Ban short skirts. Ban hand holding in public. Ban V-day. Ban item numbers. Ban chowmien. Ban mobiles. Heck, ban women.
The latest in this brilliant anti-rape measures series is to make watching porn a non-bailable offence.
Now, the cops won’t offer Rs 2000 to rape victims. They’ll just say, “Look kid, can’t file rape FIR. Gotta catch that pimpled teenager shagging to Sunny Leone in his engineering college hostel”.
Such is our fetish for missing the rampaging devil and shooting the trees, shrubs, birds, insects anything in the jungle except the dude staring you in the face with blood dripping off his mouth.
We don’t see that the one thing common in all rape incidents is the rapists’ confidence that they will get away. We don’t see that the hostile callousness of the police and a near-dysfunctional criminal justice system makes them so bold.
We wouldn’t talk of educating people and police that women have a right to their bodies, to public places and the girl who doesn’t have a dupatta on is not desperately looking for sex. It’s not as impossible as it may seem – when we can educate people for pulse polio vaccination, we can do so for treating women as more than meat as well.
Heck, when you can think of making porn-watching non-bailable, why can’t you think of making not filing rape FIRs as non-bailable?
And it’s not just rape.
For widespread corruption, we will blame everything from bribe givers to lack of morals to low salary to the latest lunar eclipse.
The blame the bribe giver argument is attractive too – isn’t the guy who bribes to get his license made or bill passed equally responsible? Only, where do these bribe givers go when it comes to IIT/IIM admissions, army recruitment or whatever little that actually works in our system. Why do these immoral ease-shoppers suddenly become honest foot soldiers of morality while dealing with foreign government departments?
Clearly, bribe giving is not the prime mover in the corruption machinery. It is driven by the lacunae in the system which enable people in power to harass you for not paying up. Deprive corruption the life blood of such lacunae and it dies down.
But then we only seem too eager to believe that it is the trees, the birds, the climbers, the creepers, the insects, the grass even the air in the jungle that’s eating up the villagers and how, the devil is a poor victim of circumstances. It works to the sweet advantage of the perpetrators – be it rapists or be it the corrupt babu/neta.
Sometimes, the simplest answer to a question is the real one. We seem to miss this simple truth simply too often.
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