The incident of a schoolteacher being stabbed by a stalker on a busy road in north Delhi Tuesday raises once again the question of the safety of women in the country. The 22-year-old woman’s murder by the man whose marriage proposal she had rejected is just the latest in a series of crimes by stalkers in the national capital.
The law enforcement agencies have not been able to stem this flow of gender crimes. Many such crimes have taken place across the country and the numbers keep increasing daily.
These unchecked assaults have added to the feelings of insecurity among women. Women going to college or to work always have to be alert about every kind of threat.
The situation in India seems to have taken a drastic turn from a criminal angle to a societal illness. Law enforcement agencies are severely handicapped. Their capabilities are further limited primarily because people manning the posts are themselves very depraved and psychologically corrupt. Society has also been pushing too many responsibilities on their unwilling shoulders. Expecting Indian government machinery to function in a blemish free manner is a very tall order which every citizen understands well by now. The question that all of us should be asking ourselves is very simple. So is the answer. With a combined effort of every citizen to somehow grab and run becoming a universal attitude, how can we expect that justice, fair play and sensitivity could possibly co-exist? The answer, obviously, is it cannot and in present day India, it does not.
This is not to claim that this period of Indian history is the darkest. Every society goes through good and bad phases. We, in India, are going through one of our worst periods. And whether rich or poor, all of us are unwilling to be answerable to anyone else. This is best exemplified when one reads the recent pronouncements made by two honourable justices in the Supreme Court of India. While rejecting a PIL seeking setting up of a ‘public body’, independent of the executive and the judiciary, to ensure fair appointment of judges in High Courts and the Supreme Court, the learned judges said “We don’t need a certificate from anyone on Earth”. This observation came when it was alleged that there has been nepotism in the appointment of judges in various courts. The judges of the apex court are always correct and no one shall ever have the authority to challenge them. However, in a democratic and modern society no one, especially those drawing fat salaries and attractive perks at the expense of the nation’s tax payer, can ever claim to be beyond questioning. The contempt of court is a regressive and old law that needs immediate drastic change. Failures of the Indian judiciary are so very visible that finding errors in their daily work does not require an extremely sharp mind. If Supreme Court judges proclaim that they are perfect and cannot be questioned, then why should the citizen not believe that he too needs no certificates from anyone.
So let us all accept to live in a make believe world where we will be a law unto ourselves.