UP – The Metrognome

Where are we supposed to go for help, if cops themselves are involved in rapes, or in covering up crimes?

by Humra Quraishi

Rapes and gang rapes. Sexual maniacs on the prowl. Perversion from all quarters.

This has been the story of our country for a good while now.

But what shocks one is this truth: in the Badaun gang rape and murder of two minor girls, cops were involved. There are increasing cases of protectors turning rapists, or helping to shield the accused. To top it all, ugly politics enters into an ugly situation.

And to all those who are currently claiming that women outside UP are safer, let me say this: stop deluding yourself. Even when we were recovering from the Badaun news, came the news of a young female bus conductor in Mumbai who was beaten up and her clothes torn by an irate commuter. There have been a few other rapes in other parts of the country too.

While we try to grapple with these facts, with the almost illogical desire of rapists to hurt, to wrest power over a woman by any means possible, it is becoming clear once again, that it is not about being a young woman or old, or being scantily dressed or covered from head to toe. It is not about her perceived ‘boldness’ or demureness, about her social standing or her education. Perverts and rapists don’t see all these factors.

I suppose some strict rule of law will be brought into place only when the powers that be are directly impacted in some way. Let any of our women ministers or top women cops walk alone, unescorted on the country’s streets, especially after dark, and let’s see how many make their way back home unmolested and left in one piece. And with riots breaking out sporadically in the country, the security of women and children is further jeopardised, because these two groups are targeted first.

And why won’t this perversion go unchecked, and indeed, permitted to rise? Our cops are busy shielding most of the accused, especially if they are influential persons. If not cops, some accused are shielded by politicians, who may even reward them in the future with positions of power.

And yet, our ideas of ‘progress’ and ‘development’ continue to be confined by our notions of how many skyscrapers our cities build or how many highways. Is there any sense in talking about development when our police force is so desensitised to the needs of the people it is meant to serve? Can we speak of progress when children are subjected to sexual assaults, and there’s no avenue of help for them? What gives us the right to look optimistically at our future when we pretend we can’t see beggars on the street, or hear the cries of a woman beaten on the road?

When are we going to stand up and demand that our cops protect the innocent?

Humra Quraishi is a senior political journalist based in Gurgaon. She is the author of Kashmir: The Untold Story and co-author of Simply Khushwant.

(Pictures courtesy centreright.in, www.deccanchronicle.com)

Back to Muzaffarnagar

How is a pogrom planned and executed? The riots of Muzaffarnagar and other subsequent developments are a recent, ongoing example.

by Humra Quraishi

Several people tell me I focus too much on Muzaffarnagar, but I’m in no apologetic mood. I’m trying to focus on and bring attention to what seems to be a genocide.

Yes, that’s blunt. Equally blunt is my belief that today’s politicians are using the age-old strategy of killing in a systematic way. First, riots are made to occur – no riot can start and spread without the knowledge of the police and the State machinery. Provocations are used to ignite an already charged atmosphere. The pogrom is allowed to go on, not stopped. And as research shows, the police play a partisan role.

If recruitment at the police constable level takes place on the basis of caste and community, then it should come as no shock to anyone that the police join the rioters when the riot goes against their own caste. The hapless victims are either killed or made to flee.

At this stage, the land and political mafia grab the (forcibly) vacated lands and homes and fields. Meanwhile, nobody cares a damn if the affected riot victims die or live like third class citizens. If they dare to point fingers or accuse the wrongdoers, other strategies are used – encounter killings or terror charges are heaped on the victims’ heads and they sit languishing in jails.

In Muzaffarnagar, though, Akhilesh and Mulayam Yadav have gone a step ahead. The riots went uncontrolled, were allowed to spread to the rural belt, and survivors were not allowed to survive. Even those tattered tents sheltering the victims were pulled off, killing most of them in these freezing temperatures.

The father-son duo is now playing a bigger game – first it was rioting, then the hounding of the survivors, then an overnight removal of relief tents, then the bulldozing of the very stretch where the survivors would sit and where the dead lay in fresh graves. Now, relief workers and activists and the media are being kept at a ‘safe distance’, by introducing a new ‘terror angle’! And to complete this picture of apathy and sheer insensitivity, thick-skinned bureaucrats of the Uttar Pradesh sarkar quip, “Nobody dies of cold…people survive in Siberia”!

Can we ask these politicians and bureaucrats to step outside their heated offices, and head to these places in this biting cold, not wearing their sweaters and jackets and mufflers, amidst the fog and the mist and the intermittent drizzles? Will they do it? Can they?

It is with a sense of rage that I say: Shame these politicians! After terrorising a hapless population, they are pushing these people towards death – all out there in the open!

Humra Quraishi is a senior political journalist based in Gurgaon. She is the author of Kashmir: The Untold Story and co-author of Simply Khushwant.

(Pictures courtesy www.indianexpress.com)