Like every other day in India, a gang-rape was reported, this time in Mysore, and, the events that follow are painfully similar to every other rape case that remain in my memory. A Mysuru university student was gang-raped last week. Neither she nor her family had made a statement to the police yet, understandably because of the shock and trauma they are being through. But every Tom, Dick, and Harry are out with their 2 cents. The minister said the girl should not have gone to that place at all in the first place. He withdrew his statements later, which doesn’t change a thing. Next, the police, who are incapable of making any arrests yet (until I started writing this), have asusual started their moral policing. They have asked the university to curb the movement of women students after 6.30 p.m. This makes me wonder whether the men and women in this country are ruled by the same laws or is there a separate sub-minimal constitution in India that applies only to women.
Last I checked, the constitution says all are equal before the law (Article 14); Nobody shall be discriminated based on their gender or anything else (Article 15); right to freedom of movement (Article 19). But the police think they are above the supreme law of the land and unabashedly unleash their regressive moral policing. Imagine the kind of wrath they would have drawn if they had imposed a similar curfew on any other group in society. But women are supposed to be just fine with any discrimination that comes in the disguise of protection. In every hostel in India, men and women who belong to the same campus are indeed already governed by different rules. In a civil society, anyone would expect this to change, but not in India where the state is so incompetent that they hide behind moral policing to shun away from actual policing.
If it is to be understood that women need to stay indoors to ‘protect’ themselves, it begs the question of what role does the police have, if all they can do is just shift the onus on women themselves. The day when a radical woman police commissioner imposes a similar curfew on the male students just to prove how grotesque all this is, I bet the world would suddenly wake up from its deep slumber and overwhelm us with their profound wisdom.
It is an exercise in futility to keep explaining to these people that rapes happen despite the victim’s age, clothing, or place. The only reason behind rapes is patriarchy. But we question and try to correct everything else other than that. A chief minister of India has a problem with women wearing jeans; a union minister thinks incidents like Delhi gang-rape are ‘small’; another CM thinks women should not be left free or independent; a chief justice thinks he can mediate marriage between a rape survivor and accused; another Chief justice dons the judge role in the case where he himself is the sexual offender; even the Prime minister thinks women who laugh can be equated with mythological villains; everybody has a problem with women entering the sanctum sanctorum of a temple. And all these people are still at large.
The vilest of all these are the common men who turn blind and deaf to all these discriminations, but, do not leave any opportunity to criticize and mock women for the remotest of the privileges they get. Before you shed crocodile tears for a Nirbhaya or Diksha, make sure you are not that guy who thinks women should not get free bus rides but does not have a problem when your counterparts grope women in the same bus.
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