That millions (and perhaps hundreds of millions) of women in India are not even tenth class citizens and are regarded as completely dispensable by their own families has been amply demonstrated this week in the story of the Hapur woman in UP, who is in a Delhi hospital, battling 80 per cent self-inflicted burns. She set herself ablaze last month, and her condition can only be imagined, exacerbated by hopelessness, despair, indifference, apathy, brutality and, of course, dire poverty and the heat of a northern summer. It just does not bear thinking about.
So when I read about it, I did just that — stopped thinking about it beyond making an irritable sound deep in my throat. On the inside pages of the same newspaper there were other stories, plenty of them — a rare conviction for a child rape, the rapes and murders of at least two others, one also a child, the body of a woman washed up on the shore, decomposed and identity-less.
India has the dubious distinction of being among the top ten countries that can be considered most inimical to women. On the surface, the figures don’t seem that alarming — 6.3 women, on average, among 100,000 are raped. In some states this could go from 30 to 50, in others, the figure could drop to one. Not bad, you would say. Except that it is possible that this particular crime against woman is probably unreported by 99 per cent.
So you put stricter laws in place, adding the death penalty to cases in which the victims are children below the age of 12. Dismally, convictions have stayed put at around 24 per cent of cases. Remember, reported cases are only the tip of the iceberg so it is 24 per cent out of the tiny number that are reported.
Every day around 60 women between the ages of 18 and 30 are raped. The poor woman from Hapur is in her 20s, with three children by different men. Except for her first child, the others are the product of rape, spread over 16 men in five years. Sorry, the numbers are important. The way the FIR that was finally made by the police, AFTER she set herself on fire when they refused to file one in spite of her complaints, tells her story in almost business-like terms. She was married at 14, returned to her family when her husband left her, sold by her father and her aunt, exploited by her “owner” who used her like a piece of equipment, renting her out to others. Finally, she confided in someone sympathetic and began to live with the man, only to have the full weight of her exploiters’ threats land upon her. So she set herself on fire. Except that she is still not dead.
Meanwhile, the village of which she is a part says she is lying, her father says she is lying, and they explain her self-immolation as an act of wickedness undertaken by a woman who kept complaining to the police over “petty” matters. Or a woman’s whole life in India is a petty thing indeed.
There is not a soul I would trust to do the right thing, which is to give this woman her own soul and her dignity back. She is one of the million lost souls in this country, damned by circumstances of birth, lack of opportunities and education, not to mention her gender. And the petty detail of a body which has been 80 percent severely burned. At least, as another young victim in almost the same circumstances is reported to have said, nobody will rape her now.