Crimes Against Women: Absurd Reactions And Ridiculous Laws! Part-I

In the aftermath of the horrific Delhi Gangrape Young India decided to come out in the streets to build a movement for change. As the movement became stronger and spread across the country various changes in fact took place from banning of tinted glass vehicles to setting up of fast track courts. But the typically chauvinistic males of the patriarchal India hardly changed. On the contrary absurd reactions kept coming in casting aspersions on the victims rather than on the perpetrating fiends. And, ridiculously ineffective and archaic rape laws have been making the proceedings repulsive.

The commonest ‘advisory’ has been on the ‘clothing’ factor—what the victims wore and what the prospective victims should not wear. Surprisingly this huge group most often included ladies too—maybe due to the everlasting impressions imbibed from a patriarchal setting.  They say that girls or women tend to wear dresses that expose and naturally catch male attentions and provoke them into acts they would not have perpetrated otherwise. They remain as garrulous as ever even after you silence them with the following: 

• If the fiends are attracted by exposure, are they immune to what the clothing hides?
• Infants to grandmothers—none are spared. So what sort of ‘clothing’ exercise would they recommend for these victims?
• If it is a personal matter for males to decide what to eat and what to wear, it must apply for the females too. Discretion and modesty as advised are applicable for both of them. If a male as per his habits finds a female offensively attired that does not give him the license to advise or control or molest or rape the ‘offender’.

In a reaction very similar to this kind of chauvinistic thoughts one right-wing fundamentalist leader opined that rapes happen only in ‘India’ and not in ‘Bharat’. By this weird classification he meant that urban culture of India invites atrocities against women while the quiet (covered?) ways of rural ‘Bharat’ vouch for less or no crimes. Well, the ancient traditions of ‘Bharat’ tell us volumes about how the emperors or kings picked and chose women to fill their harems, how the powerful officers or landlords did the same and how the males of rural India still do it. Since my childhood days I have been hearing the ‘wise’ saying “If you want a good life, control your women and keep them in absolute submission”. Rural India or Bharat does not need rapes to be committed in the open, because here everything gets done within the fours walls or under ‘cover’.

One spiritual leader said that the would-be victims should pray chanting hymns and call the would-be perpetrators as ‘brothers’ appealing to them to desist from their heinous act. He also reportedly suggested that the 23 year old girl in the Delhi Gangrape might not have tried used this option leading to her brutalization and eventual death. Well, the magnanimous leader too did not focus on the preventive aspects of the fiendish acts, but instead put the onus on the victims as has been the usual trend of male India.

Because of such colossal unwillingness of male India to come to terms with the basic problem more heinous crimes against women are still taking place despite the Young India Movement for Change and despite the nationwide awareness. (to be continued…)