TALES OF TRAVESTY
DR. JITENDRA SINGH
So, now, Bapu Asa Ram has also fallen in line ! Unable to keep himself unaffected from what can be truly described as a countrywide epidemic currently sweeping the Indian peninsula … big cities,small towns,tourist places,schools,colleges,police stations and now also God’s own “Ashrams”.
And,see the parody of Indian constitution’s democratic “socialism”…victims hail from every segment of society,rich as well as poor, and every strata of society,high as well as low. A college student,an infant child,a journalist,a newly wed bride,a middle aged matron, an IT executive, a medico,a youngster on outing with a male friend,,,it could be,in a nutshell, any female any time, anywhere.
When the founding fathers of Indian constitution did not specifically mention the crime of rape of a woman as the one calling for capital punishment or death sentence, it was not out of any default but out of a well-considered belief that such a mention was not required because at the time of writing of the constitution in the 1940s, the rape of a woman was hardly heard of and therefore did not seem to be prevalent enough to be bracketed with special mention among the “rarest of rare” crimes qualifying for capital punishment.
The nation today is fast running out of patience with a polity which tends to bid its time conveniently and quite oblivious of common man’s frustration over an insensitive law enforcing machinery and an unequal socio-economic status. Going by Voltaire dictum, ”you cannot build a heaven inside and leave a hell outside”. It is, therefore, stupendous for those sitting at the helm of affairs to believe that their own daughters and wives are safe because they move around in schoffeur driven cars well protected against the ordeal outside. The way the civil awakening across the country is taking over in a sort of defiant uprising, the day is not far when hapless poor ”daughters” on the street may force open the car doors to pull out the privileged ”daughters” from behind the windscreen.
The nationwide anger over recurrent rape phenomenon in this country is in a way also a stark reminder of the social and economic disparity which has widened down the years instead of getting narrowed down as was envisaged at the time of independence when India woke up to freedom with the dream to usher in Nehruvian “socialism” which was ostensibly expected to ensure equitable distribution of resources among different classes without aping communism. Some thinkers coined the phrase “democratic socialism” to describe it and in the years after 1947, it became the theme song for an entire generation of post-independence India …finding its echo in Raj Kapoor’s “Awaara” or “Shri 420” as much as in Sahir’s leftist poems and Lohia’s socialist movement.
Over the years, however, ironically, particularly after 1980s, “democratic socialism” envisaged in 1947 itself became a casualty. While “democracy” yielded place to an election mechanism largely controlled by capitalists, “socialism” became an unfashionable word for the country’s neo-rich who held to ransom the polity, police and power-brokers alike. At the turn of century, the phenomenon became so blatantly manifest that the society was conditioned to accept the rule that either one had to be rich to become a successful politician or one had to be a politician to become rich. And, the results are there for all to see !
Just imagine for a moment ! If only,for example,in the infamous case of last December,the raped and murdered Delhi girl had enough money in her pocket to hire a “Meru” Taxi, would she have ever landed herself in an empty bus with the innocent wish to save an extra penny ? That, truly, is symbolic of the tragedy of a have-not Indian of 21st century, the hapless common man whose predicament is summed up by Umapathy in a poetic epitaph for himself ‘‘….Mere Qabile Ka Har Fard Qatl-Gah Mein Hai !’’
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