Six years back on 16 December,2012 I was literally dumbfounded when I heard that a 23 year old college student was raped for nearly an hour in a moving bus, and both she and her male companion were beaten with an iron rod and thrown out of the the bus by some young men in New Delhi.
At that time I wrote a blog post, “With a heavy heart I felt it is necessary to pay tribute to a brave, self confident and determined girl who wanted to live a normal life. She succumbed to her injuries at a Singapore hospital where she fought for her life after flown from a New Delhi hospital. Candle light vigil and clashes with the police to vent our anger cannot change the overall outlook about women in the Indian society. Girls are somewhat more abused than boys. According to World Health organization (WHO),150 million girls have been President of India has rightly said that everyone in society should learn to respect women. Failure to do so is resulting in incidents like New Delhi gang rape. I do believe that apart from creating strong criminal laws, fast track courts, strong and active police force, increasing awareness is necessary to curb violence against women. Society should learn to respect women first. On the other hand, in the name of dignity of women, incidents of moral policing have been on the rise.
Moral policing is a typical past time for many Indians including politicians who want to dictate the way women should behave or dress up in public and even blame their dress sense for molestation or rape. They think women themselves are somehow responsible for being rape or molestation. But, wearing mini skirts and hot pants are not an excuse to rape a woman.
