The Indian Central Reserve Police Force has set up the world’s first all-women pipe band. In the undercover interviews conducted by The Tehelka with police officers in Delhi, the officers claim that rape is an offense committed by the victim who lure the violator into sex with the victim. The officers opined that but for some rare cases, amounting to about one percent of the entire cases reported, allegations of rape are concocted claims made against rich kids for extracting money.
That the National Capital Territory is a minefield for women, particularly women who work late and have to travel alone is yet another ugly reality of India. But advices are of no short fall. The Chief Minister of Delhi has advised her women subjects to be careful not to travel alone at night and thereby obviously not to ‘lure’ vulnerable men, into ‘committing mistakes’. The Supreme Court has said that it is often the manner in which women dress that generates the temptation. So much for the court in its departure from the pedestal of the Vishaka case. Conditions are such and sometimes appearing targeted that the residents of the national capital who happen to be from the northeastern region of India have now formed ‘action groups’ to provide assistance to victims of sexual abuse.
So many are the instances where women from the northeast are molested, raped and abused in the national capital each year. Yet, many Indians shamelessly refer to the anger of the people from Manipur, Nagaland, Mizoram, Meghalaya, Tripura, Arunachal Pradesh, and Assam living in Delhi, as their distorted anti-Indian tribal psyche.
In many sense it is anti-Indian for the women to be considered equal to men. Rhetoric like ‘mother India’ and ‘dharti maa‘ are hollow reflections of an entirely opposite reality. Mothers in India have not attained any real safety post 1947, though persons like the Chief Minister of New Delhi and some other states are in fact women, and the country having other women leaders. Had this argument been false, the number of women facing acute starvation and forced eviction in India would have been less than what it was prior to 1947.
The number of women killed or otherwise violated by India’s own armed forces would have been much less in comparison to the past, or at the very minimum, the number of violence committed against women should have come down each year. In fact the government of India does not have a true picture of gender violence, other than the incorrect statistics, often belatedly published by the National Crime Records Bureau. It is not an issue anyone has seriously bothered to address.
Yet the country now have women recruited to blow pipes in the CRPF, so that India could claim that it has once again achieved the unique position of creating gender parity in government services in Asia. Those who audit these accounts are only interested in the numbers, and obviously not about what the women are allowed to do while in service.
The statement by the police officers in New Delhi is a personal reflection of the reality of how India treats its women. According to the opinion of Dr. Rajat Mitra, a world-renowned psychologist who has assisted women victims in most of the rape and murder cases that were widely reported in the national media, “the statements by the police officers are a reflection of how they treat their women at home”.
The statements by the police officers illuminate the alarming fact of insensitivity of the investigative limb of the state, that in fact rape is a crime and each instance of this crime has to be approached with the uniqueness each case presents and warrants. The despicable statements underline the wrong social understanding about the crime of rape. It negates the fact that the crime scene in a rape case is the body of an unfortunate woman and her mind.
The language used by the officers show a clear bias in favour of the rich and powerful, and more generally, favouring men. The views have to be understood as just not that of a bunch of policemen in Delhi, but also that of their counterparts in the rest of the country, that it is in fact a national view, of an institution that is mandated to investigate cases of rape, with the understanding that they are not only dealing with a crime, but also with a person who has physically survived and would be required to testify about it on more than one occasion. Most police officers in the country do not know that the investigation of sexual violence can make little progress by hard questioning.
It also reflects yet another alarming reality as to what training, and for those who are trained, what facilities and equipments are available at their disposal to undertake a scientific investigation of a crime. In fact the country has not invested yet in its criminal justice apparatus to improve the state of policing from its colonial mooring to one that fits an alleged democracy. Instead what fills the void is rhetoric.
The lack of sensitivity concerning cases of sexual abuse is not limited to the police. Often doctors who examine the victim of sexual abuse accuse the victim for the violence they have suffered. Occasions in which the Asian Human Rights Commission has come across medical professionals who have accused the victims for being subjected to sexual abuse are several. Lawyers and judges also entrain similar attitudes, that at least on three occasions the AHRC had to intervene when judges who presided over criminal trials in cases of sexual violence made fun of the victim. Dr. Mitra vouches this fact from his experience when in instances where he had to testify in courts concerning cases of sexual violence, more than the defence lawyers, the judges behaved and conducted trials in manner unbecoming of an officer of the court.
The bottom line is that the criminal justice apparatus of the country is inept, biased against a victim, is often corrupt and favours the rich and powerful as against the poor. In the Tehelka interview one could repeatedly hear the officers referring to perpetrators as boys or children who are lured or trapped into committing mistakes by bad women. The reference to an accused in some of the most heinous crimes as if they are children who spoiled a toy, as opposed to the manner in which persons from the poor communities, for instance those who protest against forced eviction and rape of their women by the state and state-sponsored agents in the rural backdrops of the country as Naxalites, Maoists, terrorists and the like exposes the scam, mistakenly referred to as justice in India. Yet there has been no attempt to understand this, or to correct it.
India is proud to announce the new CRPF all-women pipe band. What tune would they play when their fellow citizens of the same gender finds it unsafe to live anywhere in the country, including its capital? Or is it to be concluded that the pipe-blowing women band of the CRPF is part of the elaborate window-dressing project that is underway in the country, that today some Indians have started breastfeeding the scarecrow thinking that it has life.
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