Ten years ago, a teenaged girl was raped in a Mumbai local train. There were five other men in the compartment but they did not stop the attack. One of them was a journalist, and I still cringe saying that. It is a profession I practise, too, and it is widely understood, but not often said, that journalists are those whom people turn to when all avenues fail. The power of the printed word (and now the spoken or shouted word on television, too) endows us with a sort of authority which we sometimes (often?) misuse. But what it also gives us is a responsibility. The responsibility to use the word well, and to do good towards our fellow human beings with it. But in the case of the train journalist, Ambarish Misha, that responsibility apparently did not cross class barriers. He watched as the man raped the girl, scarring her for life (there is no question of "probably" here, rape scars the victim for ever), but he did nothing and remained silent, as he brazenly confessed the next day, because he was "burdened with his middle-class sensibilities". That means: the girl was obviously from a lower class, poor, already wretched, and "these things happen to them all the time". He may not have said that last phrase but I bet he thought it.
That was a train. Ten years later it is a different city, a different vehicle. This time there were more rapists. The victim was accompanied by one man. The outcome was a murderous assault on both, and a traumatised young woman who battles for life.
I wonder if anyone has asked Mr Mishra what he thinks now.
Because his silence ten years ago is part of the reason this has happened, again and again. Because of the conspiracy of looking the other way even when an atrocity is happening right in front of us. Because of the pretence that certain classes of people, certain sections of society, and - yes - certain genders of the human race are "other" - and so, something bad happening to them is something bad not happening to us. Because we think that this pretence justifies our silence and our inhumanity. Mr Mishra's silence ten years ago joins the raging screams of silence all around us that drown out the unheard pleas of traumatised women and children. The longer we cower behind our so-called sensibilities, the greater our burden of guilt. But silence is not an option. It never was, and now it has become unavoidably clear that it cannot be.
We tend to think that the people who commit rape, and the people who condone it, must be different from us. They must be uncivilised, uneducated, criminalised in some way, brought up to believe the wrong things about humanity. Then along comes someone like Mr Mishra, typical of a middle- or upper-middle-class professional, aware as well as educated, nay, practising a profession of enlightenment. If he could stand by and claim helplessness while a young woman was raped in the very same space that he occupied, what can we expect from those who are considered less than him by these parameters? In the final reckoning we are all human beings, but in our assumed wisdom we have created barriers and labels which are supposed to distinguish different classes and levels of human beings from one another. But as it turns out, in the final reckoning there is not much difference between us, after all. There is only one line, drawn ages ago - the line between the oppressed and the oppressors, and in that train the woman was the oppressed. By not coming to her aid, Mr Mishra joined, however unwittingly, the ranks of the oppressors because, as I am sure he remembers and may even have quoted somewhere, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."
But of course, far from doing nothing, people in India do a lot when it comes to sexual assault. They ask questions, they point fingers. They ask why the victim was in that place, at that time, wearing those clothes. They point at - I don't know, her hair, her work life, the look on her face. Anything will do, as long as it deflects attention from the fact that a fellow human being, one of us, behaved like a monster. If we make it look like it was not his fault, maybe we won't feel complicit in his act.
As one commentator says, the change that needs to come about is a deep-seated one, a change in attitude. "It is idiotic to expect that policemen, or lawyers, or judges can prevent rape if we cannot prevent people from thinking that any kind of sexual violence is justified or forgivable," she says.
It's not rocket science we are talking about, it is merely ensuring that the city is not a danger zone to be navigated with fear. Things that need to be done start with making public transport accessible and safe, public spaces accessible and safe, lawmakers and law-enforcers accountable, and most of all streamlining the judicial system so that the victim does not become further victimised by publicity and long-drawn-out legal proceedings. The government has to demonstrate will, and the determination that every woman under its governance will be safe. It can be done.
One more change besides all these needs to be brought about, and for this we need not look further than our own minds. It seems almost ridiculous that human beings need to be reminded to be human, but apparently it is required. We need to start saying No. No to violence, No to oppression.
Oh, if saying No were so easy, we would all do it. But saying No can pull us into the camp of the oppressed, it makes us vulnerable, and most of us have a lot to risk in terms of family, if not one's own life. The answer is that we must be empowered so that we need never fear saying No again. This empowerment can best happen, of course, when everyone is enlightened but that hope took its last breath for me ten years ago. The answer, I am convinced, is for every woman to be able to fight back against an attacker, either though unarmed self-defence or with a weapon. Women have begun carrying objects of personal defence, but there is always the danger that these can be grabbed and used against them by an attacker. What we can do is to teach every girl to defend herself (compulsory NCC training, perhaps). And what we can also do is come to the aid of a woman in distress. It's not that difficult.
Just as "a victory for terrorism anywhere is a victory for terrorism everywhere", the rape of one woman anywhere is the rape of all women everywhere. To proceed from the one to the other, all you have to do is... nothing.
