In December 2012, I was one of the many students pursuing higher education at Jawaharlal Nehru University when we received the news that a young woman had been brutally raped in a moving bus the previous evening and then thrown off it. She battled for her life while police authorities across the stations beginning from where she boarded the bus to where she had been thrown off, played passing the parcel over matters of “jurisdiction” when it came to filing an FIR. It took massive protest marches by students and youth in Delhi to the police stations before this apathetic game could be stopped and a complaint filed. And while the rapists were caught and punished, it remains a struggle to establish that justice for victims goes beyond punishment of perpetrators.
Where were the police patrol vans that night? Why was a near empty private bus with tinted glasses plying on the roads of the capital? Where was the accountability of the bus owners and transport authorities? What of the investigation into the suicide of the bus driver inside the jail? The process of justice requires that tough questions be asked to authorities whose primary responsibility is to ensure safety and freedom of citizens, and ethics of being human requires that we do not exclude our selves from the need for introspection either.
A decade later, the roads of Delhi remain as unsafe and authorities as callous and apathetic. A woman’s body is dragged for reportedly almost 10 km or more on the roads of Delhi on what is usually one of the most patrolled nights of the year, in a car whose occupants are drunk and no patrolling official notices them or stops them. A few concerned citizens who do witness this horror call up the PCR and yet, from the time the first call was received to the time the body of the woman was found, crucial hours were lost making the chances of her survival bleak with every passing minute. Today, when the driver and the occupants of the car are charged with “culpable homicide not amounting to murder, causing death by negligence and criminal conspiracy”, is the negligence theirs alone? While it is yet to be established if sexual violence was also committed against the woman, it does not take away from the fact that the right to be safe and alive that does not come at the cost of one’s freedom should be for all, irrespective of gender, class, caste or any other location. And this requires a pro-active acceptance of responsibility by the state to make spaces freer and safer for all.
An equally compelling question is also around how the state and its institutions treat the victims, survivors and their families when they do not come from a location of privilege. That the surviving members of the victim’s family feel a deep mistrust for the police, their versions, and have to depend on media reports (not always the most reliable) to find the details of what happened, should disturb us all and most of all, the police themselves. In due time, the medical and other reports will confirm whether this was a case of sexual violence, a hit and run or perhaps something different, but the fact is that when victims come from contexts of marginality, disadvantage and struggle, they become “less human” for both the perpetrators as well as the keepers of law and order.
As I write this, I feel compelled to pause and reflect on what our lives in cities have come to be — alienated, indifferent, ghettoed (cocoons of privilege form a stronger ghettoisation) and also upon our responsibility to challenge this apathy without blurring the boundaries between vigilant and vigilantism, concern and intrusion, care and imposition, and between coming from a position of being humane vs moral self righteousness.
The horrors of the incident bring out the unsteady and fleeting humanity of many and as someone who tries to engage with young minds, the concern for keeping alive the humane is no less important than demanding accountability from the state. There is something deeply rotting if the panic of having hit someone “accidentally” overtakes the concern that the one hit somehow be saved. There is something deeply troubling if only few of the many who may have witnessed the hitting and the dragging could be concerned enough to call the PCR, and fewer who could stay with concern even after making that call.
The powers that be will again attempt to drown down the calls for recognising and demanding accountability from institutions of the state and our struggle remains to keep these calls afloat and loud. The media will once again try to sensationalise and play on the “brutality and the horror” of the incident since the “exteriority” of the horror makes for a thrilling watch and increased TRPs. What doesn’t make for an inviting watch is any attempt towards reflexive dialogues that can possibly push us to realise that we could as easily have been the indifferent passersby or worse, those who could hit a bystander and then be more worried about our convenience and wellbeing than the life of another. Unfortunately, for the extremely inward looking beings we are coming to be (individuals or groups), any realisation that forces us to acknowledge our uneasy similarities with the apathetic and inhumane does not make for good viewership or increased TRPs. Many of us would any day prefer a narrative that helps keep alive a safe distance between “us” and “them/others”.
In days to come many, more missing pieces will be revealed and one hopes that they truly are the missing pieces and not ones “created” to fill the gaps in investigation. Some of these will help us understand and some will also have the potential to divert. There will be pitting of narratives, intentions, inhumanities along with creation of unhelpful and artificial dichotomies — perpetrators vs bystanders, witnesses vs those who “may” have left the site of accident inexplicably, family vs police, one media vs another, and so on. The challenge for us is to resist these forced binaries, remain steadfast in our demand for truth and justice while reflecting on the state of the flickering humanity of us all.
The writer is an assistant professor at the School of Education Studies in Ambedkar University, Delhi
