It is perhaps not too difficult to notice a common enough tendency today in many of us in India to rationalize (if not exactly justify) certain obviously negative traits in people around us, our friends, enemies and those in between. This is done sometimes apparently with a detachment befitting a disinterested observer, although the emotional underpinning of the analysis is not always easy to hide. It is as if people do not anymore expect other people to behave in an ethically correct and consistent manner and most of them are more likely to be in breach of a moral code our elders so painstakingly tried to instill in us during childhood (and in turn us reprising the same futile effort vis-à-vis our children) in schools, at home, in the community and so forth than to adhere to these. With every passing generation the hold of the norm having become less constraining, aberrations stop raising eyebrows.
Thus we are not surprised to find airplane passengers, apparently educated, civilized and smartly turned out people like you and me trying to move ahead towards the exit through the aisle within the aircraft jostling and pushing fellow passengers, elbowing them or trampling their feet with oversized bags brought down from the hastily opened overhead luggage hold against express appeal from the cabin crew for greater patience and sensitivity for ‘others’. We hardly expect motorists on partially waterlogged and pot-holed city roads during the rainy season to drive with moderate speed so as not to endanger lives of drivers of other vehicles (and even their own) let alone try and avoid splashing people who could not avoid walking down the footpath with dirty muddy water. We have rather learned to expect a biker or an auto-rikshaw driver to come to grief if by a slight error of judgment his vehicle so much as touches the glistening posh (possibly imported at a great cost) ‘CAAR’ (just not a car you know, remember the ad on the TV!). An actual scratch can easily lead to a case of ‘involuntary manslaughter’ (or ‘culpable homicide not amounting to murder’), with bear bottles, baseball bats, pistols and such handy weaponry stocked in the CAAR giving fullest expression to the great Indian ‘Road Rage’.
When women are molested while negotiating our crowded public mass transport system, or are abducted and gang raped with impunity day in and day out, we as onlookers or readers or viewers of such news stories feel dismayed or even outraged. But at heart of hearts many of us are convinced that it is perhaps difficult to control this primeval male proclivity and hence it is hard to wish it away, particularly in view of the unavoidable proximity and visibility of so many women, in modern urban and semi-urban settings, everywhere in public all day long and even during late evenings and sometimes even later. We do not believe it is feasible to teach our sons to behave and not stalk, bully, molest, disfigure women, to learn to take no for an answer. But asking our daughters to follow stricter dress code, restrictions on time and place to move about, as indeed even careers to choose appears as a practical way out.
Some of us, being believers of the adage ‘prevention is better than cure’ would rather advise women about the danger of turning out in ‘modern outfit’ (inviting lecherous male attention), finding themselves at the ‘wrong time and at wrong place’. Some, if they had their way, would even wish they would not turn out at all without male family members, though how much protection that might offer against a pack of desperate louts and rowdies is anybody’s guess.
Some of the more thoughtful among us would rationalize crime against women in terms of a clash between the tradition and the modernity, the inevitable cultural backlash, the male angst in the backdrop of all round female assertiveness and progress that has surfaced as a part of this era of ‘India Growing’ narrative. And of course it might not be too difficult to explain how all manner of religious preachers, godmen, heads of ‘cultural’ organizations, politicians and the policemen have invariably converged as the upholders of the so-called ‘Indian tradition’ against the onslaught of modern tendencies like freedom of speech and freedom of choice, especially by women.
Narendra Dabholkar was felled by the bullets of an assassin on a quiet morning street in Pune. Decades earlier, Safdar Hashmi was clubbed to death on stage during a street play in a village near Delhi. They dared to enlighten people, asked them to wake up and keep the light of reason from being extinguished. Scores of other social activists, RTI campaigners, green crusaders are routinely assaulted and sometimes put away permanently by hoodlums and hitmen let loose by politicians, builders, promoters and contractors who feel threatened by potential disclosures of their misdeeds through RTI or affected by interventions by Courts. In this long running morality play on the real life stage the real villains manage to have their way most of the time over the dead bodies of the good guys and the rest of us demoralized and fearful for our own lives pass by wearing the cloak of neutrality as if what happened to Hashmi or Dabholkar do not really concern us. And to neutral observers like us what had happened was perhaps as logical or inevitable as the Newton’s laws.
