Woman travelling in car with her family in Gurgaon was pulled out and gang raped: Haryana CM must resign
If you are a woman in Haryana, you must run for cover. But where is the place to hide? Rapists are no longer bothered about looking for deserted streets and dark corners to pounce on their prey — they are brazen, emboldened by the ineptness and incompetence of the Manohar Lal Khattar-led BJP government that allows them to sexually assault any woman just about anywhere they want.
Sample this: on January 21, a 22-year-old woman was pulled out of a car in Haryana's capital city Gurgaon, and gang raped in front of her husband and brother-in-law. The horror unfolded near the Business Park Tower in Sector 57 when the woman's family was returning from a function. The rape happened barely two kilometres from a police station. Several condominiums stand tall in this area.
Gurgaon is a city bustling with malls and houses the offices of several multinational companies. It shares its borders with the national capital and is called India's Millennium City. It is projected as the model for global cities of the future. That, in an aspirational city such as this, a woman sitting in a car, travelling with family — not alone (we point this out since it is a common refrain that women who are on their own invite rapes) — can be pulled out and raped with utter impunity will go a long way in setting new standards for global cities.
According to media reports, the victim's husband got out of the car to use the toilet. Right then, two cars stopped by and four men, who were apparently inebriated, got down and asked the man why they had stopped the car. Soon after, an altercation ensued and they began beating up the victim's husband. On spotting the woman in the car, they pulled her out, dragged her to the bushes and raped her. As unbelievable as it may sound, this is the reality of Khattar's governance.
A series of rape stories has rocked the state in the recent past. Most of them emerged from the nooks of the state where Khattar has failed to make a mark with his governance. But that this story has emerged from Gurgaon must hit Khattar's pride hard — he is a constitutional leader of this lawless state steeped in barbarity, no less.
While rapes are not restricted to Haryana, Khattar as a chief minister must take the blame squarely for the state of women's safety in the state.
As many as 191 gang rapes were reported in the state in 2016 with a rate of 1.5 per cent against the national average of 0.3 per cent. This translates into one gang rape case every two days. The data also reveals three rape cases were reported every day.
These figures released by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) should have forced Khattar to pull up his socks or resign. On the contrary, he has preoccupied himself with protecting an imagined hurt to Rajput pride, leaving the real issue of women's safety to chance.
It is frightening to imagine that while the gang rape in Gurgaon was underway, not one PCR van crossed the area. This at a time the entire country is looking at Gurgaon in horror, aghast at the state of women and their endangered existence. But in a state where even senior police personnel think that rape is part of Indian culture and shamelessly speak of this misogyny to TV cameras, women's safety is at best an issue lost to prayers.
With incompetence ruling the roost in Haryana, between January 13 and January 19, eight rapes rocked the state. Two of the victims lost their lives to the brutality meted out to them. Private parts of some of the victims were mutilated by their perpetrators.
We would imagine a city fighting hard for the smart city tag would prioritise issues of law and order, of women's security. But what happens on the ground in Haryana is what Khattar thinks about — and makes his priority.
Sadly, he is not thinking of governance. He is busy muzzling freedom of expression, upholding the honour of imagined heroines while real women are raped minute after minute. It's no state to be a woman.