Opinion Crime and Punishment
The Delhi gangrape verdict evoked a spectrum of responses.
The Delhi gangrape verdict evoked a spectrum of responses.
The enigma besetting Narendra Modis arrival hung over the media through the week. Everyone from the rookiest reporter to Barkha Dutt tried to read the entrails of the BJP. All reported a perturbation of the humours but failed to deliver a clear diagnosis. The story only revealed the divide within the party,which is not exactly news. So the most important political story remained incomplete until Friday and had to fight for space with the really big one the judgement and sentencing in the Delhi gangrape and murder case. ABP News split the screen down the middle on Friday,giving the two stories equal play,and it wasnt alone.
Meanwhile,Rohit Sardana of Zee News packed a bus with young women and started asking them questions. It wasnt an air-con Volvo,not even an Indian Volvo. It was a regular Delhi bus,hammered together by bodybuilders in Anand Parbat or something,parked amidst some steaming greenery in the muggiest autumn that Delhi has seen in living memory. A mobile Black Hole of Calcutta parked in Delhi,but curiously,neither the guests nor Sardana,in a formal black jacket,seemed to be discomfited. Where did they hide the air conditioners?
Borrowing a line from Mahendra Kapoors Filmfare Award-winning song from the 1974 hit Roti,Kapda aur Makaan,the programme was titled Bus! Aur Nahin! Using a bus like the one in which the gangrape had occurred was a slightly weird device,but it broke the monotonous format of the studio talk show,which uses either post-industrial faux Dutch set design or has six little boxes set into a blue screen of death,each populated by a talking head performing a paroxysmal speech act.
It seemed to have been rehearsed,though its unusual to find a group of young people,all of whom know what they want to say and who do not immediately run out of words when they start saying it. The spectrum of feminist responses to the insecurity brought about by the rape wave was clearly articulated,and the debate was widened to matters of law and enforcement by Neelam Katara,whose son was the victim of an honour killing,and the advocate Monika Arora. True,these questions have been discussed endlessly since December last year but since crimes against women have battened on decades of silence,its good to keep talking until everyone screams,Bus!
But a strange dichotomy was visible on NDTV and IBN7. Anchors expected apocalyptic sentencing. Reporters and their interviewees were careful to point out that judgement day was still far away maybe four years away,with the case almost guaranteed to go into appeal and maybe to the Supreme Court. And despite this obvious caveat,after the sentencing,otherwise intelligent people like Shobhaa De were tweeting for a timeframe for execution. And why was the Times Now reporter totally out of breath as she announced the death sentence for cold premeditated murder? On the contrary,inhuman cruelty was the decisive feature of the case. And while dramatising the news is a central feature of the channels business plan,being physically breathless probably exceeds the brief.
Watching Vishnu Soms programme after the Delhi judgement,one felt that the case had served its purpose,emboldening women and devaluing the stigma attached to rape victims. The blurred cellphone video showed a Mumbai woman slapping about a man who was being held by the police. He had apparently tried to molest her on an early morning suburban train,and the woman was exacting vengeance. Highly irregular,as Som protested,but the womans action does suggest that the tide is turning.
pratik.kanjilal@expressindia.com
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