Comment

A picture, goes the old adage, says more than a thousand words, and the photographs taken outside Juhu’s Marriott hotel on New Year’s eve, certainly did. But the reverse is also true: sometimes a few words say more than a thousand pictures, and the reaction of Mumbai’s Police Commissioner to the Juhu outrage told its own story: “Such things could happen anywhere and at anytime. Don’t make a mountain out of a molehill.” And AC Archana Tyagi’s first response was, “Why have they referred the case to the Juhu police station? This falls under Santa Cruz jurisdiction.”

As we know now, Jadhav later appeared in sackcloth and ashes, but no one was impressed since his contrition followed a public dressing down from his boss, Home Minister RR Patil. Wasn’t it more likely that his first gut response (and the reaction of a ‘woman’ police officer) is a true indication of the police’s generally callous attitude to cases involving the harassment of women?

That question is rhetorical of course; without doubt that is the police attitude and it’s not restricted to the Mumbai police, which is why reports have come in from various parts of the country of incidents that are disturbingly similar. For example, at Kerala’s Kochi beach, Swedish tourists who had come to bring in the new year in God’s own country, found the women in their group being sexually harassed by a gang of young men. In Pune, an NRI woman was injured when assaulted by some men while in Patna, male medical students chased and harassed female students till they managed to flee to the safety of their hostel.New Year’s eve, it seems, has become a ‘secular’ law and order problem as severe and dangerous as the law and order problems posed by our myriad religious festivals. The obvious difference is that here, women are the victims.

Police indifference is not the only reason why things have got out of hand. If you look at the incidents, they follow the same pattern. The men involved are generally young (late teens or in twenties); they are not educated and they are marginally employed. And they are all out on 31st evening because it’s the night when everyone is supposed to have a good time.

What constitutes a ‘good time’? It all depends, doesn’t it, on your economic status. The ones who can afford it, go to hotels like the Marriott, and they go there as couples. The ones who are too poor to afford anything, like pavements dwellers, treat the 31st like any other night and go to sleep. It’s the young men in between, who have neither money nor women, who cause the trouble because they have the aspiration but not the wherewithal and they have the testosterone but not the outlet.

The young men outside the Marriott, for example, said they had “chicken and liquor and then went to the beach”, presumably in search of something to do. When they found there was nothing there, they waited outside hotels and restaurants to see if they could devise their own “entertainment”. They did and we saw the results.

None of this is likely to change unless governments decide to present free entertainment in public spaces. Fireworks, variety shows, song and dance routines, mimicry… These staples of entertainment, if provided at strategic geographical locations in the city might just provide the free entertainment the driftless young men are looking for.

There’s something else. Most of the young men involved in the incidents were neither married nor had girlfriends. The lack of female friends may be due to social taboos about dating but the problem is compounded by our abysmal gender ratios: if our society kills off its girl child, it’s obvious that there will be a lot of young men in search of women who go missing at birth. It all comes out on 31st night, but there are, for many, 364 other nights which aren’t much better.