Swachh Bharat Abhiyan: One of the most successful campaigns launched in India so far. By sensitizing people about cleaning roads, keeping the rivers and ponds of India clean, and much more than that, it has brought under its umbrella thousands of people. But, it has failed to make people question about protecting the girls of the country, for the roads that we now clean are smeared with the blood of innocent victims. The rivers and ponds that we are trying to save, are filled with the bodies of thousands of girls who were victims of sexual exploitation and whose cries never reached anyone’s ear and even when it did… it went ignored. Why is India still a victim of sexual abuse?
Today, we reside in a society in which we are provided with infinite number of reasons why you and I can probably be raped. Religion. Religion is NOT an excuse to rape a girl. From a long time, girls have been raped in the name of religion. Today a girl is raped because she is Christian, tomorrow another girl will meet the same fate maybe because she is born into a Hindu family or Muslim family or because she might be Sikh or from any other religion. Religion is not the answer for any question and definitely not an excuse a person can give to touch a girl. The only religion I loathe and that I feel everyone else should is the religion which teaches us to exploit a girl, for that religion truly cannot be the religion of God. And if we still continue to make the same mistakes of fighting against each other in the name of religion and assault girls and women of other religion to avenge those girls belonging to our religion, then India is heading in the wrong way because an eye for an eye does nothing but turn everyone blind.
Marriage. Marriage is not an excuse either. Your wife is not someone whom you can abuse even when you’re in a fit of anger, stress or as in most cases, drunk. Because she changed her surname, or because she left her parents’ home and moved into yours, or because she is the mother of your children, but doesn’t make her your slave.
She might be in any field of occupation. However, her presence in any male-dominated field of occupation does not mean she wants attention from everyone in a sexually harassing way and neither does it mean she is asking to be raped. She might even be a sex worker but that does not mean she wants to be sexually exploited. A girl’s consent and freedom to refuse to have intercourse with a person draws the line between her ‘asking for it’ and being raped.
Surely, a sex worker has no such option but to have intercourse with anyone who’s willing to pay because she is compelled to earn money to survive, but that doesn’t mean she deserves to be exploited or that anyone has the right to abuse her. It was not her fault that she made her way into a life which forced her to sacrifice all her emotions and sell her body to survive.
For a long time fashion trends have been playing an influencing role in the way common people dress up. Indian market is full of short clothes and it is fine to sell them and encourage everyone to wear them. However, ironically, when these very clothes are worn by girls, their characters somehow become loose and they are supposedly raped because they excite people by showing too much skin. I do agree with people who think that showing inner wears to the entire world is not appropriate. But that does not mean that the wearer deserves to be so brutally raped. All I wonder now is what excuse people give when girls wearing saris are raped.
A woman is the cradle of the entire human civilization. She provides stability in our lives. She might be our mother, grandmother, sister, wife, daughter, aunt, best friend, girl friend colleague and can play even more roles in our lives. We need to save her, not avenge her by abusing another, but by trying each and every possible way to eradicate the issue of sexual abuse in the nation. We need to educate the masses. Make them realize that sexual abuse is not an answer and also, make people realize it’s not the victim who’s at fault if she’s abused. Because more often girls who are victims of sexual abuse feel afraid to come out in the open because people point fingers at her and it is her image and her family’s reputation in the society which is affected. We need to empower women, because by empowering women we are empowering the entire nation.
No doubt we need cleanliness. No doubt we need Swachh Bharat Abhiyan. But then, don’t we need cleanliness in our own selves? Aren’t we all in need of a Swachh Bharatiya Abhiyan?
