Rape – Irony in the country of Goddesses
India is a country with a countless number of Goddesses and still, neither 6-months-old girls nor 80 years old women are spared from sexual violence. Here, women are judged by their dresses, language, habits, freedom and their degrees too. Yes, you read it right. In this country, highly educated women are already in the category called ‘Slut’ by this patriarchal society. A woman’s identity is merely reduced to their vaginas. The number of penetrations by different men decide in which category of sluts they belong. But just FYI, being with a number of women decides ‘the sturdiness’ of a man.
Today the country is outraged by the Hathras gang rape case. This has already happened in 2012 during the Nirbhaya case. But do we see any change? The answer is NO! If we go by the government data, then the number of rape cases and violence against women has increased day by day. But I would like to take this moment to reflect upon our society whose conscience has been dead from years. No body here is ready to hear the scream of a rape survivor. No one is ready to let them live a peaceful life if they are fortunate enough to be alive. Why does it always take one brutal and heinous rape to wake us up from the deep sleep? Why is it so, that after every case we go back to our sleep again? This is not the first brutal rape case in the country and the most unfortunate and saddening fact we all know is that it is not going to be the last.
Hathras case has not only showcased the brutality humans can perform but also tore apart the thinking of the ‘elite class’ who thought ‘caste’ does not matter anymore in India. Media channels are showing how a Dalit girl was brutally raped, but they forgot to show that they were raped by the Thakurs and Rajputs, the so-called upper caste of Indian society. Just because the men belonged to the upper caste, UP police and administration are trying with full force to shut the case as soon as possible so that the outrage of the people against casteism is not converted into fire and takes the country by storm. Such is India, where a dead body of the girl was burnt (not cremated) just to destroy the evidence against the rape accused. Her family was deprived to see their daughter for the last time. It took that girl’s tongue to be cut, her backbone to be fractured, to be gang-raped and to die to get the attention from the media who was drunken over the Bollywood actresses for taking drugs. This heinous crime took place on the 14th of September, but the media gave it coverage when the girl died after two weeks. Rape survivor stories are not enough for our news channels, as news has become the game of TRP.
Have we ever asked ourselves, that why we are only outraged by the rapes which are inhuman in nature? Aren’t we ashamed that we are now in a stage where only the heinous rape is able to ‘attract our attention’? What about the rapes which are occurring every minute in this country? We don’t even bother to show our concern over it. If you will go through the data (irrespective of the number of unreported cases), you will find that every 15 minutes a girl is raped in India. Rapes which are occurring within the walls of a house every second goes un-noticed, rape of a wife by her husband is still not considered as a crime and taking consent of the girl on marriage assurance and cheating her ( IPC 375) is not considered as rape by our ‘Society’. But all these are ‘valuable evidence’ to assassinate a girl’s character by the same ‘society’. And we are never bothered with these cases as these are not ‘brutal’ in nature and it fails to capture our ‘attention’. Rape in itself is the most brutal form of violence. If we are not triggered by the rape of an adolescent girl in her home, if we are not angered by the rape of a wife by her husband, if we don’t sympathize with the girl who has been betrayed by her partner, then we as a society are mentally sick. If only the brutal rape of a child, breaking bones of a woman while raping her, putting stones and bottles in the private part of her body, cutting down her tongue and at the end killing her, is what grabs our attention, then we have become the most pathetic, miserable and lamentable form of a human being.
Rape doesn’t happen only because of the sexual urges of men. But the mentality behind it. Many men are conditioned to be superior to women. They think that they have authority over any women they want. They are not taught to consider women as other human beings but flesh whom they can enjoy whenever and wherever they want. Sexual urges alone can never be the reason for rape, but the thinking of dominance, inequality and superiority are the main factors behind it. If we want a world without rapists, we need to educate our men first and the first lesson starts from home, equality starts at home.
