We do not learn from past mistakes. More often we tend to repeat them — be it trigger-happy shootings in the West or terrorism or crimes against women. Maybe, we are good at curing many things, but rather hopelessly incompetent in preventing them.
Recent incidents of rape and murder reveal the bestiality of men and their misogynous attitude that have not changed from pre-historic times. Did not the God Surya take advantage of the gullibility of Kunti? What was done to Ahalya when the ‘Maryada Purushottam’ himself had to release her from the curse of her sage husband Gautaman? The story is too old to repeat in detail. The philanderer Indra managed to seduce her incognito with the active connivance of the Moon God and others. When her scholarly husband who was fooled into believing that dawn has arrived for his morning chores returned to find his wife in the arm of his lookalike, he chose to curse her into stone rather than pursuing the offenders. How come that an acetic like Gautaman could be fooled by an erratic call of a rooster? He could have looked at the sky and divined the correct time. Yet he chose to punish the hapless woman whom he knew to be virtuous. These days Indra has been replaced by the kin of the mighty.
Even the ‘Maryada Purushottam’ abandoned his loyal wife Sita instead of dealing with the washerman who spread false rumours. Who said we do not have Ram Rajya?
A rape case, during my pre-teen years in our town, went to court when times were neither enlightened nor the media pro-active. At the cross examination of the victim, the defence counsel asked the woman if she knew sewing, which she was adept at. Then he is reported to have given her a thread, himself holding the needle. When the woman was trying to thread the needle the lawyer went on turning it making it impossible for threading. Then the woman asked him to cooperate to make the threading possible.
‘Cooperate! Your honour, nothing can succeed without the cooperation of both the parties’. The case was dismissed. This lawyer became so famous — nay notorious — that he could get a lot of cases thereafter. Even today we see the depressing sight of the ‘needle and thread’ theory in practice in several other forms.
We may have mobile phones and SUVs and all other modern gadgets, but we still carry the mindset of cave men. From the Rabindra Sarobar mass molestation of women in some sort of ‘nite’ in 1969, we have had an unending series of mob violence against women. Free the law-enforcing agencies from the clutches of politicians and monitor their performance. I had the good fortune of seeing some very good cops dealing with such cases without the prop of any new law. One wished if there was at least one single chap who disassociated with the offenders and helped a victim.