The outrage pouring out in the streets of Delhi against the horrific rape of a young woman on Sunday last is a natural outcome of collective anger. However, the Delhi protest fails to take into account that such rapes occur on a daily basis in the peripheries of India. Just the other day a young girl was gang-raped in Williamnagar. But no one came out to the streets of Tura or Shillong. There is no outrage against the daily cases of rape in Meghalaya even when most of the victims are girl-children aged four or five years. The police crime records don’t lie. They tell us that even fathers rape their daughters. This is incest, pure and simple – an outrage that calls for social ostracism- but it is happening with regular frequency. And we are talking of a matrilineal society here. So what is actually happening to our societies? Why are we so brutalised? Where is that last ounce of decency that guided our ethics and responsible behaviour? What’s happened to our moral compass? Why is the sense of right and wrong fading from our moral radar?
The reality is that our societies are getting more complex and fragmented. There is the category of the rich followed by the salaried middle class yearning to become upwardly mobile. At the lowest rung of the ladder are those who are either unemployed or whose employment hangs by a thread and who suffer daily humiliation at the hands of employers. There is insecurity about the future. At the same time what is shown on TV screens fuels aspirations that are difficult to achieve. So what happens to people who are deprived of what they see over a period of time? They begin to nurse vengeance. Raping a woman and being violent with her after the act seems to be the only way to vent anger and frustration at what they see as life’s conspiracies against them.
There was a time when society banked on each others’ support. Social capital was an asset to fight injustices. Now things have changed drastically. Social capital is lost because society is sharply divided. The erosion of social capital has taken away our ability to act together against social evils. Today the protestors at New Delhi belong to the social stratum that is essentially middle class. Most are college and university students and their parents. The parents have come out to protest so that similar incidents do not happen to their children. So it is the instinct of self preservation which is at play. Rural India which is increasingly becoming the catchment for such crimes remains unaffected by the public protests. Are we then missing the point here?