Seeing it as it is: Fight for justice for women in India

Kaya Eldridge should count herself lucky. She actually managed, after being molested, to get to a police station where she wasn’t once again molested, jeered at or raped; for that it what happens, in general, to women who have the audacity to complain against male lust. Ask Irumi in Imphal, or Dhaniben in Dahod, or Kinji in Jharkhand.

Or if you only believe the voice of authority, ask Ilaben Pathak of AWAG here in Ahmedabad; or, of course, your own maid. So Kaya was lucky that when she got to the Satellite police station to complain about the attack, the person there was the senior-most policeman in the station, and he spoke a modicum of English. She was also lucky that, being white-skinned, she was allowed an appointment with police chief SS Khandwawala.

No, it is not enough to be a foreigner. A black woman or man would not even have been given the time of day by the PA. And she was lucky that Khandwawala thought it fit to have her case heard in the record time of three weeks.

After all, what would happen under normal circumstances is that there would be muddats till she was an old lady, and the then judge would not have understood why anyone would have made a pass at her at all!

Kaya had been abandoned by her host organisation, AIESEC (which needs an entire article, so more on them later), since her arrival a few weeks earlier. When the police station summoned them to come and help translate her statement, they were loath to engage in such a trivial case, especially with the police involved. Once there, they translated and disappeared without as much as a “Can we drop you home? Do you feel okay, safe?”

But Kaya had become used to this from day one of her much-looked-forward-to visit to work in Ahmedabad. So when they feigned being busy on the day she was to appear in court, hung up the phone when she, their guest, asked whom they had engaged as a lawyer and who would accompany her to court, it must have been a part of their pattern of their behaviour, worse perhaps, under the circumstances, but not unexpected. So, to court…

Being a woman in a lower court in India is bad enough. Ask any woman, lawyers included. Being a white woman, a young woman, a woman not hidden under a burkha in a ‘Hindu’ country with allegedly non-lecherous men, is much, much worse.

Kaya was alone, except for an 18-year-old intern who started trembling and blubbering even before they got to court, a young man she had practically hijacked to show her the way to the court and to accompany her as the only person who spoke English.

This was an all-male court, with leering men, jeering men. Men too close for comfort, whose breath she could feel and smell as she stood in the witness box amid a torrent of incoherent words; men whose eyes undressed her; men laughing as the dastardly attacker jabbed his finger at her and laughed; men who whistled and roared as the culprit’s lawyer fired insults at her and asked her whether she smoked; men who were allowed to do all this in the presence of a metropolitan magistrate.

But Kaya is lucky. Soon, she leaves the country. She can, as time passes, forget the pressure of the dirty hands on her body. But what of our women, mutilated, raped, molested, paraded naked, humiliated in thousands every day? Of what use to them the legal provision of being explained the law in their own language, of not being forced to sign statements, of having in-camera trials, if the judiciary itself takes part in the hunt?

Should not the magistrate and both lawyers be prosecuted? If this kind of reprehensible courtroom behaviour continues just with mild repri