Kerala molestation: Indian women guilty, now and forever in India, a no country for women

Source:- india.com

“We all ache for a home where we feel safe. A home we can roam about without fear. At 3 on a bone-chilling winter morning or at 11 in the night, amid the darkness that grows over the silent streets; a ‘safe’ home is all we ache for.”

Yes, we do long for such a home and while waiting for it, we have assured ourselves that India is not that home. India has failed its mothers, sisters, and daughters. Despite having several laws in place for women safely, India, as it seems, is still in the medieval age with little respect for women.

On Friday, a leading actress was abducted, molested and photographed by a group of men in Kerala. The Kerala police took the driver’s vehicle into custody and sent a team to search for at least six more people involved in the offense, including her ‘former driver’ after she complained about the ordeal she went through on Friday night.

While the police have been looking out for her former driver involved in the crime, it has taken her current driver into its custody. While this all has rolled out since Friday with now even drivers are being questioned for the crime, India has again moved to the forefront of women safety. A 3-year-old girl and a 7-year-old girl were allegedly sexually assaulted and killed in two separate incidents in the past two weeks. In fact, as many as 140 cases of rape and 238 cases of molestation were registered by Delhi Police in January 2017.

“A safe city is one where women and girls can enjoy public spaces and public life without fear of being assaulted…one that promotes equal opportunities for men and women in all the spheres of social, economic, cultural and political life.” – United Nations

India is one of the most unsafe places in the world so much so that even foreign countries issue safety advisories to women travelling to India. The worst part of the Indian system is that it still doesn’t have any strict law to ensure safety to women. A law should be carved out till the ‘rape norm’ is sucked dry from the face of this earth.

We don’t have a strict law but what it has failed to understand is that if India lets culprits go unpunished or even with little punishment, it will add more to the world of misogynists and will be making way for a fresh breed of men who think they have a moral authority to attack the dignity of women at any time, at any place. It is a shame.

Over the years, we women have created a mental clock that times ‘when to go out’ and ‘when to stay home to be safe’ for us and we follow it with a constant sense of anxiety along with even if we go out, what part of our bodies shouldn’t be exposed (a society’s expectations). Our mental clock tells us that after 8 pm, women body-hungry men roam around in the streets to lay their hands on any woman they see practicing their right to be free in an independent country.

For a safer city, a continuous process involving planning, design, enforcement, legal redressal, social campaigns, civil society and community participation. Taking just a part of the problem into account isn’t going to help much. India is progressing but its transformation into a global metropolis hasn’t taken everyone into account. Women, it sure doesn’t have. Every time a rape happens in India, the women safety automatically gets featured in political manifestoes in order to attract people. It is only during elections or rapes that we hear safety measures being taken to ensure safety to women. Once the heat dies out, the talks die down as well.

India will never be a great country till every woman (including children) feels safe here. We need a mechanism to reach a point where there are no rapes. If not a stringent law to eliminate this, what are we waiting for? A supernatural power to make it happen for us?

Rapes happen, we shout slogans, we protest, called guilty for ‘asking for it’, politicians make comments, more protests and then… it dies down, till the history repeats itself! This is going to be another case fading away like all the incidents of molestation that happen every single day across India? What after this? Just another day, another uproar, another day of going back to our normal lives.