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Bulandshahr-Jewar highway tragedy shows gang rape, murder is a reality India can't escape now

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DailyBiteMay 25, 2017 | 16:59

Bulandshahr-Jewar highway tragedy shows gang rape, murder is a reality India can't escape now

In a painful reminder of last year’s double-rape of a mother-daughter duo, the Bulandshahr highway witnessed another gruesome incident as a family of four women travelling with four men were allegedly gang-raped at gunpoint in the wee hours of Thursday, May 25.

Not only was the family looted of its valuables and cash worth thousands, a man objecting to the criminals assaulting the women was shot dead by the armed goons.

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Not a single day goes when a story of a woman being sexually abused doesn’t give us a fresh jolt, doesn’t gnaw at our senses.

The Bulandshahr-Jewar highway incident, too, is a sickening replay of that daily violence that women all over India, from every age group, go through, only to end up as “rape stats” in some hardly-cited bureau of crime records.

Though no complaint of rape has been registered in the case as of now – “medical examination” is going to ascertain sexual assault, as if a death from being shot and four women claiming they were sexually abused at gunpoint isn’t enough for the police to file an FIR – the report of the incident has, predictably, become the “rape story of the day”.

The terrifying irony of sexual violence becoming the new normal in India, despite TV and social media “outraging” at maximum capacity, is telling.

Rape stories become archived as quickly as the new ones come in, and the current incident in Bulandshahr, which includes the tragic death of a conscionable objector to the crime – a man called Shakeel Quraishi – will not be spared that inevitable fate.

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Only last week, we were upset that the term “jilted lover” appeared in the headline of a leading English-language news daily, while describing a stalker-murderer. 

Exactly as salacious stories full of gory details of sexual crimes keep coming in, we obsess about the baroque violence instead of dealing with the deranged cultural mindset that ultimately produces that acts of gendered wrong.

The fact that in the Bulandshahr-Jewar highway alleged gang-rape, murder and loot incident, three separate crimes have been clubbed together in one despicable bundle of serial assault on a family from Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh, shows the casual nature of the crimes, committed with the greatest thoughtlessness, despite being premeditated.

Reports suggest that the women claim they were raped as they objected to the robbery, in front of the men in the family, who were petrified and incapacitated by the guns pointing at them.

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Not only does this go on to show the rape in this context is punitive, a matter of punishment – perhaps for the crime of simply being a woman – it also indicates that the cries of “Jungle Raj” to describe Uttar Pradesh under the newly-ensconced chief minister Yogi Adityanath are completely justified.

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Whether it’s Yogi-led UP, or ML Khattar-led Haryana, from where we had the recent Rohtak gang-rape cum murder, which was just too horrific in its post-rape aftermath, reminiscent of the Nirbhaya case, the increasing confidence of barbaric men committing ever more violent sexual crimes with reckless abandon, is showing.

Why is there no fear of law in India? Is India no longer sickened by rapes? Does it need them to be competing against each other in a distorted game of sexual violence to register the urgency?

Why despite having a bolstered anti-rape law do we not see any reduction in the number of crimes committed against women, and the degree of that violence going down a bit?

With the images of violence all around – from the cow vigilante murders, to lynching of Dalit, Sikh, Muslim men as public spectacle in various BJP-ruled states, we need to understand how sexual violence too is not unconnected to this generalised, casualised, routinised culture of daily rapes.

From the Bangalore New Year's Eve mass molestation, to custodial rapes by Chhattisgarh cops, to rape videos and MMS clips doing rounds in social media, sold as part of collective voyeuristic pleasure of a deranged society, we see how violence on women is monetised for consumption.

The questions we need to ask – once again – as we grapple with one more alleged gang-rape incident, which also has a murder and robbery in it to boot, are the following:

A. Is “women’s security” a matter of theory, to be indulged in air-conditioned seminar rooms of our “outrageratti”, or does it have a practical component as well? '

Does its availability on India’s national and state highways, arterial city roads, streets and narrow bylanes is even something our legislators and protectors bothered with? And, what have they done about it?

B. Why do we have an insidious rape hierarchy? Why do we tend to define and categorise rapes according to their location (“plush South Delhi” locality versus “dingy West/East Delhi”, metropolises versus small towns, cities versus villages, etc, etc), so that “class” and “degree of violence” become indicators of our own reactions?

Are we that blunted that a woman’s innards must be hanging out after her gang-rape for us to take notice?

C. Whom does the buck stop with? Does it stop with the station officer of the district where the crime is committed? With the MLA of the Assembly constituency? With the CM of the state? With the Union minister of women and child development? With the crime branch? With the cops who refuse to lodge FIRs to protect miscreants? With communal bigots who rape women belonging to a different religion, sect, group, language, ethnicity, culture?

When trumped up birth rates are paraded and rapes become a staple of the daily news grind, relegated to the backpages of our news dailies and websites because they get older than a piece of clothing, becoming “stale news”, what happens then?

Should the women form an “army” of their own to protect themselves?

Last updated: May 25, 2017 | 17:11
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