In India, a woman is raped every 15 minutes. The nation’s tryst with the honour of its women has sunk to abysmal depths of immorality and injustice as its horrendous track record of rapes and gang rapes continues unabated. Only sensational cases hog the limelight––the ones in Hathras, Uttar Pradesh, where a teenage Dalit girl was gang-raped and her body forcefully burnt by police, the gruesome gang-rape murder of a lady doctor in Hyderabad, the heinous Nirbhaya rape in Delhi or Asifa Bano incident, the Muslim nomadic girl, held in captivity and gang-raped in a temple precinct in Kathua, J&K –– and only when subsequent national and international outcry for justice for the victims reaches a crescendo, the administration wakes up from their self-imposed slumber.
A Thomson Reuters Foundation report published in 2018 concludes that India is the most dangerous place in the world to be a woman. The National Crime Records Bureau of India (NCRB) has released data that almost 31,000 rape cases, on average, are reported annually from 2019 –– 2021, at an average of 86 daily. Due to apprehensions of social stigma, 99 per cent of the cases are unreported, 36.05 per cent of POCSO cases (crimes against children) were registered in 2021, and the conviction rate for rape is only 28.6 per cent in 2022, according to the NCRB report. The legal dispensation is agonizingly delayed due to a shortage of judges. India has only 21 judges for a million citizens, and therefore litigation runs into decades, reinforcing the truth of the legal maxim, “justice delayed is justice denied.” Woe to Indian men whose patriarchal instincts and valour of preserving the honour of their mother, sister and children fail miserably and consistently. Indifference and neutrality to these national tragedies are the bane of this generation. As Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor, puts it powerfully, “neutrality helps the oppressor and not the victim and silence encourages the tormentor”.
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