A few days ago
while many were preparing to celebrate the solstice and a significant cosmic
event, a girl was gang raped in a moving bus in Delhi and then thrown of the
bus. She is now fighting for her life in critical condition in hospital. (we now get the sad news that she has passed away)
It is not the first time a girl has been ganged raped in India and unfortunately, it probably won’t be the last. Every 20 minutes an Indian woman is raped and this is counting only the reported cases. It is known that more cases go unreported, for fear of the social stigma and having to deal with the police, who often rape the victim again.
What followed this rape though is something
new.
Hundreds of thousands of youngsters, all over
India, came out to the streets to voice their anger and outrage.
As I write this article. The police are in
pitch battles with thousands of students on the streets of Delhi.
The young people have had enough. They don’t
want to live anymore in a society and a culture that somehow sanctions that a
woman’s place is at home, and once she is out on the streets, she does it at
her own risk.
I truly salute this young generation of
Indian’s, who are brave enough to stand up in the face of police violence and
make their voices heard, laud and clear.
What is truly
disturbing is the brutality by which their protest is being suppressed and the
biased media coverage associated with this.
On the first day the media supported the
public outrage, and as though outrage has a timeline and should be contained
for a short brief media appearance – the media has shifted sides.
Off course they did; the media is a puppet of
the corporations and prolonged protests disturbs economic activity.
India is a very complex democracy and in many
ways is not democratic at all. More then half members of parliament have
criminal cases registested against them – some of them rape cases.
It is common knowledge in India that any girl
would be terrified to go to the police to complain about rape, in fear that the
police would rape her as well or just dismiss the case.
A woman in India once told me, that the men
she really feared, when it came to crimes like rape are the police.
And now the police blame ‘anti social elements’
for inflaming the anti rape protests. Sounds very familiar, as we in the west
use ‘terrorism’ and a ‘threat to national security’ as a reason to suppress any
meaningful dissent.
What is wrong with these politicians? Don’t
they have hearts that beat like our own? Is their blood of a different colour?
For how can they condemn the outrage of nation, irate by the vile attack on one
of its daughters!
Off course, in the name of law and order these
protests will be suppressed, though in the name of law and order, rape still
goes on unchecked and mostly unreported.
As these protests goes on, the Russian prime
minister in town, signing arms deals worth billions of dollars, while half the
children in India go to sleep hungry. Isn’t this rape too? Rape of the lives of
children who go to sleep crying in hunger night after night, mostly girl
children, as the male child is always looked after with more care, in a society
that kills millions of girls while they are still in the womb.
And yes, this is the Russian Prime Minister
who imprisoned 3 brave girls from a band called ‘Pussy Riot’, for standing up
to his dictatorial ways.
We will never stop the rape of our women,
while we continue to rape the earth, rape our freedom, rape our society and
starve our children…all in the name of the creatures called economy, power,
greed and fear.
Another world is possible, and yes, we may
have to take to the streets, again and again, until the ones in power start
listening.
Here are two out of many disturbing articles in the mainstream Indian press
