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Sheila Di ks hit (sorry for the separated letters in the surname but the absurd censorship system here translates her name as hot chocolate) isn’t a character from a Carry On movie, but is the Chief Minister of New Delhi, and I’m finding it hard to put what I want to say clearly, too simply, perhaps.
Mrs Di ks hit is not just known for (no doubt unjustified) charges of corruption and favouritism, but also for remarking in 2009 on the case of a woman shot dead while walking alone at 3am in the morning that she shouldn’t have been so adventurous.
I’m not sure of Mrs Di ks hit’s’s approach to the latest horror, but it concerned a 23 year old physiotherapist walking with her male friend in New Delhi after watchng a movie called The Legend of Pi. They were summoned to a bus which they didn’t realise was out of operation that night. There the male friend was beaten senseless while 5 guys took it in turns to have fun with the woman. It ended with the girl being brutalised with an iron rod and left naked on the street. She had to have most of her intestines removed, but surivived for 13 days before dying pescefully with her parents.
The guys have been arrested after serious rioting (by angry men as well as women) in the city, but the one who was most brutal is just under 18 and faces a maximum of 3 years in a care home.The others could face the death penalty.
What has this to do with us? Nothing you may assume. Indian society is misogynistic – 300 parliamentary candidates in the last 5 years stand accused of sexual crimes, but remained candidates. There has been a big rise in abortions of girl-babies by middle-class families in recent years. Such things would be unthinkable here.
It’s not just that the same problems facing urban women in India now were faced by women here when they first entered the workforce big time in the 1950s and 60s, when they were treated as meat market goods, and reacted by creating a feminist movement demanding full social rights. That seems to be happening in India now.
I’m concerned about something which affects us more directly. I was disturbed by this incident, by its brutality, and was genuinely upset for the poor woman. Her last words before she died was to say, “I am sorry, mummy’. That upsets me, even though she’s not British, or European. If she were Polish, I would have the same reaction. It upsets me because she and I are human beings. I can so easily imagine her (like so many of us) blaming herself for the horror inflicted on her.
She was the daughter of an airport luggage loader, and an indicator that a rising Indian economy is opening up jobs for the poorest in society who show talent and enterprise. Is that bad? India is likely to overtake China this century as having the world’s biggest population, and Indians are already taking British jobs in terms of their intlelligence and education allowing them to get ahead in the computing world (not to mention their dmination of call-centres whihc answer your queries about telephones etc). India is likely to be a pretty formidable competitor to us in the coming century, along with China and a number of other countries.
But I can’t see her, or Indians, or Chinese, or Poles etc as my enemies. We are all striving to survive in a hostile world, and in doing that coflicts are happening and will happen in future.
I don’t want to see people like this woman as my future enemy. I want to see a world where we can regard one another as friends who help one another, not as competitors. That would require a cooperative economy, a cooperative society, and I can’t see much sign of that at the moment. But it shouldn’t stop us from looking, and from rejecting the competitive approach which has pitted us against one another.
I dont see this woman as my enemy. Her fate moved me. I would want alternative approaches to the way the world is evolving. Maybe this is a forlorn hope but we need to be more careful of each other, to be kind while there is still time. That need won’t go away.
Dixit (whichi is how I have always seen it spelt) is a common Hindu surname Scep, but is pronounced one part – a mans erhum – and one part – poo ..
Your post is very moving and I can actually feel your yearning for a better world. It won’t happen, I have yearned for a better world where we can all just be accepted as human beings when I have experienced abuse just because I am a different colour to the majority of people in England. Indeed I never thought that 30 yrs down the line after I left school, and the experiences of that time that my children would suffer the same. Infact I find it alarming that things don’t change.
Back to the story of the Indian girl who was gang raped. She was a young medical student, daughter of a business man, not a baggage handler. And the one thing that angers me about the case is that because her dad has money, the police have pulled their finger out and done somthing about it. Women/girls are raped everyday no doubt in India, the population is huge, the bigger the population, the more crimes will be commited. The not so wealthy women and girls don’t get any justice, even if they do report it to the police. The police are corrupt, this story filtered into the world and India had to be seen to do something. As you rightly said Scept, it has a booming Economy. Infact India is predicted to become a Superpower. What country could and has and will achieve that after becoming Independent only some 70 odd years ago.
There is a stigma attached to rape in India. Infact most cases are not seen as rape, but as the womans fault. It brings shame to families and often women kill themselves rather than a lifetime of shame.
I hope Jyoti’s death will not be in vain, and somthing positive will come out of something so bad, but I doubt it, not long term anyway.
Writing this piece has been very hard. Even though I know all the above and things about India, you kind of put it to the back of your mind. It’s their problem.
Acknowledging the good and postive is all very well. It’s the people who do somthing about the bad and negative that are the real heroes.RIP Joyti Singh Pandey
two great posts from scep and kenty ty………..a country that seems to be growing at an incredible speed but still has barbaric crimes being committed against such innocent individuals
What a beautifully moving piece of writing … and a genuinely heartfelt plea. I wish there were more people on this awful planet of ours that felt the same. It seems to me that the good in humanity is far outweighed by the evil; exemplified succinctly by Kenty in her reply and which I fully support as the two-tier way in which such crimes are dealt with.
That said, whilst I despair that society seems to ‘normalise’ such events and so called civilisation remains so corrupt, media-led and manipulative … I retain hope.
Hope for a better, fairer, kinder future.
Suzanne x
Thanks for the replies.
Kenty’s reply I was looking forward to, and appreciate it, especially as Jyoti’s name had been released by her father only a few hours earlier (though Sheila Diksh it is the name I’ve always read in my paper – also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheila_Diksh it sorry but the absurd censorship system on this site means you have to link up the names ‘Diksh’ and ‘it’)
But Kenty the only things I’ve read about the family stress that the father was a loader who had given up all his money to pay for Jyota’s education and training (my newspaper said this, and is is backed by wiki – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Delhi_gang_rape_case), and the reason that the police were so quick off the mark wasn’t to do with the family – indeed I read on Indian websites apologies from New Delhi policemen who felt shame for the tardy reaction of the police force – but with the rioting which took place after such a horrific attack. That rioting was very serious – the government had to close down nine metro stations to stop large crowds gathering, and violence against the police was pretty intense.
But Kenty, that’s why I disagreed with one part of your reply so much. You said that your hopes for a better world had now gone as you saw your daughters facing the same discrimination you faced. But it was precisely the hope that such dehumanising attitudes and crimes should be attacked all the way which led to the rioting, which led Jyoti’s father to release her name (against the law), and which may mean that Jyoti’s death isn’t in vain. A correspondent for The Times of India wrote in today’s paper that when he heard of the crime and saw the reaction, he wanted to rush out not to get a good story but to show his support for the demonstrators. Soemone was standing up at last.
Only idealistic teenagers (and totalitarian ‘goodies’) believe a world without war or rape is possible. We’re never going to get to a situation where opportunistic people don’t take advantage of idealistic people, or where some swine is going to kill or rape somebody. But we have to fight for that world. The alternative is to give up and die – to live a career life which is pretty meaningless.
That’s why I hope your advice to each of your daughters is to fight against the ignorant people who confront them. I also hope that when Jyoti, facing death, told her mummy that she was sorry, her mummy’s advice was ‘Courage, my brave one’.
Rare Im moved by posts here but I agree with others a beautiful post scep…. Actually though maybe its my rose coloured glasses but I do think that good outweighs evil in this world.
I truly hope that this young woman’s death results in their society taking women’s issues seriously, and that’s at least a beginning.
I read an article about the Daughters of India which was published as a result of what happened to that poor girl and her friend.
As kenty states, the police and authorities are totally unsympathetic to any woman who gets sexually assaulted or raped. The police say that she asked for too much money, or didn’t get paid and so is “crying rape”. The implication is that anyone having sexual relations outside marriage are prostitutes.
The business about the female children being aborted, it is worse than that. Only 1 in 4 girls survive past the age of 4. This is because having a daughter who needs a dowrie is just too expensive for the poorer families. Just as in China the girl children are not wanted, so in India.
I hope that the death of this brave young woman can help to change the world.
Indian women friends of mine ask you to sign this.. x
Rape cases in India take years. I believe the goivernment has been forced by the protests to insitutute fast-track courts to deal with women, and hopefully the degrading tests pointed to by Ruby will be brushed aside.
In Britain, women who had been raped were treated as suspect until relatively recently, when an active women’s movement forced a change in police practices.
I also read that the government is determined on the death penalty in this case – very rare in India.
They really have been embarrassed by the national outcry and international attention caused by this case.
Attitudes and practices can change. Changes in this country are more recent than it might seem.
I’ll just give two examples: Less than 30 years ago a female colleague commented that the only women walking in London at 2 in the morning were ‘old toms’ – prostitutes. It took an outcry about how police officers were seen ‘interviewing’ female rape victims in a fly-on-the-wall documentary in 1982 to begin changing the UK police approach to interviewing women from one based on suspicion to one that encouraged support and reassurance. The changes might not be total and the examples are not in the same order as Joyti Singh Pandey’s barbarous treatment, I realise.
India is a country where rapid change has already happened. I hope the release of Jyoti’s name and the outcry will do something to remove the stigma against rape victims, even at an official level. And feed into (and on) global changes to improve justice in sex-related attitudes.
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