By Mahesh Vijapurkar
A lot went into the buildup to the public outrage that gripped Badlapur town near Mumbai on Tuesday.
The police delay in registering an FIR, and the school management’s refusal to meet parents of the school’s students after fobbing off the parents and grandparents of the assaulted 4-year-old girls saying that it could have been the work of an outsider were just some of them.
Those who study the psychology of group – in this case, literally a mob – and their actions may have the final word, but it remains obvious that the background to the fury witnessed on Tuesday had a lot to say. The foremost is the outrage in Kolkata where a doctor was raped and murdered and how it was handled by the authorities by initially attempting to pass it off as a death by suicide has been playing on people’s minds.
The victims were two kids who probably were not even aware of their bodies and the insensitivity of the school to their parent’s complaints added to the problem. Coincidentally, the same day the outrage overflowed the streets; the Supreme Court was to sit in a suo moto case about Kolkata’s Abhaya, and a judgment in another case in Ajmer was pronounced by a court there after 32 years of trial.
The government could have averted yesterday’s crisis had it immediately suspended or transferred the policemen involved in delaying action on two different days – one, 12 hour lethargy in registering an FIR and two, hours of delay in talking to the parents when they returned to the police station the next day. Instead, the police decided to battle the crowds and top-level intervention led to the suspension of three policemen.
It is not common for a town – Badlapur is a municipality – to rise in unison but the cause was compelling. It is difficult to justify mob outrage but can only be analysed. It seems people are tired of rape after rape across the country and the absence of a response from the government to the women wrestlers’ plea against powerful molesters and their patience snapped. While more rapes are heard of, fewer cases of convictions are a fact.
The faith in the system is at an all-time low even for a cynical public and those in the know – workers in the civil society sector who aid victims of sexual assaults – describe how excruciatingly hard it is to deal with the system like repeated police station visits, procedural requirements and trauma of the wait for years of wait for delay in securing justice.
Here the victims were so small that they may not have known what was an appropriate and inappropriate touch the trigger was easy to find. That the police and hospitals gave them a hard time despite the tender age of the children added to the public discomfort who had taken to WhatsApp to discuss the issue. It had a whiff of the Arab Spring.
The TV visuals showed at least one procession of grim men carrying a noose made of a thick rope and another such image surfaced from the Badlapur suburban railway station. The demand was for the hangman to come into play making it a call for Kangaroo courts, politely called instant justice. Those images spoke little good of the long-winding medico-legal and criminal justice system where time is at a discount.
Trials are not easy to bear because the number of pending cases in courts adds to delays and POSCO has not made them any easier. Such backlog-induced delays which seem to those outside the courts as lethargy do not help deter the social misfits (not her exact words) from sexually assaulting others. Delays are such that assaulted teenagers may be middle-aged before the criminal is punished.
Self-styled godmen getting frequent furloughs does not add confidence in the prison system and political patronage is patent in such cases, including one where convicted rapists were garlanded and facilitated in Gujarat. By bits and pieces, the air is befouled, and a newly appointed male janitor finds a girls’ toilet in a Badlapur school to do his dirty deed.
Mahesh Vijapurkar is a senior journalist living in Nashik, Maharashtra. He likes to take a worm’s view of life above ground.
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