A news published from Bhopal reads as follows : A minor dalit girl has been burnt alive by two boys in Kodari village of Burhanpur district of Madhya Pradesh. The boys allegedly entered the girl’s house in the afternoon when she was alone and attempted to rape her. The victim was a student of class VIII. When she resisted, the boys poured kerocene over her and burnt her. The girls’ mother rushed the badly-burnt girl to hospital where she succumbed to her injuries.
This was the third case of the same kind on the same day in the same state. A college student shot dead his girlfriend and an M.Phil girl student was gang-raped in Bhopal Memorial Hospital.
These are not the stray cases. This is a common daily diary of almost all newspapers in the country and it covers a very wide range. In it the attackers are not only village boys and street goondas but also college students, teachers, doctors, business managers, politicians, police officers from police constable to DGP rank. The victims are not only dalit girls (though they are the easiest prey) but also students, teachers, working girls, starting from domestic servants to highly placed government officials. There is no age bar : right-from minor girls of 5 years to senior women of 60 years. Likewise social and economic status is no bar, but members of the poor families, especially dalit poor families are easy victims.
As the government repeatedly says, the country is fast moving ahead on the path of development heading to achieve 9 to 10 percent growth rate and to become a world power, women of the country are finding themselves less safe. It is not safe to travel alone in trains, it is not safe to return home from office after night duty, it is not even safe to live alone. The other day, a girl travelling alone in a day train was attacked and molested by a group of eight students and male copassengers had to hide her beneath the berth to save her. A lady government official in an AC Coach had difficult time to protect her from a molestation attempt from a co-passenger. Suicide cases among girls after molestation incidents are becoming very common.
Aberrations in human behaviour are understandable. But this spate of abnormal demeanour cannot be regarded something natural. Before 30-40 years, such horrible incidents were rare.
What are the causes of this moral decline on such a large scale? One reason is historic. The caste system has been acting as leprosy on the Indian society. Even after so many reform movements, especially Dalit movements and the legal prohibition, this cancerous element still persists in the subconscious mind of many upper caste hindus that the lower caste people are meant for serving and consequently can be exploited, even sexually also. Most of the Dalit-girls and women in villagers are molested by upper caste people. This social evil was to some extent under control due to the restraints which the society used to exercise.
This social restraint is now almost disappeared. Why this is so, leads us to the second dominant reason of women’s’ insecurity and molestation. This is consumerism, marketism and corporatization thrown upon the society, economy and polity by the multinational corporations. To create their business empire, aggressive publicity using modern information technology is undertaken by these companies to create desire for their products. Their target is to liberate mind from all moral compulsions and for this the most powerful strategy is to arouse the lower human instincts especially sex and violence. Naturally woman is used for this. Consequently the vision to look at a woman is distorted. A woman is now looked, not as a mother, sister or daughter, not as a source of creation and power (shakti), but as a configuration of flesh with measurements at different levels, as is done in beauty contests. Most of the serials, on TV, ads and e-mail messages constantly contribute to excite the minds especially of the youth. The result is what we are witnessing all around.
What to do? Perhaps we have to adopt a two-pronged attack on the problem. Firstly we have to target the multinational corporations, the root cause of moral decline and secondly we have to form village/mohalla level watch groups to bring deviated persons/youths on the path of sanity. —BLS
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