A 23-year old girl, a trainee physiotherapist, and her 27-year old male friend, a B.Tech graduate, watch a movie at a plush multiplex in Delhi’s Saket area and then take a scooter rickshaw to Munirka, from where they hope to catch a city bus to their homes in Dwarka.
A black-tinted luxury bus stops at that very bus stop, and the ‘conductor’ offers to drop them off to their destination. It is 9.30 pm, and the bus has four other passengers. The bus drives on a little ahead and then slows down. Two of the passengers are asked to disembark. The bus then picks up speed. One of the six drunken men still on board makes a lewd remark at the girl who ticks him off. All hell breaks loose. The girl is dragged into the driver’s cabin where she is brutally assaulted and gangraped. An iron rod is pushed into her gut, causing her intestines to perforate. Her male friend, who tries to save her, is severely assaulted.
During the next 45 minutes, the bus covers a distance of 31 km, crossing three police control booths on the way. The police sense no mischief. At 10.15 pm , the six men strip the two of their valuables, their clothes and throw them out of the bus near the Mahipalpur flyover.
Several cars pass by and their passengers see the bleeding couple struggling for their lives. Not one of them stops. Finally, a chowkidar spots them and alerts the police, who send a police control van to the spot. A police constable rushes to a nearby guesthouse run by the Indian Council of Social Science Research to get some bedsheets. The two are wrapped in the sheets and taken to Safdarjung hospital, where this young victim is still struggling for her life.
As if the Haryana rape spree only a few weeks ago was not bad enough. Last week’s horrific gangrape has knocked the bottom out of the political class and police’s entrenched blame-the-victim mentality because rape victims are “not suitably attired” or else “are found pubbing at late hours”.
The government continues to indulge in window dressing. Delhi chief minister Shiela Dixit and her health minister Kiran Walia made a perfunctory trip to Safdarjung Hospital 72 hours after the incident. Visibly moved, Dixit said her government was willing to send this young medico abroad for treatment, perhaps taking a leaf out of the Pakistan government’s offer to Malala Yousafzai, the young girl whom the Pakistani Taliban shot in the head for espousing the cause of girls’ education.
Meanwhile, the public outcry against this crime has intensified in Delhi. The youth are out on the streets demanding fast-track justice against rapists. Spontaneous groups have gathered every day of the past week at India Gate, inside the premises of Safdarjung Hospital and outside Rashtrapati Bhavan. On Saturday evening, the protests on Raisina Hill intensified after police resorted to water cannons, tear-gassing and lathi-charging the crowds as the protesters raged against the Delhi and Central governments, forcing a series of phone calls and meetings between top leaders, including Congress president Sonia Gandhi, PM Manmohan Singh, Union home minister Sushilkumar Shinde, BJP veteran L.K. Advani, Leader of the Opposition Sushma Swaraj and others, and eventually a statement from Mr Shinde asking protesters to calm down because the government was initiating measures to ensure speedy justice for the gangrape victim, now nicknamed ‘Amanat’ by the media as well as review security for the ordinary Indian.
The social media is abuzz with people demanding that the rapists be given the death penalty. Others want them to suffer chemical castration. Indira Jaising, additional solicitor general, has criticized those demanding the death penalty. “Death penalty will not deter anyone from committing a crime. Rather, it is the certainty of conviction which is the greater deterrent. Investigation and prosecution are the need of the hour,” said Jaising.
Women’s activist Dr Ranjana Kumari, who heads the Centre for Social Research, is also taken aback by the growing demand to hang the rapists. “Death penalty is very difficult to establish and is used in the rarest of rare cases. Since Independence, only 46 people have been hanged, but there are 40,000 cases of rape presently pending in our courts. A lynch mob mentality will not do,” said Kumari.
Nor are social activists in favour of castration, even as an extreme form of punishment. Some say the US sentencing system, where rapists are made to serve prison sentences in a sequential manner, unlike in India where sentences are concurrent, may be a stronger deterrent.
Kumari’s own organistion took up the Buddha Jayanti Park case in which a girl was raped by a member of the President’s guard in 2003. “Nine years later, he has received conviction in a Sessions Court but the rapist will now go on appeal. By the time his conviction is confirmed and he is sentenced, another five years will have passed,” Kumari said.
A visibly nervous police force is demanding that some 10,000 personnel of the 84,000-strong Delhi police force are deployed in paperwork and they should be taken off these duties and assigned to patrol beats. Policemen across all states are bogged down in duties that include vigilance, VIP security, working in the Enforcement Directorate, or municipal demolition cells and in police training colleges.
“The primacy of beat patrolling, which is the backbone of our work, has been systematically annihilated,” says an angry former top cop Kiran Bedi, who attributes the sharp spurt in crime to there being “no ground policing systems in place”.
“Between 1980-86, we (officers and constables ) used to patrol the streets of the capital. We ensured that the public were equally involved in these efforts and we had citizen and traffic wardens comprising prominent Delhiites, including a retired Air Marshal, so that members of the public had an equal stake in keeping cities crime-free. Speeding PCRs are no substitute for combing the streets,’’ Ms Bedi said.
“The success of our efforts could be gauged from the fact that in 1980, we were able to end illicit bootlegging in West Delhi. Women benefited the most from these efforts,” Ms Bedi added.
The most shocking aspect of the December 16 gangrape has been the sheer savagery of the attack. The question being asked is, what are the circumstances that cause men to turn into such deviants? This is the question senior advocate Kamla Bhasin is asking herself repeatedly. “What has our patriarchical society done to produce such perverts? Also, part of the problem lies is the violent and extremely provocative sexuality being portrayed in Bollywood and that needs serious questioning”.
There is little doubt that entrenched misogyny is endemic in our society, although even women help perpetuate such a mind set. Take the examples of female foeticide, dowry deaths, acid attacks, public stripping and honour killings…. there is a strong undercurrent of treating women as objects, as second class citizens at best. The other key problem is that the state has established no benchmark in taking tough action against the perpetrators of such crimes. Khap Panchayats and caste-based clans protect rapists and, instead, issue advisories to women to dress carefully, marry early, not use mobile phones and remain within the four walls of their homes.
The National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) reconfirms the worst fears of rape victims. Rape conviction rates remain a meager 25 per cent. Lawyer Rebecca John explains that cases of murder, rape and other heinous crimes no longer enjoy primacy in courts of law. “When I joined the practise in 1988, there was one special court dealing with corruption. Today, we have 26 special courts, each dealing with 4-5 cases in a day, while courts dealing with heinous crimes including rape and murder have to deal with over 50 cases in a day. No wonder such cases have got sidelined”.
Rape has no easy answers, especially since it is often perpetrated by people living in the neighbourhood of the victim. Twenty-four thousand rape cases were reported in 2011. The NCRB reports that the offenders were known to the victims in as many as 22,540 cases. This means, rape is being committed by neighbourhood friends, teachers, even uncles, brothers and fathers.
Rape cases, surely, are on the rise. Women increasingly fear the masculinisation of all public spaces. Will we be able to stem this tide or is increasing brutality against women going to become the reality of our lives?