Dear Editor,
Crime is crime. Victim is Victim
Yet how can the educational success of the victim religiously dominates the headlines! This terminology of “CBSE topper” has been transformed into an adjective of the hapless gang rape victim in Haryana!
This constant focus on the educational success of the victim indirectly suggests that had she been a Failed or Dropped Out candidate, then the crime would have been of “much lesser” proportion or gravity! Or such barbaric cases need not deserve such limelight if the victim is not “meritorious” enough!
And indeed this is the thing which happens. Innumerable barbaric incidents continue to tarnish this land each and every day making India the most dangerous place for a woman to live in. But “collective conscience” of the nation got “hurt” only in a New Delhi case! Why? Because the victim was a student of physiotherapy and the criminals of bus driver-conductor-helper vintage were affiliated to “low class”! But when a footpath child in Kolkata meets the same fate in a moving cab and the body dumped in a canal, not a single candle gets lit by the “intellectuals” and “bright” students of high profile Universities and no one cared to march on streets with “tear” in one eye, “fire” in another! Does the “collective conscience of the nation” go into “hibernation” then! Or it remain immersed in malls multiplexes and night clubs when innumerable girls of “unglamorous” credential get brutally tortured, many of them to gory death also!
In this “principled” land of ours, it seems that gravity of the crime depends upon the educational and class credential of the victims as well as criminals! And so we have to disgracefully witness such “selective protest” only! What a shameless specimen of hypocrisy double standards and class consciousness!
At the end of the day all are human beings irrespective of demographic economic educational and all possible factors. So all incidents of crime and its hapless victims deserve equal sympathy and protest.
Yours,
Kajal Chatterjee,
Kolkata