With the West Bengal rape victim being burnt alive, there arises a huge question mark on the credibility of citizens of India.
Every morning you read the newspaper and find front page stories of daughters of our nation being raped, molested, burnt or tortured in some way or the other. But it doesn’t affect you any more does it? After the Nirbhaya rape case people went about lighting candles, even though the accused were punished did the statistics of rape cases in the national capital go down? No, in fact many voices that would have gone unheard got public exposure, but rape did not stop.
In the Commercial capital of the country, regarded as one of the safest cities of India, we had the Shakti Mills rape case, followed by many more. Some got noticed, while many became page 5 or 6 news in vernacular tabloids and eventually got lost.
After so much happening and so many cases coming up the recent headlines grabbing case of the 16 year old Kolkata resident being burnt alive once again managed to shake up the nation. Or did it not?
We Indians have evolved from a time where we had accepted corruption and red-tapism, political dominance, illiteracy and poverty. But we managed to fight out all of this and there is a huge noticeable change in our nation.
How did we fight out any of this? We raised our voices, we refused to put up with nonsense, some where we had to go hungry, somewhere work penniless for community benefit but most importantly we were united as citizens of India and that is what made all the difference.
With the issue of rape, this unity is what we lack. As citizens of India coming together and protecting our own daughters is the mindset we need to adopt. Would a man turn a rapist to his sister? He obviously won’t. We also have issues like female infant mortality and the scarcity of sex education that increases the chances of rapes happening.
It become so common to write, talk, debate and discus about this issue and ultimately gaining no results that people have given up on the society and on each other as humans. But, I feel differently the more we talk, the more we debate, discuss and repeatedly keep doing so somewhere we shall be able to bring out the required unity and eradicate rape completely from our country.
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