I feel outrage that we even continue to celebrate our ‘independence’, because I am unsure what exactly we are independent from. Every day there are reports of Muslims being lynched. People who have actively rioted against minorities remain unscathed while innocent people like Umar Khalid are wasting away in jail cells. The rates of unemployment across cities are staggering, even as we continue to over-invest in infrastructure that collapses upon its first contact with intense rain. I’m feeling jaded because there are so many brilliant people who call India home who deserve to have the opportunities they need to shine. Instead, we’re all utterly reliant on class and caste privileges to move forward. In doing so, we inevitably continue to uphold the status quo. Brahmanical patriarchy becomes completely normalised. What a pity, to be citizens of a country with such a finely sculpted constitution; to be, in whatever capacity we can call ourselves, a functioning democracy, and to still have to continue to fight for rights that we are in fact entitled to. 

Last night, as protests were underway, a mob entered the RG Kar Medical College and Hospital premises and potentially destroyed sites that could have borne evidence. It is unclear who this mob answers to. Autopsy results suggest that the female doctor was most likely gang raped. I feel horror every time I hear that word. As if rape by a single person was not horrifying enough. It seems to have become a norm in India, which says so much about the sickness of patriarchy and misogyny. I’m still processing the reports about Palestinians being subject to such forms of assault and the international community, including journalists and newspapers, staying silent on the subject, despite the presence of damning footage. Instead, one reads reports of right-wingers in Israel rushing to defend soldiers’ ‘right’ to sexual assault. No one has the ‘right’ to rape. I grieve to think we live in a world where this can even be considered a possibility, because it attests to not only the extent to which we have dehumanised non-white bodies, but to the dehumanisation of even the aggressors. What does it profit anyone, to gain the whole world but lose their soul?  

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AAP 43.10%

INC 24.14%

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We deserve better. As Indian women, we have every right to equality and justice. We ought to have the right to go about our daily lives without the fear of being molested, raped and/or killed. We ought to have the right to feel safe wherever we go. Some of us have been lucky to feel safe at home. Not everyone is so privileged. All of us know instances of abuse within the home, where the perpetrator is not a stranger but a relative. We have never known true justice. We have never known what it is like to not be gaslit, for our bodies to be honoured and respected, even by the people we hold dear, or for our autonomy to be privileged. We’ve just grown accustomed to constantly fighting the odds, sharpening our resilience, going against our family’s wishes in order to pursue our dreams, in order to live our truest lives. 

We deserve better.

Deliberating on the life and times of every woman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.