The world never ends

There are over 12000 people gathering everyday in Delhi to protest the brutal gangrape of a 23 year girl in a moving bus. It certainly isn’t the first gangrape in the country, nor is it the most brutal one yet. Many more men, women and children have undergone possibly even worse trauma. The rape of a college student by a Bombay constable in broad daylight at a traffic crossing, the rape and butchering of a 5 year old child in Mahipalpur, Delhi, the mass rapes in Kashmir and Imphal by the armed forces and the even more disturbing rapes during the Gujarat riots; how can we judge if one was worse than the other?

Agony is an immeasurable, infinite concept. What makes one crime more outrageous than another is its circumstance. The imagery of rape of a para-medical student in a moving bus in the heart of Delhi is more unnerving than that of rape of an illiterate housewife in a remote village in Chhattisgarh. The difference in the aftermath is also just as stark. One spurs a national movement that vies to dominate the cover of Time and the other remains a statistic, if at all, in a dusty record room.

On a separate note, the current protests are different and rather refreshing in that they have beaten the shame out of rape. It is an unintended, yet a very welcome consequence of the recent protests.
Rape, unlike ordinary physical assault is perceived as a blemish on the victim’s self worth. It’s the only crime that seeks to blame the victim, plague her/him with guilt and self-loathing and tar her or his character forever. So when the media refers to the 23 year old rape victim as the ‘rape survivor’ and other ‘survivors’ in other parts of the country, start speaking up about their own traumas, you know the stigma of rape is wearing off.

Could this have happened had the protests been a more coherent, contrived demonstration led by the likes of an Arvind Kejriwal? I doubt very much.The magic in the protests comes from the raw, collective energy of the truly furious youth of the country. It’s a growing and dangerous energy, too. It’s intelligent and capricious and ready for confrontation. It’s the kind of energy that comes in waves, gathers momentum along the way and intends to destroy entire dynasties. Of course, this one actually intends to destroy the dynasty of patriarchal mindsets but then again, Rome wasn’t built in a day.