Nirbhya

 

She was somebody’s daughter with common girlish dreams. She had a name like any other girl. She was looking up to future like any other girl. She was just like any other girl seeking her share of happiness in the hustle and bustle of Delhi. Now she has an official name Nirbhya, the fearless. But as she died, it is unimaginable to gauge the fear she must have faced, the agony she must have undergone. People know her as the victim of an unimaginably gory crime. Her honour decimated, her innards pulled out by the rapists. She died to bring many surviving dead souls to life from the killing apathy. There are no Christmas festivities in Delhi. There is no festive air. Nobody is bothered about welcoming the year 2013 waiting less than a week’s soufflés away in the dying wintery year. India is in the grip of a mass realisation: It’s high time they show respect to the girls and the women.   

This is the longest night! Our conscience frozen into an inhuman hibernation! In the frigid gloom, the devils shed bloods on the white snowy sheet of our social fabric. A painful cry echoes through the land of lifeless corpses! It pulls the dead souls out of their quilted, warm graves and they swarm around the tombstone of the higher mortals’ graves, crying and shouting to awake them out of their perennial, impotent sleep!

 

The cold-smitten dates of the third week of December raise some hopes! Anna Movement, Kejriwal Movement, Ramdev Movement, all had a leader fighting for a common cause. But the people gathered on Rajpath to march towards the Rashtrapati Bhavan and Parliament House to shout at their indifferent red stone walls are not doing it for glory. They are driven by a mammoth shame; a collective feeling of guilt; they need an outlet to shed their share in the tragedy. These young boys and girls are no followers of some socially conscious individual. Each and every individual braving the cold water and police batons is a leader to himself/herself! It is not for media; it is not for a long plan of action for a dream future; it is no systematised stage show! It is simple; it is from the heart; it is fought with a faceless, selfless bravery! These are the bleeding hearts; carrying over the plight and pain of the girl fighting for life in the hospital. Thousands shout her plight; thousands cry for justice. Caught in the jaws of death; her life torn apart by the very hands that could well have been solacing brotherly, if the devil inside the perpetrators would have been aware of the word ‘sister’—she now has a reason to get a forgiving smile for these thousands of brothers and sisters crying for justice from her side.  

Thousands of young people throng the area around the citadel of power. Each and every member is a pioneer, a leader! It is a movement started by the leaders. Busy in petty household chores, and guiltily watching it on the TV, even in the most Hindi-movie-driven heroic fancy, one cannot visualise himself/herself more than pissing on the Parliament after somehow managing to sneak through the barricade. The beholder of such impotent law that allows such criminal acts against women, and that too one after another, does not deserve better treatment.

Forget about law, justice and the government. People are foremost. A cause has to first jolt the courts in their hearts. We are responsible for this nasty assault on humanity. We have allowed things to culminate in such an inhuman tragedy. Thousands of cases of molestation in varying degrees pass on a daily basis as routine things. People allow them to occur; criminal apathy! This pandering of the smaller evils by the court of conscience in the thousands of spectators on the footbaths, crowded buses and metros and bazaars just leads to criminal loopholes at the administrative levels. First thing: If you are a good human being and theoretically shout ‘Capital Punishment to the rapists!’, you have to get eligibility to shout this slogan by at least taking a vow to interfere when some petty male molests a girl or women in any form or degree before your eyes. If the courts of humanity inside us will not allow thousands of such indecent things on a daily basis, the higher courts and administration will also not spare the evil-doers at bigger chronic stages.

We are the law! We hold the court inside our civilized hearts. Leave the bigger crime acts to the judiciary. We, as the carriers of that tiny court of humanity inside us, can well afford to dispense justice from our own ends in street-side regular cases of violations of norms against women, by promptly condemning the criminal for the deed, to be followed by a few hard slaps to serve the cause of justice. The case has to be closed then and there and spare the over-burdened judiciary to continue settling thousands of self-evident ghastly crime acts that are pending for decades.

The latest incidence is not in abstract. It has come to hit the last nail in the coffin of women plight in Delhi to seal its fate to suffer and survive in fear and insecurity even in the broad day light. Hundreds of such cases and incidences have been tonking at the courts of our conscience and the thick walls of governance for decades. It has been caused by a bigger criminal act by all: individuals, society, government, police and judiciary. Delhi is being run by an experienced old lady for a decade and half. If the intensity of crime against the women is getting sharper teeth to tear the moral fabric to pieces, then shame should loom large on her face if ever her inner voice gives her some credit for being a successful administrator! India is being handled in proxy by another lady for a decade. It is high time that she feels finally like a woman and not like a mechanically principled Nehru family Queen thinking 365×24×7 just about retaining the political clout of the family to ultimately install the Yuvraj as the King of India.

This country is not short of those bookish theologians who will drag you into the psychology of crime to prove the ineffectivity of the capital punishment. To be hell with such idiots and put their analytical brains in boiling oil and feed to the rapists in jails who fatten themselves on our public money. Capital punishment serves its purpose. Hang these six bastards and then see the crime graph in Delhi.

There are undercurrents of good and bad in almost all human beings. We came out of the caves to civilise ourselves by taming the beast by putting up chains of deterrence in various forms: social conventions, ethics, family relationships, beliefs and lawful punishment. When they started wagging tongues against the capital punishment, it was under the blind belief that we have become sufficiently civilised to self-contain the bad in us to a degree that would not allow us to get into heinous manifestations of crime. But dears, these assumptions fail miserably in the devils still lurking around in stinking corridors of sub-human existence interspersed with the cleaner faces of our society. Socio-economic development in these grey areas is a generational shift and the theoreticians can dump their capital and jobs and work in these slums to change their surroundings and material possessions and then later on clean the shit of their brains. We but in the cleaner by lanes of the society want safety for our law-abiding generation by having this feeling that there is capital punishment against the crime that is tormenting the body and souls of almost all the women and girls in Delhi.

Hang them please!