We rage, we grieve, we weep and we fight. As women, as a nation, as a society. And with each horrific detail of the bestiality and torture inflicted on the 31-year-old post-graduate medic in Kolkata’s state-run RG Kar Medical College and Hospital, we wonder what meaning the words of our Nobel laureate hold any more: Where the mind is without fear, and the head is held high, where knowledge is free, where the world has not been broken up into fragments.
Our worlds, as women in cities not made for us, have been breaking into dangerous fragments for decades. The homes we live in are not safe from assault, the streets we walk on are not safe from catcalls and lewd comments, the buses and metros we board are not safe from leering male gazes and deliberate brush and grope, the workplaces we spend hours in cannot guarantee that we will be safe at all times, the public spaces we dare to go for leisure do not even offer safety, the private leisure spaces have men who believe that we discount safety when we walk in.
She was in that seminar room after long back-breaking duty hours, doing the simplest thing possible — catching up on sleep. Violated repeatedly, bludgeoned in all places, head smashed against wall, her glasses shattered with pieces in her eyes, internal and external injuries that make for gruesome reading — what pain and torture she must have gone through in those hours. All because a handful of men — the post mortem reports points to more than the solitary pervert homicidal man behind bars — chose her to unleash their degenerate ideas of sexuality, power and possibly even fun.
Before her, there were others that we outraged and grieved over, lit candles for, marched for, demanded safer cities, safer workplaces, safer everyplace. Who can forget the Nirbhaya or Jyoti Singh case in Delhi, in December 2012, that sparked a similar nationwide outrage? There’s even a fund in her name to ensure women’s safety, a fund with lofty ideals and thousands of crores. This meant nothing to the Kolkata’s medic struggling valiantly against her violator or violators, resisting the strangulation, the smothering, and the rapes.
Decades before, in 1973 to be precise, there was the bright Aruna Shanbagh with a promising career ahead of her. A nurse in a Mumbai government hospital, she was similarly waylaid in her workplace, beaten and raped by a ward boy, and left to die. Only, she turned into a vegetable, lying on a hospital bed that used to be her workplace, her heartrending story brought to life by author Pinki Virani. In the years since the Nirbhaya case, there have been so many — the lawyer who was raped and murdered in her Mumbai apartment by a watchman in the building, the photographer who was raped while on an assignment in the Shakti Mills compound, the woman who was raped in a van in Sakinaka over a financial issue.
These are a mere handful cases only in Mumbai. It used to be a safe city but overall crimes against women — including rape — have steadily increased. There were equally horrific cases in Kathua, Unnao, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and every place on the map. The National Crime Records Bureau report of last year showed that crimes against women have been on the rise with 4,45,256 cases reported in 2022 — a staggering 51 cases every hour across the country.
In Mumbai, the number went from 4,583 cases in 2020 to 5,543 the following year and to 6,176 in 2022. The city has hardly covered itself with glory. Indeed, the numbers are far from Delhi’s which registered 14,158 crimes against women in 2022, according to the report. The NGO Praja Foundation’s study showed a rise of 22% in rape cases and 51% in sexual assault cases in Mumbai between 2014-15 and 2018-19. In cases of molestation, Mumbai and Delhi are almost on par with around 2,000 registered cases every year. Thousands more go unregistered. In violent crimes, outraging modesty, and trafficking, more cases were registered in Mumbai than in Delhi.
This may be explained by, as activists point out, more women feeling empowered in Mumbai to report. But what sense do the figures — rise or decline — make to the woman who is alone in the local train compartment in Mumbai at 10pm or walking home from the bus stop on a street deserted and without lights or to the young girl who must put up with suggestive glances from drivers in rear-view mirrors of cabs and rickshaws or to the woman who must deal with unwanted attention at her workplace or, worse, molestations and assaults if her workplace is the home of others?
She is out there, alone against the world, her safety in only her hands. Her city is less safe than it used to be. Every time, it is one woman against the world that has been designed and built by men for themselves. Women are not safe anywhere, at any time, with people known or unknown. In cities, in towns, in villages. Sometimes even in their own beds with men they are married to. Or they have to count on their luck to be safe. Is this a civilised society run on law and order?
How many candles will we light, how many marches will walk in, how many petitions will we sign? How much will we outrage and towards what end? Yet, outrage we must. Without that, the Kolkata case might well have been hushed up, passed off as suicide. Is this the administration that a woman chief minister heads? Ultimately, every crime against women, every sexual assault and rape, is a failure of the system itself — unsafe places, insensitive administrations, people in power quick to blame women, minimising molestation and leering, non-responsive investigations, lack of evidence and witnesses, poor conviction rates, and absence of exemplary punishment.
The outraged see justice in the death penalty. In all cases, even in the Kolkata one. But has the death penalty to rapists, when convicted, really worked in favour of women? The evidence is far from compelling. The man/men in that seminar room in Kolkata knew that they would be relatively untouched or unharmed by law. The other response of administrations has been to do technological surveillance with CCTVs and the like, now on roads too in many cities. But what good does that serve if the network is not monitored round-the-clock and a quick response is not initiated to untoward movements? In Kolkata, forget a response to prevent the crime, even the footage is missing.
In newsrooms, in advocacy groups, in colleges, we have run campaigns to make our cities safer, to reclaim spaces, to reclaim the night with joy and hope. Yet, every rape diminishes the possibility of a better tomorrow. How then to commemorate Independence Day except to remind ourselves of the maxim that freedom without justice is no freedom at all? And that justice is a long and difficult road.
Smruti Koppikar, senior journalist and urban chronicler, writes extensively on cities, development, gender, and the media. She is the Founder Editor of the award-winning online journal ‘Question of Cities’
