What Has Delhi Rape Taught Us About India And Her People!

The news of the delhi rape shook the world. I'm still not sure why this particular incident woke so many of us up and made people think about women security/respect in India when such incidents keep happening by hundreds everyday in India. Sad thing is that the poor girl suffered a lot and died, the good thing is that an issue of primal importance came to light!
Here's what this episode taught us about India and her people:

1. Indian Politicians: The politicians of India are a true representation of her people. We are insensitive to women and are apathetic towards women rights and our politicians gave many statements that cement that fact. Few politicians cried in the parliament but failed to check their own party members from making statements that show that they view women as objects of carnal use only.
2. Rahul Gandhi: We learnt that when the going gets tough, he tucks inside his bed under warm blankets woven by his mother and her admirers. There was, yet again, no statement from the Prime Ministerial candidate of Congress party.
3. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh: Theek hai?
4. Sadhus of India: We learnt that the Indian sadhus want their fair share of prime time on news channels. When most intellectuals on the telly were condemning the heinous crime committed in the capital city, Shri Aasa Ram Bapuji decided to blame the victim to make sure that his statements are not overlooked. The news channels instead of ignoring such stupid comments took his bait and gave him the prime time slot that he has earned through rigorous tapasya. Which brings us to the next point.
5. Indian Media: Indian media is probably the second most immature media of the world (no points for guessing the number one!) Day in and day out all the news channels broadcasted news about protests. First, they went after Delhi administration, then they went after the protesters when one policeman was killed on the streets of Delhi. The inevitable "aap kaisa mehsus kar rahe hain?" question was also thrown at the brother of the policeman who died. And for some reason, they could report rape cases and cases of molestation of girls only when the nation started burning. Rapes and women rights infringement is nothing new in this country but till now the media decided to play it mum.
6. Indian Police: Indian police is just a bunch of illiterate, insensitive, thugs who come into this profession for primarily 2 reasons - failure at every other career, lure of ill obtained money! For more details you can read my previous blog post.
7. Son Of The President Of India: Nothing new here. It was expected of a son of a typical politician.
8. Social Media: No matter what people say, social media has come to stay! The amount of information and idea exchange that happened over the Internet over the last few weeks is simply unprecedented. 
9. People Of Delhi: We kept blaming the people of Delhi for being responsible for rapes but the true story emerged when crime stats of other states were pulled out. Delhi may be leading in number of 'reported' cases but, no other city is far behind!
10. Indian Law: Indian law is helpless, meek and to an extent impotent when it comes to punishing the real criminals. The only use of law is in putting innocent girls behind bars for what they say about a dead person on Facebook! Lawyers of India are no better breed of people. The kind of statements that the defense lawyer gave to save the rapist were enough to judge the mentality and idea of justice they have.
11. Average Indian Male: The average Indian male is sex starved.

Who Wants To Be A Policeman?

When I was a kid studying in a regular school in Allahabad, quite a few teachers had a policy of appointing the most troublesome kid as the 'class monitor'. The policy worked well. Give the biggest goon in the class a responsibility to sober the rest of them, give him authority, a boost to his ego and things would go smooth.

This technique worked perfectly well till we all were small kids. As we grew up, the system somehow failed - the experienced teachers knew that well and the goons started going back to where they belonged - which was not in any responsible position whatsoever.

The police, across the world, does a dirty job. They are the ones interacting with the bad guys, they are the ones who are taking bullets while assuming authority of shooting them when needed.

Imagine a civilized society. Now imagine a regular person living in that society. She would never hurt anyone, even if it is required by law to do so. I'm assuming that the readers of my blog are a relatively civilized bunch of people, in that case should I ask one of you to shoot a bullet into the head of an evil person, chances are that you would not be able to do that (God save us if civilized people have the guts to shoot people around!) We need a class of people to do the dirty work for us, for that we must be thankful to each and every member of the police departments of the world.

The Hindu mythology has many examples of Gods assuming powers to kill and punish the evil. I've often asked this question to myself, why do the Gods have to do that themselves? It would be a lot simpler for them to pass on special powers to some human and let him carry out the execution. Why does a God take the pain of taking birth in human form, live the life of a human till it is time to take out the bad guys? There would be many reasons, I'm sure but, one of them has to be the fact that power corrupts. Give a corrigible guy enough power and chances are that he would not be able to live within the code of the civilized world. A great responsibility should come with great power but, that rarely happens in the real world!

So, here's the catch - we need to give enough power to the bad guys to do the dirty task but we want them not to misuse it! Tough call.

In my experience, there are two types of cops in India. Type A are the ones who perform poorly in academics, are invariably college dropouts, get 'farzi' certificates and hook on to a police job by producing large sums of money as bribe that they hope to get back soon after they join their office (the bribe for getting a post of sub-inspector can go up to as high as 50 lakh in some cases!). Type B are the ones who crack tough competitive examinations like the PCS entrance and get the top jobs within the police department and eventually break down to the system of corruption and power misuse.

Indian policing system is archaic, unjust, inefficient and ineffective. The common people are most afraid of the police than any goon. Going to a police station is one of the worst experience in a person's life in India. The regular policeman is a 'danda' wielding, abusive, fat, reluctant frog who is too deep down in the corruption mantle to do any good to the society. To try to justify that we need such an abomination for the smooth functioning of our society is a shame that India has to live with. It is a shame that such people 'run' our society!

A very comprehensive police reform must be introduced at the earliest if India is to have any hope of becoming a civilized society one day! This is perhaps asking too much. How can we expect the ugly beast that wishes to engulf us to self-destruct! Other parts of the world have had similar realizations recently. Places where the problems arising out of a police state were not too pronounced have gathered and shown a resolve to stand up against the evil that hides itself under the pseudo-name of 'governance'. We have much bigger problems because standing up against the police is much harder here. We would need a non-cooperation movement in a scale bigger than the one we had for our independence. And who would want to volunteer for such a cause when things seem 'normal' on most days! We have accepted our tormentor as a master, it is much harder to break the chains of acceptance.

The first step to breaking out of the vicious chains is to realize that we are not free. That thought alone would be powerful enough to lead us to the next logical step - that of organization!

--More soon--