Why the World Bedraggle India's Daughter?

The room is in dark with intriguing silence; the laptop is on, blinking and emitting snippets of light. We get our breath hard, blood chilled when my wife and I watch the monitor, languorously re-enacting scenes of a gruesome rape being perpetrated by a group of goons in a moving bus. The voice that shrieks for help belong to a teenage girl who gets raped because she is out of home after 9 pm; murdered because she resists the thugs’ attempts to get their cardinal desires quenched. The BBC documentary has many loose ends and overtly biased. Instead of condemning the heinous crime, it gives amplifiers to Mukesh Singh and his cohorts to justify their acts and the subsequent murder of a gullible girl. “What I’ve pulled out of her body, I threw it away,” the juvenile’s bizarre voice slaps my ears and make me recoil. My wife gets into her feet, races over to the sink and throws up. I still sit frozen, gazing helplessly at the ceiling mired in cobwebs and piles of paint peels.Mukesh Singh, one of the rapists, continues to drone. His grading of Indian girls – he says only 20% of them is good – coupled with his lawyers’ gibberish on Indian tradition vs Indian women make my wife feel nauseous again. ‘My god! Who made this video? Was it by Leslee Udwin or by those misogynists who had snuffed out a flower and thrown it in the gutter? For the documentary puts the victim in a poor light and shows how circumstances lead a group of guys become rapists’, I say to myself, suddenly remembering the ‘boys-are-boys’ statement I heard from a senior politician,  months back. ‘Is the world too, like our country, not kindly disposed to women? Does it treat them as chattels?’ my wife asks, her voice is in shards. I get a numbness. I’m in no mood to speak, leaves her questions hang on fire.  I take a peek into the FB. It looks saintly. No verbal explosion is let loose there because of the British documentary. Only a few gets agitated over the video and vent their injured expressions. As for others, they’re still in the comforts of their cocoons either writing eloquently about their upcoming books or displaying heartwarming quotes or presenting recipes for new stuff.’ Why people are what they’re?’ a question confront me. Now I hear someone or something begin to speak from inside me: “The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.”

RIP Nirbhaya.