Pity.

In the second week of February 2012 , as the whole world celebrated the week dedicated to ‘love’ by exchanging heartfelt greetings with their loved ones and had immense ‘fun’ culminating in reckless drinking and PDAs and so on, a forlorn woman tried having her share of deserved fun at a local bar in Kolkata. Later she was raped in a moving car, at gunpoint.

Without much hope, she courageously reported the incident to policemen at a nearby police station. They jeered at her in return and offered her a night of ‘fun’ at Tantra because after all, it was Valentine’s Day. The chief minister, a woman herself and the custodian of a ‘progressive’ state, alleged that the incident had been ‘contrived’ to malign her party. This shocked many and made them wonder how the same woman who waited outside Jyoti Basu’s office with a deaf and dumb rape victim and refused to budge until justice be adjudicated, could say something so illogical in such a grave moment of crisis.

This recent rape incident reminded me of this one debate I had participated in back in school. My argument demanded frequent use of the term ‘rape’ and I clearly remember that I was asked to replace it with the phrase ‘trespassing on women’s chastity’. Of course it made my speech unnecessarily long-drawn but ‘safe’ and ‘moral’. I lost. I lost my argument.

Returning to the case at hand, what I personally fail to understand is how people and the custodians of law distort the term ‘rape’ and do not deal with it professionally. What is rape then? Of the myriad interpretations, one thing might I add is settled-it is definitely immoral. “How could a separated mother of two , Anglo-Indian , go to a bar at the wee hours of the night and drink?”, “ What was ‘she’ doing there?” are some of the questions raised by the custodians of law and our ‘celebrated’ chief minister, Mamata Banerjee. It is interesting to note how social aspects which are otherwise irrelevant to the case are brought in and how they distort the case further- Marital status, caste, interests. In India, it is observed that women who transgress the roles they are expected to play in the society are always considered immoral. It is indeed a shocking fact given that our country, particularly our state, is believed to be progressive and all that. Rape, we all must realize is basically a crime. Like murder, like larceny, it’s a crime and the culprits must be penalized like what every law, in every other country demands.

I salute the victim for her indomitable courage and congratulate Damayanti Sen and her team for identifying the hooligans .Apparently, the case seems to have been solved but what remains unsolved and shall remain unsolved is the deep-rooted problem of prejudice that makes one’s will to fight and the law skeletal.