Make women safer in India

It always takes a gruesome crime, unfortunately, to jolt the nation into action and uncover existing skeletons in the law enforcement’s closet. The horrific rape and murder of a 27-year-old vet near Hyderabad has brought back memories of ghastly crimes committed against women in the last decade or so, and several, unjustly so, lack closure. The country is still waiting for the perpetrators of Nirbhaya gang rape and murder to be punished. As chilling details of the case emerges, the whole nation is deeply traumatized. It makes everyone including women to wonder whether India will ever be safe for the womenfolk.
Today the Upper House of Parliament was rocked by an uproar, where legislators demanded capital punishment for the perpetrators. The problem with India is that only when such barbaric incident takes place, everyone makes hue and cry. After sometime people forgets and moves on. No sincere effort has been made to make women safer. What about the promises made after Nirbhaya incident? A survey conducted by the Thomson Reuters Foundation in 2018 had ranked India as the world’s most dangerous country for women, ahead of Afghanistan, Syria and Saudi Arabia. Instead of taking the report seriously, the government along with National Commission for Women rejected it outright. They also pointed out that rape, harassment and other forms of violence against women appear to have risen in India because more cases are being reported, driven by public outrage. This was a bizarre explanation given by the NCW. Instead of being defensive, the government of India should have taken the report seriously and worked out a road map to make women safer.