Barely into the new year and the news for women is already grim. On December 31, one of the most patrolled nights of the year, four men in a car hit a woman on a scooty, don’t bother to stop, and instead drag her for several kilometres. She dies of her injuries. On an Air India flight, a drunk passenger urinates on a 70-year-old woman. On landing, he happily goes home, and it’s media outrage a month later that leads to a police complaint and a belated announcement by the airline to ban him for 30 days.
In Bengaluru, 2022 ends with the depressingly familiar tale of what men can do when rebuffed by women, when a 19-year-old student is stabbed to death. A new location, but the same story in Delhi’s Adarsh Nagar where a woman is stabbed, luckily not fatally, by a man who’s miffed that she stopped talking to him. Elsewhere, another man is arrested after threatening to attack a woman with acid if she does not accompany him to a new year’s party.
A decade after a brutal gang-rape in Delhi led to our toughest laws, the National Crime Records Bureau continues to report an upward trend in crimes against women. The scale of violence is off the charts. Yet, 30% of the Nirbhaya Fund has not even been utilised.
No alarm bells are ringing as a patriarchal State assumes paternalistic roles. The killing of Shraddha Walkar, allegedly by her live-in partner Aftaab Poonawala, has resulted in the formation of a committee in Maharashtra that will track interfaith relationships. In poll-bound Karnataka, the Bharatiya Janata Party state president Nalin Kumar Kateel asks party workers not to talk of civic issues, but of “love jihad” even though the home ministry told Parliament in 2020 that it has no evidence of it.
As citizens we have become too numb to respond — a somnolence reflected in bystander apathy. The woman who witnessed her friend get entangled in the undercarriage of the car in the December 31 collision went home without reporting it. No passenger protested at the sight of a man urinating on a woman or the crew’s inadequate response. In Bengaluru, the student’s family learnt of her death not from her college, but from the police.
Prescriptive, after-the-fact remedies rarely work. The Delhi Commission of Women has asked for a committee that will meet every month to discuss crimes against women. Nobody can fault this, but I fear it will fall short, a band-aid to an endemic problem.
The problem is not a lack of laws but sheer callousness when it comes to the lives of women. More than protection, we need policy and politicians to talk about measures that ensure the constitutional right to equality for women citizens. More than concern, we need autonomy and empowerment. More than committees, we need the political and public will to create a rights-based society where women are not just assured of justice but something more: Dignity and the right to just live.
Namita Bhandare writes on gender
The views expressed are personal
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