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Jyoti Singh verdict: Go back to sleep, India. There will be no rape tomorrow

Durga M Sengupta | Updated on: 6 May 2017, 16:22 IST
(Photo: Arya Sharma/Catch News)

I will pray that the identity of 'Juvenile' rapist is leaked. And may he be lynched to death by public.”

How can the punishment be as simple as death. They should be tortured till their last breath.”

If a man places his hand on a woman against her wish, do not chop off his fingers, but hack his head.”

The Jyoti Singh verdict has brought out the monster in us. Yesterday, the Supreme Court upheld the Delhi High Court order of death sentence to four convicts in the 2016 Delhi gang rape. The moment the verdict was announced was very telling, as the entire court erupted in celebration.

One click on the top trend on Twitter, #Nirbhaya, shows what India is really thinking. The mob psyche that's demanding violent death, mutation, public hanging, has greatly outnumbered those who don't support this eye-for-an-eye mentality.

Seeing red

What's worse is that skeptics of the death penalty are being called “beasts”. And the right punishment for beasts, as all of them have successfully argued, is death.

Jyoti Singh's parents are elated, and that's reason enough, they say. This will teach rapists a lesson, they say. Justice is served, they say.

And yet, the irony doesn't die. Rape, mutilation, murder aren't crimes that can be fixed with a verdict. To say that Jyoti deserved no less is a disservice to the memory of a woman who did not choose to be your cause, who didn't die for you to first protest, then demand death, and then celebrate death penalty.

It is a disservice because Jyoti Singh may not have wanted any more than to have survived, but we let her wake up our collective conscience. And a collective conscience should want justice, yes, but it shouldn't be baying for blood.

We have now lost track of why we cared, why this case means what it does to women, and, instead, we are down to demanding violence for the accused. A demand that reeks of our need for a quick resolution, a spectacle, bloody entertainment to satisfy the thirsty voyeur inside of all of us.

“If this case isn't rarest of rare to award death penalty, then which case can fall under it,” said Justice R Banumathi of the three-judge bench that delivered the verdict.

The court also said that “aggravating circumstances outweigh mitigating circumstances in the case; offence created tsunami of shock.”

Blinkers on

The two statements go to show that this case was considered rarest of rare, not just because of the crime and the victim's suffering, but because public sentiment demanded death.

We cannot ignore the fact that public sentiment was swayed by this case alone when violent rapes are committed every day, because we see this case as relatable and, therefore, a symbol for the sexual violence we experience every day.

we've clearly moved beyond the space of rational, meaningful discourse.

And so, the verdict for this case also quite simplistically is seen as a solution. As something that fixes the larger problem of rape and violence in India.

Why? Because it's convenient. It's convenient because, to our minds, it seems a satisfying end to the one case that we believe signifies all of sexual violence in India. It's a clean cut, we think. But is it really?

The moment we allow ourselves to accept that death to Jyoti's violators is the end of a chapter in India's history of sexual violence, we put on blinkers, until we stumble on another case that rattles us.

This verdict isn't about Jyoti's family or what she herself wanted. Nor should it be. But we'll come to that later.

It's about how a crucial debate about sexual violence and the opportunity to bring about meaningful reform was quickly lost to the demand for death, castration, and other violent punishment. If a beheading in Baahubali for sexual assault is the closest analogy many on the internet can come up with, we've clearly moved beyond the space of rational, meaningful discourse.

That medieval idea of justice is being touted as the right way today. And proof of its inherent medieval idea of mob justice is the Baahubali parallel. How is this any different from that idea of 'goonda raj' we so publicly click our tongues at.

Who's to judge

Jyoti's parents may see death as justice for their daughter, and respect to her memory. And a common strand of argument on social media has been, “How would we react if she was our sister/daughter?” Maybe we would see rage and react exactly as them, but so do scores of families of people lost to heinous crimes in India.

If every case was handed out a verdict in keeping with what the kin demand, which it quite obviously isn't, we wouldn't need law to restore order in society. Vigilante violence would suffice.

Yes, our law believes in meting out capital punishment in the “rarest of rare cases” and it has been correctly argued that Jyoti Singh's case falls under that bracket. But merely accepting that as a hard fact isn't enough, for we need to ask why.

We aren't enraged at the crime committed, we are enraged at how its reminder inconvenienced us

If Jyoti Singh weren't brutalised on the streets of south Delhi, where 'national media' dwells, her case wouldn't have been highlighted. Had she not been raped on the streets us urban elite walk on, had she not been raped 'right under our noses', had she not been raped after watching an English movie that eventually won a few Oscars...

The list is endless, and so are our double standards.

There's proof that we aren't enraged at the crime committed against her, that we are enraged at how its reminder inconvenienced us. We were forced to engage with this story, trapped with thoughts we didn't want to acknowledge, and death to those thoughts is what we seek.

With every demand for death, we inch closer to that possibility of forgetting and moving on. This isn't resilience, for we aren't coping, heck, we aren't even willing to accept the scope of the problem anymore.

We just want to shut our laptops and sleep.

So congratulations, India. Go back to sleep, for there will be no rape tomorrow.

At least none you must take cognizance of.

First published: 6 May 2017, 15:56 IST
 
Durga M Sengupta @the_bongrel

Feminist and culturally displaced, Durga tries her best to live up to her overpowering name. She speaks four languages, by default, and has an unhealthy love for cheesy foods. Assistant Editor at Catch, Durga hopes to bring in a focus on gender politics and the role in plays in all our interactions.