Headline : Chandigarh Stalking

Nirbhaya was brutally raped, thrown on a road, stripped off her clothing, her intestines pulled out, when like any ordinary city working girl she simply decided to go for a film with a friend & take a bus ride home.

Sunanda Tharoor wife of a cabinet minister checked her self into a luxury suite at The Leela & was found dead with bruises & bite marks.
The sham investigation that followed this high profile case didn’t even feel the need to make excuses for its cover up.
How many expected something to come out of it ?

Stalking, harassment, kidnapping, rape & murder abound in a country of 1.2 billion.
The media selectively plucks one out ( usually People Like Us ) from which they can derive the maximum TRPs & we unquestioning their choice, discuss on cue, lack of policing, dismal security, shoddy investigation, CCTVS that don’t work or exist.

TV channels have spawned these talk shows & candle light marches. We willingly change our Facebook & Twitter DP happy to have done our bit & ravenously pore over sanctimonious & smug op-eds of pop psychology that capitalise on our 30 day attention span.

Because we only follow up from headline to headline the fact remains that our cities are terribly unsafe. Our police ill equipped. Law & order dismal. Promises of CCTVs & Helplines forgotten.

Nevertheless TV anchors & their panelists play out the circus breathlessly –

Dear viewer.
We bring to you the very first stalking.
Scary. Frightening.
How do you feel ? What do you think ?
The victim is going to fight it out. The victim has since died but her parents will fight on.
Hashtag IndiaWithXYZ

Dear viewer.
Here is this politician’s spoilt son.
A goon, a drunk. The first man to harass a woman in this country.
His father needs to resign. The Govt needs to go.
Hashtag NeedsToGo

Outrage. Hysteria. Outrage.
What a bloody farce.

If our governments have no intention of providing security. If they have no intention of enforcing law & order & if we are going to allow them –
then this is just another God given opportunity for the out-of-power ones to fix the ones in power.
A chance to be gleefully back in business.
To gleefully scavenge on someone else’s trauma & use it for ones end.

For systemic change we civil society & all its components must demand every hour, everyday of the year that our cities must be made secure as modern, urban population expect all over the world.
We must demand police reforms.
We must demand our law agencies are allowed independence to enforce the law.
We must pressurise a lazy & fearful judiciary to dispense justice.

This is not to say that in civilised societies, mature democracies there isn’t an attempt to protect one’s own. But with the system & institutions in place, the checks & balances make it that much more difficult to do so.
……Or else it all remains a merry go round of hollow, empty rhetoric for which we must share equal blame.

We might not care to recollect those three young girls found hanging from a tree after they went out into the fields one night to urinate. Just like their mothers & grandmothers have done every day of the year before them.
That story is too remote & too far removed from our lives.

But instead please care to remember closer home – Nirbhaya’s parents.
They still live out her brutal rape & slow death every minute of the day. To say ~ time heals ~ would be insulting to those who endure such physical & mental anguish.

However, these very same professional wailing banshees have forgotten them like yesterday’s newspaper.

~ Law & order exist for the purpose of establishing justice & when they fail this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of progress ~