The yellow highlighted text, in the picture above are the anxious thoughts of Bakha from the book Untouchable written by Mulk Raj Anand. Bakha is one of those unfortunate folks cast aside by the society as an “untouchable”. He cleaned the village toilets, like his father did. His sister, Sohini, used to clean the temple, the same temple in which the holiest of the holy priest, violates her dignity and then goes on to publicly accuse her, of polluting him.
There are two kinds of people in the world. One, who see a fundamental problem with what happened with Sohini or Manisha::(Fiction or Fact) and those who do not. The second kind of people, here, are extremely problematic. To be a pure bystander of heinous and gruesome injustice against those who are rendered meek or powerless by destiny or society or government; is in itself, a crime.
To be a mere bystander, while a 19 year old Dalit girl is brutally abused and left to die, It is not just a crime against Dalits, or women, or Dalit women, it is a crime against humanity.
The girl, barely an adult, had unspeakable injuries inflicted to her body, by a group of men who perhaps, either had no morals, or had morals which justified their act.
The dead body of the girl was carried out in the middle of the night from the hospital and in an anarchic manner burnt to ashes in a field, like the last bits of an evidence. Is that all she amounted to? An evidence of the assault they inflicted on her, and the details of the assault, which like her are long gone, and can now simply be concocted, in whichever way you like.
Fast forward to today and you have people analyzing exactly how her tongue was injured, whether it was cut or whether it protruded as a result of her throat being choked. There is absolutely no dearth of people who would jump at a chance to politicize the incident. People are analyzing her injuries, concocting theories about her assault, hypothesizing if she was indeed raped; claims by the police that she was not raped, the same police who burnt her body in the middle of the night, without her family. All the while forgetting that this was a human being, who was mercilessly murdered, all in the name of caste, religion and patriarchy.
Are these people listening to themselves?! Politicizing this incident, have we fallen down so deep in our own sh*t?
Not only are people mere by-standers, they are protectors, protectors of the accussed, protectors of the dysfunctional system, protectors of caste-ism and this monstrous swamp of a Society.
A word I have grown to dread and hate at the same time.
When you think about the fact that Uttar Pradesh, a state with the largest police force anywhere in the world, also accounts for 14.7% of crimes against women in India, it shakes your faith (Source) .UP police is standing at the state border to control politicians from the opposition or journalists from entering the state and visiting the family of the said girl, in Hathras.
Source: Artwork by Tushar Madaan.
Why, in a democracy should the police take such an action? Why, in a democracy should the phone calls between a journalist and the family of the victim be tapped? Why in a democracy should anyone be cremated without their family, at the whim of the police or the state? Who is the police actually protecting, the victims or the perpetrators? As for the latter, they are doing an absolutely terrific job!
It is not just the four upper cast men who killed her, it is the power that backs them, it is the society, that killed her. There are tons of video clips that emerge and each one brutally kills my hope, this one, particularly stayed with me.
This particular video has the heart wrenching voice of Tanushree Pandey , the brave journalist who tried to get as close to the truth as the Police would allow her to (and raise your hand if you´re scared for her safety, or of anyone who dares to raise their voice) and the face of a cop who was not helpful at all.
She asks a cop (abridged text from my memory), “Sir, bas itna bata dijiye ki ye body hai ki kya hai? Ye Jal kya raha hai?” (EN: Sir, at least tell me, what´s burning, is it a body or what is it?)
It is human rights, it is morals, ethics, women´s rights, empathy, democracy, the society, the values, the country.
India jal raha hai !
(EN: It is India, that burns).
What really boggles my mind is that how can these atrocities happen in one part of the world, and everywhere else, even in close quarters, life just goes on, people accept, people forget!
How is this fair? Borrowing some text from the Spiegelmonument in Amsterdam, the abridged words of Jan Wolkers lamenting the war crimes, strangely express the gist of my grief:
You look up at the sky and can’t believe how the blue firmament could have stretched so serenely above THIS HORROR as if it were nothing but a field of flowers. And, in a vision of justice you see cracks appearing in that impassive blueness, as if the massive atrocities going on below have violated eternity forever.
He placed shattered mirror on the ground and wrote (abridged):
In this part at least, the sky will never be whole again.
On September 29, at 7.15 am, the brother of the victim texted Newslaundry: “Ma’am, didi ab nahi rahin.” Ma’am, my sister is no more (Source); a part of India, a part of humanity died with her and will never be whole again.
Thank you Jyotirmoy, for being my proof reader.
