After Nirbhaya, the word ‘rape’ has become the most used word in our newspapers. Analysts tell us that post Nirbhaya, more and more women and girls are coming forward to be counted as un-witting victims of heinous crimes against women.
Earlier, sexual crimes against women, like mental diseases, were blots against family reputations and had to be kept under wraps. So all mental health issues and sex related crimes never happened. Families swept these crimes under the carpet.
Vinod Mehta has his own take on the incidence of rape in India. He relies on data published in the UN Development Goals report 2014. This report says that 800 million Indians – two-thirds of our population – relieve themselves in the open and under a threatening sky. “The world does not offer us the decency to let us defecate in private,” says a woman from Patna whose daughter was recently raped when she went into the fields that have now become raping and killing fields.
Unfortunately, we are more concerned about building giant statues of ex politicians than sulabh souchalyas. The debate over ‘toilets before temples’ will no doubt continue to hog newspaper columns and T.V. debates for decades to come.
‘While the Modi government is busy doing spectacular things like single-window clearance for foreign investment and identifying the date and year of the great Mahabharata war, one doesn’t read or hear much about what it proposes to do for eliminating a shocking disgrace from our society. Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze point out, “the history of world development offers few examples of an economy growing so fast for so long with such limited results in terms of reducing human deprivations”.’
We don’t seem to have the administration or the law and order machinery to deliver justice to the victims and penalize the perpetrators of sexual assaults. The on-going case of a six-year-old being raped in a school in Bangalore truly exposes the system or rather the lack of a system.
So even as the police seem to be groping in the dark, our potential rapists are happily groping in broad daylight!
In 1964, Vidhyadar Naipaul, in his book, ‘An area of darkness’, wrote – ‘Indians defecate everywhere. They defecate mostly besides railway tracks’. Ironically, fifty years later, in 2014, Naipaul’s observation on the shitting habits of Indians has been echoed by the Indian railways. Their latest report on safety says that one of the main causes of rail fracture is because of accelerated corrosion caused by the discharge of raw, un-treated sewage from train toilets.
So now, in the name of safety, the railways want to introduce chemical toilets on trains. These guys write their reports from their AC cabins at Rail Bhavan. They should walk the tracks sometimes or these untouchable ‘brahmins’ should read Naipaul in some AC library in Delhi.
