On March 8, Women’s Day, India will see and many others will relive the story, nay, the nightmare that befell a 23-year-old girl in Delhi on December 16, 2012. I need tell no more, I think. Most of you would have already guessed who I am talking about – it’s Nirbhaya. India’s Daughter, a powerful and heart-wrenching documentary by Leslee Udwin that will be screened by the BBC on Women’s Day, re-evokes all the grief and rage that we women felt on that fated day in December. It is also a part of a world-wide India’s Daughters campaign against gender inequality and sexual violence against women and girls championed by Freida Pinto and Meryl Streep.
But eight days before its screening, the documentary or rather its contents, is already evoking a sense of outrage among Indians. One of the rapists involved in this incident, Mukesh Singh, had spoken on camera to Udwin, saying, “A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy. You can’t clap with one hand – it takes two hands,” he says in the interview. “A decent girl won’t roam around at 9 o’clock at night. Boy and girl are not equal. Housework and housekeeping is for girls, not roaming in discos and bars at night doing wrong things, wearing wrong clothes. About 20 per cent of girls are good.”
Outrageous though this is, it is not surprising that an uneducated brute like Mukesh Singh would make statements like this. But when the same comes from an educated lawyer, his own defense lawyer, it is utterly and absolutely unforgivable!
“We have the best culture. In our culture, there is no place for a woman,” says ML Sharma, defence lawyer for the men convicted of Nirbhaya’s rape and murder.
Another lawyer on their team, AL Sharma adds, “If my daughter or sister engaged in pre-marital activities and disgraced herself and allowed herself to lose face and character by doing such things, I would most certainly take this sort of sister or daughter to my farmhouse, and in front of my entire family, I would put petrol on her and set her alight.”
And it is not just the defense lawyers who think in this manner. As a beat reporter after the 2012 incident, when I spoke to a few male public prosecutors from Chennai on their opinion on the case, the stance they all took was the same.
“She must have done something. Why else would these men go rape her?”
“She was out with her boyfriend late in the night. Not a good character.”
“Both of them must have been making out in the bus. That’s why she was raped.”
It is shocking to think that the same people whom we approach to help us in our quest for justice actually think and perhaps even see us, in this manner. In fact, if many lawyers think and act like this, who needs criminals?
But then education has never been a measure for progressive thinking in India anyway. We have progressive and open thinkers who are barely literate and we have highly educated people with several degrees to their name who have gone through life with blinkers on.
This documentary only reaffirms what a lawyer friend of mine once told me. “It is not the law which is conservative, but the people who wield and execute it,” she said referring to her own experiences as a fresher in a state High Court.
Consider this. We have a law that makes prostitution legal, but pimping (running brothels) illegal, because it notes that many women are driven to prostitution under dire circumstances. Yet many of the sex workers are often arrested and harassed and booked under different sections of law, like say, Indecent exposure. So it is not the law, but the policeman who books the sex worker who is at fault.
We have a law that has provisions for punishing rapists, molesters, eve teasers and other sex offenders. But the sentence that is meted out depends on the judge who interprets the law, the lawyer who prosecutes the case and the policemen who investigate it, many of them with known gender biases.
Since the Nirbhaya rape case, we have seen an increase in the number of fast track courts, we have seen the government pass many new laws pertaining to sexual assault, making punishment more stringent. A Nirbhaya fund was set up to compensate the victims and improve infrastructure for women’s safety.
But none of these will matter or even function properly if the people who execute it harbinger such notions about women. It is time we educated our protectors and lawmakers. Only then will we women see a real revolution, not just the Arab Spring that followed Nirbhaya’s horrific nightmare.
Image Courtesy: BCCL
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