How many of you know about the documentary made on Nirbhaya, aired on BBC2 which is causing so much controversy? Most people? It’s being written about everywhere, after all.
And how many of you know that a few days ago, a six-year-old girl from Ahmedabad was brutally raped and her private parts damaged by inserting an rod inside her? Not too many of you, I guess. If this were a classroom, one would probably see a few hands raised hesitatingly.
On Friday, March 6, around 11.15 am, this baby girl came to her mother, crying. Her frock was soaked in blood. “She was in terrible pain and would not stop crying. She pointed her fingers at the site’s security guard who was standing a few feet away from us. She told me, ‘he did it’ and I understood,” her mother told Ahmedabad Mirror.
The security guard, 20-year-old Kaushal Chauhan, in an act of perversion, inserted a 12 mm-thick four and- a-half-feet rod into the girl. He claimed he was drunk. Ahmedabad police now has his confession. He has reportedly told them that he is the one who did it because he “just felt like doing it”. That little baby is now in a critical state at Ahmedabad Civil hospital, with a shocking amount of internal damage.
But what’s more shocking is the silence that has followed the brutal incident of this six year old girl. This silence is almost as deafening as the screams of anger that followed the rape of Nirbhaya.
The little girl comes from a poor family whose father is a construction worker. They barely manage a square meal a day. The mother is forced to take care of her three other children at the hospital itself because they have no place to go. A dupatta lent by another patient in the ward serves as a sheet for these kids. The father who is an alcoholic has been banned from the ward after he barged in demanding money from the mother.
Yet not a single NGO has come to the aid of this ailing baby and her mother. What’s even more ironic is that this episode happened in the run up to Women’s day, around which time many NGOs were celebrating women’s safety week, but nobody had time for this girl. Reports of her are missing from major newspapers around the country. Is it because she is the daughter of a poor construction worker?
Why are we being quiet in this case? Do we not owe her justice? Does every girl who is raped and assaulted need to be branded ‘Nirbhaya’ in order to garner public sympathy and attention? That little girl will probably never get over the mental trauma of this incident, even if she does ever recover from the physical injuries that were inflicted upon her, which the doctors express some doubts.
Progress is slow, but we have already seen what changes we can bring about when we angrily took to the streets after the Nirbhaya rape episode. And this little girl is as deserving of that change as Nirbhaya was. And change will not happen unless we take each and every rape seriously and make sure the government is put under sufficient pressure each time to make an example of the rapists.
If we can’t change bias towards women and children anytime soon, then we at least need to inculcate fear of punishment so that deranged men like these would hesitate before committing this heinous act. And this would only happen if we raise our voices each and every time, put pressure on the judiciary, the government, on the society each time to correct these wrongdoings, to change their attitudes. Only then will this horrible and senseless violence stop.
Image Courtesy: BCCL
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