5 min readAug 31, 2024 07:23 PM IST
First published on: Aug 30, 2024 at 08:05 AM IST
Two days after the Delhi gangrape, Parliament debated the “demand for severe punishment against perpetrators of gangrape of a young woman on 16 December, 2012 in the capital”. Thirty-seven Members of Parliament, including this columnist, spoke in both Houses. In the last fortnight, as we witnessed the entirely understandable public outrage, one reflected on transcripts from some of those speeches. Here are a few excerpts from what, sadly, turned out to be hollow words.
M Venkaiah Naidu (BJP): “Every 18 hours, there is a rape, and every 14 hours, there is an atrocity committed against a woman. There are around 10,000 cases of atrocities on women pending in various courts in Delhi… what is required is the political will to deal with such situations and sending a strong message to perpetrators of this sort of heinous crimes that they will not be spared; they will be taken to task. ”
Jaya Bachchan (SP): “Everybody will forget what is going to happen to her, but she will remember for the rest of her life. It will be a scar. It is a terrible mental torture more than physical. How are you going to repay for this? Every day, women are getting raped by their fathers, their brothers, their cousins, their uncles. I personally feel very, very ashamed that I am sitting in this House and I am helpless and I am not being able to do anything.”
Renuka Choudhary (INC): “Collectively, it is a social failure. It is not enough for us to treat this as yet another statistic and that tomorrow things will finish and thereafter another incident will happen like this.”
Javed Akhtar (Nominated): “We all need to think about this issue at two levels, at the level of the administration and at the level of society. We need to punish the accused with the strictest punishments. However, I don’t agree that it should be death by hanging, not that I have any sympathy with the rapists, but death sentence is just a shadow that does not solve the problem.”
Mayawati (BSP): “Action taken against the perpetrators must set an example for everyone so that crimes like these do not take place in the future. The actions taken by the government against the perpetrators must be publicised so that the people who get involved in these kinds of heinous acts do not even think of committing such acts. There needs to be a change in the laws and the laws relating to crimes against women must be made stricter.”
Tiruchi Siva (DMK): “I hope the outcomes of this discussion would send the message across this country that such heinous crimes would not happen again in this country. It means, your stringent action should send such a message across the country that any person involved in such a crime will be severely dealt with.”
D Raja (CPI): “Our women are not safe. Our children are not safe. It should be a collective social responsibility to protect our women and children. We should collectively think about how to address this menace.”
T N Seema (CPIM): “We want strict action, we want immediate action and we want assurance. Fast track courts should be set up in all districts. Young boys should be educated in school itself to treat women as equal citizens.”
Sushma Swaraj, in Lok Sabha (BJP): “Madam Speaker, you used a word to describe the incident — ‘heinous’. There cannot be a more appropriate description of the incident. I have stated multiple times that people who commit crimes like these must be hanged. After the incident, the victim is neither living nor dead, even if she survives, she will spend the rest of her life in vegetative state. Do the accused not deserve death by hanging?”
And here is what your columnist said (speaking on behalf of AITC): “I stand here nervous and scared as the father of a 17-year-old daughter living in India. Whenever there is a rape we think that it is a woman’s issue. We often want to make it a woman’s only issue. I strongly believe it is much beyond being just a woman’s issue. In fact, it is actually a male issue. This is about men. And I say this as a man. We men sometimes stop behaving like human beings and start acting like animals. It is time we now seriously took up this issue of preventing rape. Prevention. We first need to create effective social communication. We must do this and then spread this message through different media.”
It’s 2024. Twelve years on. More bestial, heinous crimes. This August we failed a young doctor in Kolkata. We failed a tribal woman in Raigarh. We failed a 15-year-old in Jodhpur, a 7-year-old in Delhi, two 4-year-olds in Badlapur.
Only speeches in Parliament are not enough. Let’s pledge to turn words into action. Swiftly.
The writer is MP and leader, All India Trinamool Congress Parliamentary Party (Rajya Sabha). Additional research by Ayashman Dey
Doctors, Students, Interns and health workers of RG Kar Medical College and Hospital during the protest at the hospital premises in connection with a doctor killed inside the hospital, in Kolkata. (Express Photo by Partha Paul) 
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