India No country for women!

Namita Bhandare 

Hindustan Times

20 April, 2018

Recent gang-rapes and our reaction to them tell us how far we’ve descended in six years after Nirbhaya.

Cover Image: Advocate Deepika Singh Rajawat, lawyer of the Kathua rape case victim, talks to media after filling a petition in the Supreme Court, April 16. No action has been taken against the Kathua Bar Association lawyers physically trying to prevent the police from filing a charge sheet. (Sushil Kumar/HT PHOTO)

 

James kottoorEver since the famous Nirbhaya gang rape in Delhi, December  2012, which produced the landmark judgment  to stop it with stringent punishment, how far have we made progress or deteriorated abysmally?

 

If the whole exercise was counter-productive, it was due to two reasons: 1. The punishment proposed was never given;

2. There was no serious intent on the part of lawmakers to change the mind-set of the people. We have no dearth of laws to deal with any crime, only the lawmakers routinely fail to implement them for the sake of vote-bank politics.

                The culprits in this case are we ourselves, the voting public, who consistenty vote in our favorites in  our caste, class and creed circle, instead of candidates with vision, conviction, courage and action as our  political leaders.

                 And so the lesson is: Nothing is going to change until we change our mindset to vote in only statesmen, not looters of the national pie for five years at a stretch.  If we can’t do that, blame no one except ourselves. To achieve that we have miles to go to upgrade the quality of our educational system. james kottoor, editor ccv.

 

Read below the report by Namita Bhandare

in Hindustan Times

 

When we allowed our anger to spill over into the streets following the December 2012 gang-rape of a physiotherapy student, we didn’t ask about her religion. We didn’t put labels on our fellow protesters’ ideology. And we certainly didn’t entertain any of the usual questions about what she was wearing and why she was out after dark.

Our collective anger resulted in a new law and while we believed that mindset change would take longer, we trusted that it would inevitably follow.

Yet, how far we’ve descended in six years became clear as news of the premeditated gang-rape, torture and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Kathua began to gain traction.

At more or less the same time, another rape, also of a minor girl was making headlines in Unnao, Uttar Pradesh, the state presided over by a man who swore to unleash anti-Romeo squads to curb sexual harassment.

In Surat we have learned about the body of a child found with over 80 injury marks on her body — raped and tortured for days before being strangled to death. In Kulgam, Kashmir, news is trickling in of yet another minor girl being drugged, raped and sold for sex. In Nagaon, Assam, an 11-year-old was gang-raped and then burnt alive.

In the long course of a brief fortnight, there is the realization that rape and its attendant brutality is now an everyday crime, grotesquely ordinary in its routineness, recounted in almost dull, pornographic detail. This is the India we now accept.

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