Sending Facebook petitions to president not enough to stop rapes

Ananya.s.guha

20 December, 2012

A few protests are taking place, in a most scattered manner, regarding the Delhi gang-rape. I feel ashamed even to use this expression, a slur to put it mildly on human behaviour- aberrant and despicable. Some people are putting up petitions on Facebook to the President of India. How will this help?

WE HAVE to make an orchestrated protest all over the country. But, the most important aspect is that the callous and dirty mindset must change. Capital punishment for such acts is another ‘solution’ so that it puts the fear of god into the minds of these devils.

Two years back in the columns on Boloji, Nikhil Sharda wrote, “After a rape of a white woman in Mumbai, that murder is murder, and rape is rape, no matter what the colour of the skin is.” But doesn't it hurt us to know, that this is what our own Indians have been doing- in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata or Guwahati? How do we transfer this anger and hurt into concrete action? How do we expiate for our collective sin of dishonouring the human and more specifically Indian race?

Some years back an Indian expatriate did the same in the UK, and murdered the girl, a college-going student. He was finally arrested in Siliguri! Again a few years back there was the most heinous sexual crime in New Delhi against a foreign tourist, or someone working in an embassy. It is so grotesque, that your memory grows foggy, and capitulates to time. It is escapism, we want to forget!

And this recent episode in Delhi sends shivers down the spine. Yesterday, I read an article on this Citizen Journalism website, in which a Professor of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi wrote how threatened she was feeling in a bus she was travelling alone, in her forties while going to the University campus. The overture or words of the conductor took on a salacious note, so much so that she had to call for help. Delhi is infamous in this regard. Many of my lady colleagues working here in Shillong have said that they were followed, or to use a more animalistic word- stalked. This is what happens.

How could all this happen in a city bus, without anyone raising a murmur? Were the people so scared out of their wits? Where is the modicum of the decency then? Is this not a tacit way of saying yes? All these questions come to the mind, but I know these questions will remain unanswered.

If we are fighting against corruption and politicians; then, is this not corruptibility in its worst form not to fight hoodlums?

We need answers to these questions. And the President of the country or the Prime Minister must answer them. Yesterday President Barack Obama said about the recent killing of 27 people in a school in the US, said that he is thinking of how to combat such killings, and this was not the first. At least, the President has thought about it, gave public vent to his feelings; he might even be ruing the fact that he did not abolish the gun license. It is at least better late than never.

These two incidents, one in the United States and the other in our country followed close on heels. The Prophets of Doom or the Mayans are right - the world is ending slowly but surely, at least morally speaking. And, India seems to be playing a leading role in this rule of depravity.