Gauri Sinh: Heavy cost of protecting women in Maximum City

Crimes against women are front and centre in Mumbai’s consciousness at present, but what is increasingly more worrisome is what’s related to these crimes — greater aggression if they or others attempt to defend themselves/hit back.

We already know how two Amboli boys grievously lost their lives trying to defend their lady friends from harassment, the incident sparking outrage and protest petitions to make Mumbai’s streets safer. But this is not the only instance in the city where the act of trying to protect women, either by the victims themselves, or by sympathetic others, has lead to further victimisation.

Take the case of the girl who was cat-called near her Malad college recently. When she protested, her tormentors returned on bikes and beat her on her head so savagely she needed stitches. Or take the case of the Colaba woman in the ladies compartment of a local train who tried to defend herself whilst being attacked by an intruder. She was slashed viciously. Or the young girl, who, in staving off an intruder on a CST-bound local, got blade injuries last week. The subtext ostensibly being, that not only should women just submit meekly to harassment, but in the course of rolling over and playing dead they shouldn’t even try and protect themselves, for fear of greater reprisal. Can the scenario get any grimmer, and really, where are we heading?

Shouldn’t alarm bells be ringing at Maharashtra’s dismal picture for crimes against women in the National Crime Records Bureau 2010 profile? Reported incidents of crimes against women have only risen from previous years — they stand at 15,737 for 2010, 7.4% of the all India total. Reportedly, Mumbai has the highest number of cases of rape and molestation registered among nine cities in the state in the past one year.

But we don’t need official figures to understand how our environment is becoming increasingly dangerous for women, we simply have to read the headlines. And the recent cases are just the reported incidents — on streets, by unknown oppressors. What of street harassment and harassment faced in work places and from known devils, by thousands of women who suffer everyday, and for the most part, silently? What of their anguish, does it register, is it considered to even exist if not voiced, or bureaucratically documented?

There has been shock registered at the spurt in these recent cases because Mumbai has long been considered one of the safest cities in the world for women. Shock and outrage, especially when it leads to a call for action and greater accountability of authorities, is good. Because it is important not to let the city become the same as many scarier ones in the nation or elsewhere, like our capital, for instance, which every woman will attest is a very difficult place to consider oneself safe in.

And certainly, there ought to be more done for women’s safety on the whole, in a land referred to in the feminine, which holds close the feminine divine, shakti. It is the same land after all, whose first PM made a telling observation, when he commented that the condition of a nation can be determined by the status of its women.