This question comes up every time a new case of rape arises and every time the Nirbhaya incident is discussed all over again. Every time the media covers one case far too much, this reminder pops in the comment section – “Why only Nirbhaya, why haven’t you covered the case of ……?”
There is really no appropriate answer to this question. The response has always been that the Nirbhaya episode kickstarted the citizen movement on crime against women; and that nothing has ever been so brutal as that case. That’s not true though. There are allegations that rape of young little kids do not matter to the public because they are poor. That’s not true. Rape is a heinous crime, regardless of their economic status and everybody knows this, feels this. So why only Nirbhaya? Why not the four-year-old girl?
Freida Pinto recently hit closer to the truth than anybody else during her recent interview with The Salon. Freida, incidentally, is one of the brand ambassadors for the Leslee Udwin documentary, India’s Daughter, which has the current government alternating between spitting fire and turning a cold shoulder towards it.
Pinto’s theory on why Nirbhaya alias Jyoti’s case became the tipping point as published in the Salon:
“She was a medical student, very aspirational, much like most of the college students who were out on the street protesting. This is a woman who basically had a chance to transform her own life and her parents’. She was very ambitious, and in many ways she was already a fighter, with what she was doing in her life. People love rooting for fighters, we all know that.
This girl’s life was taken away from her, in a way that no one expected. It wasn’t a road accident, she wasn’t ill. She was doing something that was absolutely the most normal thing to do-which is watch “Life of Pi” one night. And then something as horrific as a gang rape on the bus followed that.
Yes, we hear about rapes all the time, in different parts of the country, but in terms of her being an early 20s aspirational girl, that is something we probably had not heard of on this level. Also the brutality of the crime itself got everybody’s attention. Sometimes, I wish people did not focus on the brutality of the crime, because it really does not help the problem. And the brutality of the crime, in such brutal terms, has happened many times before. I think the number one aspect was that she was an aspirational girl just like you and I.”
It is only right that we champion the cause of every rape victim. We’d like to do that too, don’t we? So why have we rooted more for Nirbhaya than anybody else? Because we see ourselves in her. We are only human after all. It’s not in our nature to unquestioningly embrace every bit of horror we read about and seek a solution for it with a clear head. We deal with it by remembering only those that strike a chord most with us and forget the rest. It’s how most people deal with grief too. This doesn’t make it right though. It only makes us human.
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