Society
What's in a Name?
The threat to a country's security comes on two fronts: one is external agression, the other is a threat to internal security. Right now the country is passing through a very bad phase of internal insecurity. That is because the people of the country are hurt and offened. This stems from insecurity.
If the horrific Delhi sacrilege could take place to one, it could happen to others, in different parts of the country. Even as the seething anger is not dying down, there are proliferation of rape reports pouring in from other parts of the country. As if it is a season full of rapes and grotesque incidents, which should put anyone to shame, and scurrying for cover to hide their faces.
I read today that in India this kind of crime rate is among the highest. There is nothing to worry, in India everything is highest, when it comes to rounded negativism. And do we bother? Of course we don't, only when it stares us in the face, and threatens our already disintegrated lives. But what happened in Delhi, has shaken each and everyone of us from intertia, lassitude, and abysmal insensitivity. It has scared us to our wits' end.
The educated classes are highly insecure. What about the uneducated ones? They are too enmeshed in everyday struggle for survival to understand brutish forces. Anyway their lives are already brutalized on a daily basis. Has this incident affected them ? I do not think so. Reports clearly indicate that the 'mass' protests are only among the educated sections.
The others do not matter. For them it is a everyday rape, for them life begins everyday with sinister awakenings, for them shame, anger, hurt is embedded daily in their lives. And if one of them were raped, would the other classes come out publicly?
We get angry when people protest, we admonish an intellectual, who is a Member Of Parliament, only because he wanted to know the name of the victim. What is the reason for keeping this as a closely guared secret, and pledge for 'anonymity? - so much so that the public has invented names - Damini, Nirbhaya and Amanat. Doesn't she and her family have names? Even in death must she remain the victim of obscurantist silence? What did she do to deserve this? Anonymity is a stoic slience, and a diversion to keep this issue secluded from mainstream social life and politics. Shame on us! We are blundering, yet again in the most insensitive manner. This appalling insensitivity began when we clamped a law and order mechanism to suppress protests, a mechanism which is not to blame in itself, because they are hired to be fired.
What's in a name after all? Whoever said it said it right. We are vindicating his words with gusto. Fifteen lakhs and an employment is some petty compensation. After all what's in a name, when the dead cannot speak, and are - faceless and nameless? Only her parents know, what's in it, only they know what suffering humanity is.
03-Jan-2013
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Ananya S Guha
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