The legion of incidents over the past four years has driven home an idea surreptitiously: resist the brunt, raise your voice, and you feel the pinching heat. We may not have been directly associated with the idea, but this idea and its ideology have become a veritable Frankenstein monster, growing to its full size. The results are harrowing and worrying as those who have stolidly remained at the fence are also seeing their backs burnt and bruised badly. This Frankenstein monster has started to create a window of fear before everyone, including its creators. Despite all such worrying concomitants to the idea, there still seems to be no end to the closely planned propaganda to create more havoc and set a new normative for the society, and empower the monster more. This goal of certain people of a saffron hue has been executed without any traces of evidence and concocted in ample ways to make it look normal when it arrives. And there are too many brains behind it that these come with a mix of biz and scripted acknowledgments from the Emperor. Upon closer look, the intricate details send jitters, and the whole body and conscience fidgeting.
India has been turned into a massive organism, flailing arrogantly, and in its process wiping the areas it was protecting earlier.
What am I talking about? What is the idea? The most traumatic thing about the present is that the idea is hidden before the eyes, but, nobody dares to probe it. Making the entire setting a risible plot where, the truth is what our Emperor says, “there is not even a semblance of unrest or the cataclysms that some point out, all these accusations are catharsis of anti-Indians, and acche din is coming! “
I make no serious attempts to unravel this dangerous malady, but, earnestly, I could not ask my ink to dry too. Voice of Oppression is just the angst of a gentle heart, the fear of a timid being, and the outburst of an Intolerant Indian. First in the series is the deplorable and most appalling, rape-culture of India to which dangerous flavors have been added in the past four years.
Rape Culture
Every time I see different faces, a glimmer of hope descends;
Are you here to hug me, carry me out, to light, to hope, shrieks my silenced voice;
But, the act repeats because, he finds pleasure in me, Gropes, and penetrates the non-existent to feed his ghastly lasciviousness;
New person again, act repeats, more arrogantly and aggressively, to show his devotion to his religion is transcendental;
Phew, all that I can do, curse the religion and hate this effeminacy that, attracted these demons to me;
Every cell aching and every beat slowing; please, can someone see, just see, and tell
Is Death Nearing!
Asifa, an 8-year-old teen, was raped and murdered in a ‘Hindu Temple’ some months ago. What similarity does she have with ‘Nirbhaya,’ another rape victim, whose death awakened humanity from deep slumber and took the entire nation to the precipice in 2012? The similarities are many…
Both were victims of the thinking pervading our society since histories got etched: Women are pleasure gardens, meant to explore sex; Women are baby producing machines, and women are the best targets to evoke fear vicariously in the enemy camp. History is filled richly with examples that evoke disgust but aver with lines mentioned above with revere– Ramayana, where a man goes on a killing spree to retrieve a woman, then after reunion sends her to desolation, doubting her fidelity, and don’t forget the monkey aide who burns down an entire city for nothing. Mahabharata, five men share a woman, and kill 100 brothers because she was humiliated, but who humiliated Draupadi more is an enigma, the Pandavas who did not mind about her love and shared her because of a candid sentence from their mother, another woman, or the Kauravas who tried to disrobe a woman who was sold by her husbands- the heroes, and curiously she was not disrobed too. Mughals made marriage alliances a part of their military expansion and in the partition of 1947, it was women who were either targets for retribution or objects of sacrifice.
On the same line is the statement of ‘Ram’ Singh, a perpetrator of Nirbhaya’s rape, ” You can’t clap with one hand- it takes two hands. A decent girl won’t roam around at night…She should just be silent and allow the rape. Then they would have dropped her off after doing it and only hit the boy. The incidents after Asifa’s murder make no effort to hide their similarity to the earlier precedents. A ‘Hindu Ekta Manch’ resorted to rabble-rousing in the name of protecting Hindus and are still proudly supporting the convicts. Not delving further into this rape of religion by another religion, are there some differences too?
There are some differences when we juxtapose Nirbhaya-2012 and Asifa- 2018. Remember, remember, our present Emperor, an orange chaddiwala back in 2012 said on the streets, ‘Don’t forget Nirbhaya when you vote’.
The others, I mean, the so-called ‘patriotic’ Indians who spend their time either on FB or Whatsapp or perennially snooping into others’ lunchboxes and rumors, and complaining about misgovernance and traffic, were virile back then, so much anger that if left, would have even hacked the perpetrators to death. Where did all these souls go now? Where have they vanished? (not including our Emperor, who must be on his flight to some foreign country)
Soothsayers may say, India is hemorrhaging with rapes, and if every rape attracts a crowd, then the whole of India must spend their whole time on roads only. Such a benign thought. Further, the probing on when the fight can be taken, a readymade answer just pops like poop, ‘the rarest of rarest and the most brutal acts.’ If we go by the word of these ayatollahs, wasn’t the rape of Asifa, a rarest of rarest and a very brutal act? Doesn’t this act demand a fight? Like the one in 2012 where everyone at least showed to the political cliques that the nation condemns it. What has stopped in creating a storm and its surge forward? Bluntly, I would blame- religion, religion, religion.
Asifa was a Muslim, and Nirbhaya a Hindu, as if only the ‘Hindu bodies’ are holy and hallowed. The act was committed to uphold the name of religion. I wonder if the ‘Hindu’ Gods for whom the act was done were pleased with the act or if the ‘Muslim’ Gods who also must have also accompanied the former in silently viewing the spectacle. And still, I pity those souls who still reach the doors of a temple, mosque, and church to pray for justice. Preposterous! These souls are fools whom I often think should be extinct as the Neanderthals disappeared.
Today, this situation, begs our action and reaction because to the already demonic act of rape, another layer of vileness is being added, rape by religion.
Facts will tell you how mammoth the problem of rape is, and how dangerous the new layer is, a closer analysis of headlines will starkly point out.
The facts and figures paint a gloomy picture of an already ugly, scruffy canvas. In 2016 alone, there were 3,38,954 crimes committed against women. These crimes include 38,947 acts of rape, 84,746 cases of rape of non-penetrative form, and 5,729 attempts to rape. Add to them the surge in sexual crimes against children over the past four years; 2016 recorded 35,980 cases. Not to mention another dubious footer in all these reports reporting rapes, 94% of rape of penetrative form on children goes unreported, and an equal percentage of adult women assault never reaches the light. And these cases that do surface are stuck in the courtrooms. India reeks of an anti-women culture, which even the highest courts have embraced, as an astounding number of cases reported are either dismissed or feeding insects in the courtrooms.
Now, recuperating from this bloody data seems a cruel joke if we look at the headlines created by the chaddiwalas of the Emperor. ‘A Hindu Girl raped in Assam, why no Candle Light March’; ‘Had the Girl called Brother, her rapists would have left’; ‘Girl with skimpy shorts is un-Hindu and deserves rape’; ‘Love Jehad should be annihilated’; ‘The Emperor is a true Hindu(as if all others are false Hindus) and he is a fakir, sanyasi, brahmana…and whatnot( not bearing the fact he is married and sent his wife to her maternal home)’.
The facts may have existed from earlier and ballooned recently, but all these headlines are entirely new. These are results of a clear policy to infiltrate the society with some idea from the books of Savarkar and Golwalkar. And this idea is hidden before our eyes, and we do not want to seek it. Ideas of being ‘Un-Hindu.’ And disclaiming other religions and people of the Hindu religion who question this malevolent dogma. This ideology of pure ‘Hindu Rashtra’ is the sole reason behind innumerable Cassandra cries to protect the nation and restore its apocryphal ancient honour. It mortifies and sucks any optimism out of the country.
These ‘Orange ChaddiWalas’ and their hidden ‘orange chaddiwala,’ ‘The Emperor’, are redefining rapes in an ugly way. Their motive is not to clear India of rapes but, to redefine them. To redefine the rape culture in a more ugly way which gives carte blanche to certain louts. It is undoubtedly ‘acche din’ to ‘The Emperor’ and his saffron louts.
If we do not voice this oppression, our future generation may record their anguish over our cowardliness in future detention camps, as Anne Frank did during the Holocaust. Asifa today, tomorrow, an axe will be there to slice our head if we stay silent. This rape culture needs to be opposed in its entirety. Or else, we are not allowing the rape of a woman, but we are allowing the rape of our country, the rape of ourselves. There are no good rapes and bad rapes; there are no ‘Hindu Rapes’ or ‘Muslim Rapes’; rapes are just rapes, a symbol of oppression, which has stripped the modesty and independence of women for centuries. The oppression must be given voice and fought, not emboldened by remaining silent.