Trigger Warning: This article contains information that could be triggering for some people. Reader’s discretion is advised.
A deep boiling rage, frustration, and despair have defined what navigating the past week in our country was like. There’s a lot of anger. We’re angry at those in power because women have been unsafe for a prolonged time now, yet, somehow, we’re worse than ever. We’re angry at our friends who are still choosing silence. We’re angry at men we know and don’t, men who still dare to say, “Not all men”. We’re angry because how does celebrating freedom make sense when half of the population feels unsafe anywhere and everywhere?
In the last week alone, multiple more rape cases were reported across India while we were protesting against the heinous rape and murder of the Kolkata doctor. The body of a private hospital nurse based in Uttarakhand who had been reported missing since last month was recovered in Uttar Pradesh. She was returning home from work when she was allegedly raped, strangled to death, and dumped in the bushes. Her face was crushed beyond recognition.
In Dehradun, a teenager was allegedly gang-raped in a bus at the Interstate Bus Terminal. In another incident in Madhya Pradesh, a 69-year-old man allegedly raped a minor girl. In Bengaluru, a motorist allegedly raped a 21-year-old final-year BBA student. He had offered to drop her home after offering to drop her home.
When we speak of incidents of systemic violence against women, the caste of the victim also influences its treatment in the mainstream media and how the public reacts to it. Note the outrage against reported rape cases of upper-caste women from higher socio-economic strata is more aggressive than the cases where the victim belonged to a marginalised community.
Within a week of the Kolkata case, another horrific incident took place in Bihar’s Muzaffarpur. A dalit minor was allegedly gang-raped and brutally murdered. According to her family, the prime accused, Sanjay Rai, a 45-year-old man, wanted to marry the minor and threatened the family that he’d abduct and rape her if they did not let him marry her. She had to drop out of school because of this. Her body was later found in a pond. “Rai had been torturing us because we are dalits and Rai comes from an influential Yadav family”, noted the girl’s mother in her complaint, reports The Indian Express.
In Uttar Pradesh’s Bulandshahr, a 57-year-old Government official raped a minor Dalit Girl at her house and then proceeded to rape a goat. In Moradabad, a 20-year-old Dalit nurse on night duty in a private hospital was reportedly raped by a doctor who runs the facility with the aide of a ward boy and another nurse who forcibly dragged her to the doctor’s residence.
These are a few reported incidents from last week alone. There are thousands of others that go unreported each year for various reasons — either the victim wasn’t perfect or belonged to a minority community or the police couldn’t care less, or the victim’s family was blackmailed, or the family itself silenced the victim to hide the ‘shame’.
There are so many incidents that become mere notifications on our news apps, incidents for which we don’t step out to protest in a candle march. This has happened for years. This has been happening since 2012 when another woman was gang-raped and the details of her assault chilled our nation. A rape takes place every 16 minutes in our country. In 2022, according to NCRB data, approximately 51 cases of violence against women were reported every hour. In 2019, about 10 Dalit women were raped every day, making them ‘among the most oppressed in this world’, noted BBC.
Women in different parts of India are assaulted, molested, cat-called, eve-teased, or raped every day. The situation has been exacerbated to the extent we now gift women pepper spray to protect themselves, we nudge them to be vigilant and guard themselves, we ask them to prescribe to the regressive protocols for their own safety and hope it’s not their day today. Ask women around you and you’ll hardly find someone who hasn’t experienced some form of assault. It’s like we don’t know a woman who hasn’t felt violated.
Rape cases have always existed. They have popped up on our feeds; and we have become almost de-sensitised to them. They happen far too often so we don’t react until something exceedingly ‘chilling’ shatters our hearts again, and well, it has happened. We’re crushed again.
We’re reading more about rape cases again because we’re all angry and that’s the climate of our country right now. This is important too, but now, we have to stick to this. We can’t let this die down, otherwise it becomes a cycle. We have to talk about this. When we’re raising voices against the violence women are subjected to in our country, make sure we’re speaking for all women, beyond the hollow confines of caste, class, or race. Our outrage cannot be selective. The life we are asking our women to lead right now is not normal — it’s unfair, it’s alarming. How did we even get here?