Article on Delhi gang rape in TOI on 30.12.12

This article in TOI on 30.12.12 is an editorial by Rupa Sengupta. I can tell you that I agree with every sentence, every word of it and I am sad to say that my parents, like many expected the highlighted sentences of me.

Why is freedom still denied to midnight's girl children?2012 will end at the stroke of the midnight hour. But India won't stop mourning the death of Nirbhaya, a young rape victim so named by this newspaper for her fearlessness in the face of adversity. This paramedical student's undeserved fate serves as a reminder that - after six decades of Independence - the modern Indian woman is free to do simple things like meet a friend, walk on the street, and catch a bus at night - only at her own risk. Whatever happened to her freedom, promised at the stroke of midnight back in 1947?
Nirbhaya's is the story of millions of Indian women, open to insults, subject to ambush, vulnerable to attack, destined for demonisation. Yes, women are stalked, molested and battered the world over. But, barring some barbaric places, the world over it isn't social custom for girls to be killed even before they're born. The world over, they aren't forbidden choice in work, love or marriage by politically coddled khaps. The world over, they aren't set ablaze with sickening regularity for not meeting dowry demands or failing to bear sons. Nor do most politicians, the world over, think it perfectly kosher to justify rape by blaming the victim.
The men who victimised Nirbhaya were monstrous products of this very society that would have women surrender body and mind or else metamorphose into a strumpet in male eyes. Surely freedom means nothing if, despite their shared humanity, women are thought inferior to men, and so coerced to serve them in the flesh or be stripped, whipped and worse.
It's time to ask some questions - and loudly. How many times has a girl child been told not to run wild like her brothers, because she must inculcate passivity? How many times has a girl student been told that the art of masochism prepares her for life more than the habit of scientific enquiry? How many times have teenagers, barely post-puberty, been paraded in the marriage market as sideshows to the 'dahej'*? How many times have brides been made to acquiesce to conjugal deflowering and impregnation as the sole justification for their existence?
Perhaps as many times as 'virtuous' women are told that the night is out of bounds save to tramps and trollops. All because nocturnal obscurity works in the fevered minds of predators a mysterious transformation of woman into slut cum prey. How many times must the midnight hour - the instant this country won freedom - be a witching hour, associating woman with evil so that society can deploy male lust as a weapon of punitive exorcism?
What are you doing out at night? That's what her tormentors asked Nirbhaya and her companion one December night. Shall we not, as midnight's children, demolish that abominable question by saying women need answer neither to society's moral police nor to its criminal spawn?
That Nirbhaya's heroism moved so many people in a nation where gender bias breeds rampant brutality suggests we can. As a new year approaches, let it inspire in us the resolve to reform society and politics, challenging every one of their conspiratorial assaults on one half of the Indian population. Nirbhaya's refusal of victimhood in her darkest hours teaches what we always knew: that human dignity is inalienable and the human spirit indomitable. It is this light of inner freedom that midnight's girl children must hold on to.
For, Nirbhaya's story doesn't tell women to dread the world because beasts lurk in it, behind trees, beyond each bend, in vehicles with dark windows. It enjoins us to remake the world so that every member of a long-oppressed sorority can trust it as a guarantor of equality, security and justice. Our freedom is only half-won unless Nirbhaya's sisters can walk on the road on a winter night, board the bus that comes along, and find their way home - the way Nirbhaya hoped to.

It gets me thinking. Why do we women put up with this hellhole? There must be some way out of it. Only thing, it is unknown as of now.

Regards

* Dahej is Hindi for dowry.