Tuesday 24 April 2018

Rape, Protests and Whataboutery

Rape has once again ceased to be a statistic. In our country it happens once in a few years and in its wake brings in a widespread convulsive outrage, which spills on to the streets.

Keyboard warriors call for eye for an eye retribution and as a template cite methods used in Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries, whom they otherwise look down upon. Some end up betraying their latent patriarchy, while others, especially the political class, end up with their foot well entrenched in their mouths.

Last time it was the infamous December, 2012 Delhi gang-rape, often referred to as Nirbhaya case. As the incident happened in the national capital, it instantly caught the eye of national television. Egged on by saturation TV coverage and continuous buzz on social media, the outrage was instantaneous.

Delhi's wintry smog laden streets got filled with protesters and the government of the day had a tough time dealing with them. Footage of policemen using water cannons and canes to control the restive mob became a staple fare of almost all TV channels.

In Delhi even those who had never taken part in a protest in their lives got busy preparing placards and heading to protest venues. All this put the government of the day on back foot.

Newspapers were forced to report every rape case that came their way and that too provide a good display instead of relegating them to 'in brief' sections.

Dinner table conversations started veering over the topic and parents of teenage children had tough time answering queries like 'what is rape?' or how different it was from molestation!

The pontificating anchors pointed out the victim was just like us, called her 'India's daughter' and cautioned us that it could happen to any of us and they whipped up a sentiment of blood lust among the masses. The culprits happened to be from the fringes of society with no political or social clout, the very riff-raff detested by the middle class.

They were put immediately behind bars and going by the standards of Indian judiciary the trials were speedy enough. The government also formed the Justice Verma commission, which recommended many changes in laws related to sexual assaults.

Gradually the outrage died down and the daily rapes retreated to its realm of statistics and police record books.

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The current outrage, in contrast, is a slow-burn one caused by gruesome rapes in Kathua in Jammu and Kashmir and Unnao in Uttar Pradesh, which acquired limelight months after the actual incident. In the interim period they remained on life support on social media through the posts filed by activists fighting the cases.

Both cases were different from the Delhi rape in one aspect - the alleged perpetrators were influential people with political and social clout.

Moreover since both places were located far away from the myopic TV cameras of our news channels they got little attention and the cases dragged on for months with the perpetrators almost succeeding in burying them.

In fact the clout enjoyed by the perpetrators at Kathua was so strong that there were street demonstrations in the district to defend them. They even unfurled the Tricolour and invoked religious symbols to defend the perpetrators. The accused included a temple priest and few police officers.

Even more appalling was the conduct of the lawyers who actively protested the filing of the chargesheet by the crime branch against the accused.

In Unnao rape case the accused happened to be a BJP MLA and hence the matter was in deep freeze from day one. The tipping point was reached when the Unnao rape victim's father died after being in police custody. Around the same time the contents of Kathua case chargesheet was published in a Delhi newspaper.

For national media this was its Rip Van Winkle awakening. TV channels could no longer remain in their cosy self-censored bubbles and ignore the protests breaking out in every corner of the country, mostly orchestrated through social media.

But having been embedded with the establishment for the past four years, they were not exactly comfortable in attacking it. Soon whataboutery crept in, where were these protesters when rapes happened in Assam, where is the money collected through social media campaign going.

One channel began an innuendo campaign against Deepika Singh, the valiant lawyer who has taken up the Kathua case against heavy odds, alleging that she was pocketing the money.

Moreover, the moment Prime Minister broke his silence expressing displeasure over such 'incidents', TV channel displayed the same kind of euphoria that a child shows after he gets back his favourite toy, which he had thought was lost forever.

For them it was a early ghar wapsi after a brief flirtation with anti-establishment hashtags.

Image courtesy: Facebook

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