A 17 year old high school teenage girl was gang molested in
Guwahati. If we leave aside the Assam
Police who took their own sweet thirty minutes to reach the crime scene; it is
the incongruity of the public and the reporters who captured the video, which is more preposterous.
Baghpat Khap
Panchayat in UP bans women under 40 to go for shopping and using
mobile phones. As if this was not enough, these women were also ordered to
cover their heads whenever they step out of their homes and get escorted after
sunset.
A teenage girl was rescued from abductors and then raped by
policemen in UP. A wife was brutally beaten and tortured by her husband in Goa.
These are merely few incidents that I have pointed out here.
You pick up any newspaper or an online news website and you will find a number
of similar incidents these days. As an Indian woman, I feel ashamed, helpless
and petrified. What if any of these happens to me? It does not matter whether I
live in a city or a village, whether I am at home or out, whether I am educated
or not, whether it is a day or night, whether I am wearing a traditional outfit
or a modern one. This can happen to any girl or woman anywhere at any hour.
Sometimes I feel culpable of being a woman. It used to
infuriate me when people expressed grief over a girl child's birth. But now I
wonder if it is the gender of the baby that they really woe about. In fact it is the
constant struggle in the future life of the girl that bothers them. The notion
of weaker sex is enforced and strengthened time to time at multitudinous
occasions. The woman folk often face wrath of immediate family members or
society at large to fight for their rights.
The cases of molestation, rape and domestic violence robs a
girl or a woman of their physical well being. But what about the emotional and psychological
trauma which occurs as a result of aftermath? Who addresses the lifetime
tribulation of humiliation, fear, defenseless, vulnerability, guilt, rejection,
anger and so much more?
I agree that such incidents do happen in the other parts of the
world. But if you look deep inside your heart, you will be inclined to accept
that these occurrences are more rampant in India. Blame it on the government, social
infrastructure of our culture or the mindset of the people, the bottom line is
that I feel intimidated and unsafe in my own country as a woman and a mother.
I often ask myself, “Indian woman – To be or not to
be"?
