Junior doctors protest against the alleged rape and killing of a trainee doctor, at RG Kar Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata, Saturday, Aug 10, 2024. (PTI Photo)
A sentence that turns my stomach every time I hear it is when a woman is brutally raped and our political leaders say, “Do not politicise this”. It is a sentence that we have heard often since the brutal, horrifying rape and murder of the young doctor in Kolkata. Every time politicians talk about ‘politicisation’, they accidentally convey that they feel neither shame, empathy nor horror, only concern that they are worried about being hurt by political consequences. What talking about politicisation also reveals is the reason why nearly a hundred women, some of them little girls and babies, are raped in India every day. It is because our political leaders do not care enough about crimes against women. They like to believe that crimes like rape are because of social factors like patriarchy.
What is more worrying is that our political leaders have taken to choosing the rapes that they want to make a noise about and ignoring those that are problematic for them to discuss. If this is not playing politics, then what is? So the horror of what happened in that Kolkata hospital is being fully exploited politically by BJP politicians and party spokespersons because they wish to embarrass Mamata Banerjee. But they choose to forget what happened in Kathua to the eight-year-old Muslim girl who was confined in a Hindu temple, and drugged, starved and raped for days. When the little girl became a liability, she was killed by smashing her head with a rock. Hindutva organisations came out in support of the rapists. And then proceeded to spread insane conspiracy theories.
More recently in Hathras, upper caste Hindu groups also came out in support of the men who raped and murdered a Dalit teenager. She was raped in a sugarcane field and strangled so violently that her back was broken. She survived for two weeks and, before dying in hospital, named her rapists. But justice will never be fully done because her broken, battered body was burned in the dead of night by the police so no DNA testing was possible.
This happened on the watch of Yogi Adityanath, who ranks second in the ranking of Hindutva heroes. He ruthlessly squashed all attempts to tell the story. Journalists who tried to tell it were jailed and charged with sedition. That time, the political leaders who tried to ‘politicise’ the story came from the Opposition, but those same leaders have been mysteriously silent about the Kolkata horror because they do not wish to embarrass a Chief Minister who is an ally. Much noise has been made of the incompetence of the West Bengal government by those who want to do the ‘politicisation’ this time.
This time, doctors went on strike across the country and there was so much anger in the streets that the Supreme Court decided to intervene. This is good, but will it make a difference? Unlikely. Days after the Kolkata horror, two four-year-old girls were raped in a kindergarten in a Mumbai suburb. Enraged protestors took to the streets and sat in protest on railway tracks. This caused the Bombay High Court to intervene and to declare correctly that “if the school is not a safe place, then what is the use of speaking about the right to education?”. Fine words, but will they make enough of a difference? Will our courts now deal more urgently with rape cases? They can sometimes take decades to be decided.
What hope is there for things to really change when the men who raped Bilkis Bano and killed her three-year-old baby daughter have managed to escape serving full life sentences because the Gujarat government decided to free them. When they came out of jail, they were greeted with garlands and sweets, and posed for pictures as if they were heroes and not convicted rapists and murderers. When a senior BJP politician was asked about the undeserved reprieve, he said that they were “sanskari Brahmins” who could thereby do nothing bad.
What hope is there for real change when someone as important as the RSS chief, Mohan Bhagwat, can say that rapes occur only in urban parts of India because of Western influence. Does he not know that it is in rural India where rape is weaponised regularly? Sometimes to settle personal scores and sometimes for political reasons. In our big cities, there are at least journalists around to tell the victim’s story, in villages, the stories remain untold and justice is almost never done.
So what can be done to bring real change? It will come only when we in the media tell every story we possibly can. But in the end, it is in the hands of our political leaders to ensure that the police do their job sincerely and that justice is done by enforcing the laws that already exist. For this to happen, they would need to fulfil their duty as political leaders instead of playing politics by choosing to view these horrific crimes against women through a narrow political prism.
It shames us all that India is sometimes described as the rape capital of the world. It shames me personally when I must warn female foreign visitors to India to be careful not to become too friendly with strangers. If our political leaders truly want to make India a country in which women are safe, they must stop playing petty political games.
