point amply illustrated by what Ram Singh and his men did to a hapless girl “just for fun”.

Equally alarmingly, even as the nation is erupting in protest, anguish and shock, fact is that two more rapes have been reported in Delhi itself, and from varying strata of society. A three-year-old schoolgirl has been sedated and raped in her school by the owner’s much educated husband, and a 40-year-old mother of two has been done in similarly.

From here pops up the inevitable question: Has rape, like corruption, already turned into an irreparable cancer of society with no damage control in sight? Is the ugly, disgusting phenomenon, much like environmental degradation, gone far beyond reversal as modern humanity hurtles towards its self-shaped collective doom? The answers here are not good, not good at all.

In India, where rape has co-existed with the citizenry for centuries, and at all levels, much like in the rest of the world, the home situation gets compounded with all sorts of administrational lacunae.

It all starts from the mindset, wherein most rape cases get relegated to the inside pages, worse still briefs, till something as blood-curdling as the latest bus incident comes along. Be it the tardy judicial process which retards conviction, or the even tardier enforcement of law which is highly decked against the victim, or be it the stigma-prone societal response to the crime itself – there is a strange aura of quick reconcilement to this oft repeated heinous act. This, in itself, gives impunity and wantonness a dangerous fillip.

Rape, sane-minded people will agree, has nothing really to do with the way a person dresses. If it were so, women in salwar kurta and chunni should have never been raped, nor should have the 23-year-old girl now battling for life in the Safdarjung Hospital.

She did not do anything deemed evenly remotely provocative or unsafe. She was not alone, she was not inappropriately dressed, she did not know the attackers and she was using legitimate public transport to go home at a decent hour. Still, she was not only raped but also shockingly brutalised by men who may be living just round the corner from your home, training you at your workout, or worse still, driving your child to school and back.

The fact that gang-raping a woman was not enough for the six men, they also had to give extreme pain to the victim by inserting a spanner into her all the way up to her small intestines, shows how distorted urban life has become. Not just this, three of the six men continued to rape the victim much after she passed away due to the pain of undiluted brutality. And then, without a care in the world, they threw her out of the bus, leaving her to die with added head injuries.

So what is it that one can sincerely do to curb this lunacy of violence that has crossed all limits and borders, so much so that the incidents can no longer be deemed stray aberrations?

How can this violence on women, or even men for that matter, what with sodomy and homosexual crimes also rearing up their ugly head, be tackled? Beyond the knee-jerk reactions of demanding chemical castration, public floggings and death penalty to the perpetrators of this crime, there is an urgent need to take a comprehensive look at what needs to be done.

The need to look inwards and arrest the plummet of values comes on top of the list. In a democracy as tumultuous as India is, hardcore corrective measures,  mostly never come along despite a meteoric demand.

One has to live with the fact that India is no Saudi Arabia where justice is retributive. An eye for an eye, beheading or many such punitive measures that act as deterrents will never ingratiate themselves in Indian jurisprudence.

Perhaps then, there is need to look at the Singapore model where the rape count is surprisingly low. Experts will tell you that’s because of the general fear of the law among its citizens. In 2011, Japan reported 2,357 incidents of rape as opposed to India which reported 15,468 in the corresponding time.

Seasoned woman’s rights lawyer Flavia Agnes has long argued that fast-track justice is the most effective way to curb the crime. She laments the fact that a judge’s response to ascertaining rape varies according to the age group.

For girls below 12, they intend on looking for injuries. Their biggest concern in case of minors is what impact the sexual violence will have on her marriage prospects.

Activists like Pinky Virani argue in support of harsher punishment, especially death penalty for rapists. They reject concerns of a cross section of opinion-builders that death penalty would end up in most rapists killing their victim in order to erase evidence and escape the law. That may or may not be the real fallout but releasing rapists with a seven-year RI does not match the crime they commit. And, in any case, all such punishments are actions that follow a crime. What the need of the hour is to prevent rapes from happening, not merely punish the offenders once a woman has been brutalised.

For that to happen, there is an urgent need to sensitise the population at all levels, and that not only means the police, but also the society at large.

Samajwadi MP Jaya Bhaduri could not keep her tears at bay in Parliament the other day when she recounted how every time she wanted to speak in Parliament about violence on women, she was made to sit down. She could not get over the fact that a rape victim in her constituency got raped in the police station where she had gone to lodge a report of the wrong done to her earlier.

This may be shocking but is not exactly rare. Police rapes have been reported from every part of the nation from time immemorial. The story of FIRs not being registered in rape cases and the victims being harassed by men in uniform have appeared in the news every now and then.

The need here then is to speedily implement the long-pending police reforms that have been lying on the shelf unattended for more than three decades.

Next comes the Judiciary where a conviction rate of just .03 per cent speaks volumes about how difficult a fight for justice actually is. There has been a chant for fast-track courts for rape cases and this singular step will go a long way in dealing with the monstrous proportions of the problem.

Of course, genuine patrolling by the night police, valid registration of all public vehicles, proper screening of drivers, well-lit streets and GPS tracking systems on all night or day vehicles will help as will better use of technology.

But the single most important way to curb incidents of rape would be to look within, self-monitor and take a serious note of what kind of a modern more we as a population are propagating.

It is an established fact that violence of all kinds has grown in our society which is churning in a West vs East, familial vs individualistic, woman vs man tussle.

Family values, for which India has long been considered the land of nirvana, has been thrown by the wayside and parents of today — especially urban parents, have gone much beyond the traditionally prescribed limit of how much exposure their progenies should get to acts of violence, be it toy guns or for that matter, violence in films, on the streets, in school or even in comic books.

Today’s generation knows that the law catches up with very few and this perceived impunity to the justice system is what tells them it may be okay to commit a particular crime because they just might be able to get away.

If the occurrence of rape has to be reduced (let’s face it, there is no doing away totally with the problem), it is imperative that the young ones are taught by their parents what respecting another human being means and how violence rubs of the line between them being humans and animals.

Such advise may be considered regressive by many but self-monitoring has had a history of working things out for the best. Big pockets, upward mobility, speed cars, designer labels are swish things but they need to come to GenX at an appropriate time. The abundance of this makes both the haves and the havenots irrationally demanding about what they want and what they should have.

Schools play a big role in such studies and counselling classes along with parents would go a long way in monitoring a child’s growth in the right direction.

Today’s society, if one sees it in entirety, has become comprehensively violent and women are its biggest victims. Even today, marital rape does not come into the clean category of a rape; domestic violence has continued unabated and rape has gained in incidence and cruelty.

Data suggests that acts of the victim rarely influence a rapist’s choice. Rape can and does strike anyone at any time. Age, social class or any particular ethnic group has no bearing on how a rapist chooses to attack.

Why else will one read about a boy raping his grandmother, a teacher raping his student, a father raping his daughter, a lover raping his beloved and strangers pouncing on you anywhere anytime?

All this shows how far we, as a population, have walked away from propriety, respect of the law and even self-appointed moral monitors that used to keep alive something called a conscience. Sadly for India, the Ram Singhs are now not few or far between. Sadly for India, our law is inadequate, too retarded, too inhibitive and too slow in dealing with a crime so serious as rape.

Yes, the police is not doing its job and the courts are too guarded in their perception of rape to take landmark departures for the benefit of the “alleged” victims. But are we ourselves doing anything to be hands-on against this scourge?

Not yet. Yes, we are too non-plussed to come out with a clearcut action plan. And no, we have not done too well in curbing society into a more positive, more healthy and cleaner frame of mind. Till that happens, very little hope in this direction.

Remember Aruna Shaunbag is living a vegetative life for the last four decades. Her rapist is out much before the seven years (lack of evidence) and working somewhere around many other women.

Remember Sonali Mukherjee, the promising girl scout who is over with 22 surgeries in her fight to look human and is awaiting more, even as her acid thrower eve-teaser got out of jail in a jiffy and got married to another girl of the same village! Such is life that we have the task of combating!

It happened this year

January 18: A cab driver raped a 20-year-old Manipuri woman in southwest Delhi. The woman worked in a Gurgaon-based spa and had hired a private cab to go to her Mahipalpur house after her night shift. She was then repeatedly raped in the cab. The driver, Anuj Saini, fled by the time the cops arrived but was arrested after four days. Conviction awaited.

January 28: A 12-year-old Class V girl was repeatedly gangraped for over five months by a 20-year-old man and his two friends in the Bawana Industrial area in outer Delhi. They threatened to kill her parents if she complained to anyone. The incident finally came to light when the minor, a Government school student, fell ill and her parents rushed her to a nearby hospital. The check-up revealed that she was four months pregnant. Main accused Deepak Shah is under arrest, his friends still at large.

February 24: A six-year-old girl was abducted from near her home in Kirti Nagar by two of her neighbours. She was found the next day by a private contractor near a temple 2 km away. She had a  deep gash on her right eyebrow and cigarette burns on her body. A medical examination confirmed rape. No arrests yet.

April 15: An 18-year-old girl raped by a placement agency owner was rescued from a nursing home in south Delhi. She claimed that the woman who had brought her to Delhi had also brought 14 other girls. Police said Kunti Devi used to bring girls from Jharkhand and hand them over to her husband Rajesh, who was running a placement agency at Aligaon in south Delhi. The girl who was given pills for abortion has exposed a shocking tale of unscrupulous agents taking advantage of rampant poverty, trafficking girls to metro cities and selling them as domestic helps.

May 16: Three men were arrested for murdering a woman whose body was found in the LNJP Hospital. The accused had gangraped the woman twice before murdering her. The accused Salman (24) worked at a printing press, Arif (26) was a butcher and Mohamed Yahiya (26) a salesman at a grocery store. The men told the police that they used to roam the hospital premises and lure young women. Yahiya befriended the victim two weeks before her murder when she had come to the hospital for treatment. He met her twice after that. On the day of the murder (April 23), Yahiya called the woman to introduce her to his friends. As an argument broke out among the accused who were drunk, the woman tried to raise an alarm and was attacked by all three who stabbed her twice and slit her throat.

June 1: Former BSP MLA from Muradabad Balram Singh Saini’s granddaughter committed suicide after she was gangraped by three youth who threatened to make her mms video go viral. Reports claimed that the girl, a Class IX student of a convent school, was taken to a house by her friend Pooja on the pretext of some work where the three youth were already hiding. As she entered the house, they gangraped her and made an MMS of their act. The girl was threatened by the boys with dire consequences if she said anything to anyone. The depressed victim narrated to her family members the entire incident but committed suicide shortly afterwards. All the culprits have been arrested. Conviction pending.

December 19: A 17-year old girl from Faridabad filed an FIR claiming that she was first raped by her landlord Ahmed Lekh in Bijnor earlier this year when she had gone there to attend a wedding. She said her mother was also involved in the crime. She claimed the two tied her hands and feet and then the landlord raped her. The gruesome crime continued for more than six months. She was threatened that if she revealed anything they would kill her father and other family members. A CD of the rape was also made.

December 22: A three-year-old girl was raped in a West Delhi playschool by the owner’s husband who is a research officer in a well-known company. The parents came to know of the incident two days later when they took the girl to a doctor as she was unwell. It was the doctor who told them that she had been raped. The culprit has since been arrested.

Parliament was told last wednesday that there has been only one rape conviction in delhi in 2012. the capital recorded 635 rapes this year.

Investigation is pending in 348 cases.

193 cases of eve-teasing were reported in delhi in 2012. While 200 people were arrested, no one was convicted.

A total of 128 dowry death cases were reported in 2012 but there was no conviction. The total number of arrests were placed at 253.

Source: Published in Sunday Pioneer, December 23, 2012