Molestation: Society, Police, Judges in Dock

The molestation of two women at JW Marriot hotel will become the most outrageous instance of how our society slides down to bestiality. When the society at large fails the woman what can you expect other than what you are getting in the streets of Mumbai, Kolkat and Delhi. Kolkata was most cultured and yet it also has joined the rest. Experts have been warning for decades now that the ratio of women has gone down as compared to men making our streets unsafe for women and girls. Some have also expressed concern that during riots and pogroms the woman is singled out for horrendous revenge. A society that does not heed either will have it coming to them sooner or later. Ahemdabad gave way to this bestiality in the 1980s with women falling victim to hatred of communalism. Never before had the woman been made to suffer by people on both sides of the great divide. Had we in our conscientious uprightness addressed this issue then much of the cruelty to women in the public would have been checked. All the wings of government have proved ineffective. The worst among them is the police. A former police commissioner of Delhi had the temerity to say that much of eve teasing, molestation and rape are on account of women wearing provocative dresses. Even political parties like the Shiv Sena joined the issue with a cultural agenda in hand. Whether they object the skimpy dress on the Marine Drive or provoking apparel in Connaught Square in Delhi, the police and the political parties blame the victims rather than the male perpetrators. Male chauvinism went so far that Kiran Bedi had to seek voluntary retirement and resign because of it. The reason among others behind denying Bedi commissionership is the lurking male scare of territorial right. The women are much less corrupt, more modest and incapable of placating the political bosses without their spouses. The political parties of all hue and colour have used the woman for their selective narrow electoral goals. In the New Year eve molestation in Mumbai Shiv Sena supported the police rather than the victims. BJP would use Shah Bano case and would patronize Taslima Nasrin rather than take up the case of the bereaved widow Pryanka Todi not to speak of the widows and victims of the Gujarat carnage of 2002. Now women feel so left out of the polity that they have woken up to the last resort of forming their own political party. They came together on January 7, 2008 in Delhi to form a political party called United Women’s Front under the chairperson Suman Krishan Kant, widow of a former vice president of the country. The chairperson of the party remarked "Women have simply not been getting the kind of governance they deserve. Take Delhi for example. It has a female chief minister, yet it is one of the most dangerous places for women . . . All this is precisely because we do not have enough women in decision-making and in the political process. Even the courts have failed the women. In the famous rape case of Ms Mathura in Nagpur region the girl was victim of her own friend. She went to complain to the police against his violation of her modesty. The police themselves raped her. The shopkeepers in the neighbourhood heard her cries and gave witness in the court. The Supreme Court ruled in favour of the cops saying that there were no physical marks of nails or other wise to prove the rape. In another famous case an inexperienced ward boy of KEM hospital raped a female doctor and injured her spinal cord thereby paralyzing the young doctor for life. He was exonerated because he had penetrated the anus and not the vagina!

In the case of the Juhu hotel the police should have taken extraordinary caution in view of the crowds of revelers and the attitude of certain political parties to the revelry. There seems to be some design in the molestation and attacks on women. For around the same time Koena Mitra, a model and actress was inside the Sahara Star hotel in Mumbai. A stalker attacked her. Like the police commissioner of Delhi the police in Mumbai blamed the women. Mitra says “The cops told us to wear decent clothes and threatened to punish us if we broke the dress code for our performances on New Year's Eve." The question that the right minded people have always asked and what others including the political bosses must ask now is: what exactly is the decent clothing? Most of the rapes take place not in cities but in villages across the country where our daughters, sisters and mothers wear nine war or yard saris. What should the country side women wear to prevent molestation and rape?

The two victims of Marriot hotel area were decently dressed. There was no nudity of any kind or variety. On the other hand they were fully covered and rather formally dressed. What is more their skirt, coats and pants were black, a colour of mourning rather than revelry! It is shame that a crowd of about seventy men set upon them tearing even the skirt of one in their attempt to disrobe them.

Disrobing and not the kind of dress was the prurient predatory desire of the male!