First and foremost - An Expectation

A new government has taken charge in Kerala. The expectations are running high in the minds of people who are tired of the shoddy governance, high-profile corruption scandals, and an insensitive ministry during the previous government. This led to a massive landslide victory of the Left democratic front in the state. People have voted them to power expecting rapid transformation to happen in the functioning of the government. There is no doubt that the present government is under immense pressure to revive the lost faith and build confidence in the minds of people and stand by each of the commitment given in the manifesto.

I hope the LDF government will take all steps possible in order to justify their victory. They also have a huge task at hand of proving to the whole country that a LDF government can bring about an inclusive development and equally preserve the secular status of the state which is under threat today. We are in an era where communal unrest is begining to gain momentum across the country.

But in between all these political drama taking place at the helm, people like me are curiosuly waiting to see the stance of the new government on the case in which a dalit girl - Jisha was raped and murdered recently in Perumbavoor. The carelessness with which such a henious crime was dealt with by the police has raised many questions in the minds of people. News papers and channels have been full of speculations about the motive of such lackadaisical enquiry by the police. There have been reports of evidences not being collected or protected properly, a hasty postmortem which was not even recorded and burning of the corpse which is not as per rule in such cases. The crime scene - single room house was not even sealed by the police after the enquiry which is the minimum standard to be followed in such cases. We see that in so many movies. But all these regulations were flouted in the air and today even after almost a month not even a single arrest has been made.

With all the dreams of a flourishing state in my mind, i can't but stop myself from wishing that a drastic step be taken by the government in this case. A girl was raped and murdered. She was a representative of lakhs of such girls who belong to the cornered groups in our society, With no means to proper living conditions these girls struggle all through their life in each step to establish a decent life. When one among them is raped and murdered and if our justice system is unable to deliver justice even after death, hopes and dreams of lakhs of such girls are being trampled. It is an insult to the struggle that many go through to bring about a positive change for their ilk in this society.

I only wish that strict action is taken against the officials who handles this case with so much of indifference and carelessness. If this is done immediately by the government, they will succeed in taking a positive step towards strenghtening the confidence of people like us in this government.

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Lessons learnt and to be learnt

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There is so much of discussion going on about results of latest assembly elections in TamilNadu, Kerala, Assam, West Bengal and Pondicherry. Governments have been toppled, glorious victories have been claimed, a sustained assertion of power has also taken place and there has been an interesting development of making inroads into an impenetrable zone and even blooming at one place.

My new found interest in politics has come as a surprise to my family as till 2 years back my knowledge in politics was almost negligible and I was one among the crores of educated youth who considered it as a dirty game and took their names only to blame and complain. But what has changed in the past 2 years? When I started talking about politics at home my mom asked me this question. Is it because I had married a man who believed in a strong political ideology and also believed that every citizen should participate in politics? But no, I had woke up to active political discussions even before I met him. I had started to take note of politics in India during the 2014 Parliamentary election. The sudden rise of Mr.Narendra Modi is what kindled the curiosity in me.

I was stuck by the fact that a person who was spoken about across the country with terror, in a short span of few months had become the star crowd puller for his party. All of a sudden he became a model politician and his name could be heard in every nook and corner of the city. The city road sides adorned his huge life size banners screaming out a vision of a developed nation, promising a Gujarat model development plan. Prior to that, i had heard his name scarcely in news bulletins. People who supported him and even argued in his support - like my colleagues in office, I guess would never even have heard or read about him before, were his die hard fan and also were talking about the Gujarat model development about which they had no real statistical idea except for which was presented to them in a shining manifesto. So how come he could garner the attention of the whole nation? How did he mesmerize the youth of the country who had been indifferent to politics till then? This was a puzzle that actually got me to follow politics.

Frankly I have never been his supporter or admirer - but the aura with which he towered over all his friends and enemies in politics did make me notice his personality and also pushed me into following the political developments in the country. Once I started reading in detailed I understood that there was a huge PR strategy behind the whole campaign. The whole campaign was planned by the PR group intelligently targeting the tech savvy youth of the country. We are people who with access to the internet have details about the whole world at our disposal but do not have time to do any analysis or are basically lazy to get into statistical real data and so we will believe and gobble any story given to us in silver plate, cooked as we want it. We can never connect with the ground reality the way we connect with the social community on face book and twitter. So the whole campaign was aimed at bringing us into the magical world of developed India and building stories only around things that we understand or matter to us.

This is one part of the whole plan that I could grasp. I am sure there will be so many other parallel plans developed by the PR agency, which was implemented successfully and hence the unbelievable victory of the greatest show man.

This is one area where the other parties should learn a lesson from this charismatic man. It is imperative that the lessons are learnt by the right people at the right time so that our country gets a real leader who leads his people out of poverty by keeping them safe from the hands of crony capitalists who by the power of monopoly are influencing the policies of the government and pushing the people into poverty. Today the country is developing but its people are just poor and cannot afford the development.

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Selective Outrage - An irresponsible Trend

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In 2012 it was the most terrifying and heart-wrenching Nirbhaya incident and in 2016 it is a similar incident in Perumbavur, Kerala. It was Jyothi then and it is Jisha now. I shuddered when I read the details of Nirbhaya and I felt the same fear when I read about the Perumbavur case. It is not within the capability of any normal human being to even imagine the kind of cruelty that these two girls have suffered . The whole nation was on fire in 2012 and it is again on fire now in 2016. And it is right to be on fire.

When these incidents were brutal enough to shake the human within us, how many of us have thought or even heard about much much more such rape cases that have been reported in media between 2012 and 2016? I am very particular about the period between 2012 and now because 2012 was when the "common man" of the nation woke up from their self-induced peaceful sleep to the horrible reality of sexual assault and fatal cruelty meted upon a woman in this country. Do we know how many cases of rape are being reported every day? Just to give a fair idea, I am listing few cases that have garnered some media attention after the Nirbhaya case.

"In August 2013, a 22-year-old photojournalist, who was interning with an English-language magazine in Mumbai, was gang-raped by five persons, including a juvenile, when she had gone to the deserted Shakti Mills compound, near Mahalaxmi in South Mumbai, with a male colleague on an assignment.

In May 2014 two girls aged 14 and 16 were allegedly gang-raped in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh and girls were then hanged from a tree.

On 14 March 2015, a 71-year-old nun was allegedly gang-raped in Ranaghat, West Bengal by intruders at Convent of Jesus and Mary. "

- Source of information Wikipedia

In its annual report, the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) said that the number of rape cases in the country has risen by 9 percent to 33,707 in 2014 - Source of Information in.reuters.com
These records are available on the NCRB website and is open for all of the public to see.

Aren't these data enough proof to show that 'Rape' is not a rare issue but a recurring and continuing crime in our country. If for the sake of argument I say that I am ignorant about the statistics, aren't we supposed to react with the same fervor and emotions when any rape case is being reported in the media? Some cases do get media attentions either due to the rareness of the case itself or because of the courage showed by the victim to bring it to the media attention. So many cases go unreported in our country.

But why was no social media campaign for these cases? Why was there not so much of hue and cry over these cases? Why was there no public demonstration in support of these victims or any change.org campaign for these people? I guess these people should have had a horrible death so that they would have got so much of public support. So does that mean that the victim should die a horrible death for us to react with so much of fervor? Doesn't a rape victim who did not die deserve this kind of support? Had Nirbhaya not been so cruelly attacked and left to die, had not Jisha been torn to pieces, would we have given them this much of our time and emotions? Isn't rape a cruel enough act for us to react?

Does rape not kill a person emotionally? Does rape not put the victim through serious physical and emotional pain? The continuous scrutiny by the society, ostracism that the victim and the family members suffer is beyond many of our understanding. I feel that many times we look at Rape as a lesser crime than murder. But in reality in a society like ours where chastity is the base on which a woman is judged, where morality of a woman is considered more important than her real talents and her achievements, where a woman is pushed to commit suicide because of the shame of having been raped, where a rape accused roams around freely but a victim has to live in fear, rape should be considered a crime worse  than murder.

I am not trying to belittle the outpouring emotions of the public in any case but if only we could react with the same emotional outrage for each rape incident in this country, if only we could influence our judicial system to bring the accused of every rape case under the law and get the deserved punishment, if only our emotional outbursts in the social media could target each and every rape case in this country, If only we as a society could support each Rape survivor morally to fight back for justice and stop making them a victim, I feel we will be taking a step ahead towards building a much safer place for our women where they can really live without fear. Every woman deserves it.

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