It happens all the time!
One of my students from the Times of India School of Journalism, travelling by auto rickshaw was robbed of her hand bag by two motorbike-borne thugs on the crowded Dhaula Kuan road in New Delhi, yesterday evening. It seemed that the rickshaw driver was in the robbery as he deliberately slowed down the vehicle to let the robbers snatch the bag. The brave student had resisted the robbers and tried to cling on to the bag. But the robbers dragged her out of the rickshaw, resulting in injuries to her right ankle and knee.
While all this happened, around 6 PM, no one on the busy road in India’s capital came to the girl’s rescue. Her bag contained money, credit cards, her Income Tax PAN (Permanent Account Number) Card, mobile phone and other belongings. The cops from the police station in the area too seemed to be in the robbery as they hardly took congisance of her complaint to them. It is quite common for cops to be hand-in-gloves with criminals in our civilised society.
The student has decided not to pursue the case, as she feels that nothing will come of it. Though in her early twenties, this post-graduate student is already cynical about our police system.
This is not the first brazen robbery that has taken place in New Delhi. It’s also not the first time that people who have witnessed a crime have turned their faces away. Worse has happened and people have quietly passed by, without caring or noticing. But I’m writing about the incident here, because it has happened to my student, who, ironically, is training to be a journalist, to be part of India’s active fourth estate and watchdog of democracy.
If such an incident had happened in Australia to an Indian student, a hue and cry would have been raised. The incident would have been quickly dubbed a racist attack.
What kind of attack, do we term this? Was it a mere robbery, one more example of the breakdown of law and order, the crumbling of human decency and civil society? Or should we shake our heads, like we Indians are won’t to do, and say helplessly, ‘What can we do about it, it happens all the time.’
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jitu rajgor says:
Double standard of our society.
This shows double standard of our society. Culturally, we scream out of our lungs that we respect women but in real it is not so. I am not shocked by the incident you have described. My city's newspaper has full of that kind of stuff in daily basis. We like good society, but never put a step forward to change the scenario.
Oswald Pereira says:
Double standards is like a disease.
You've rightly pointed to the malaise that afflicts our society, Jitu. Double standards stem from our hypocrisy. Our respect for women seems so superficial. But it's not an affliction endemic to India. This disease of double standards is prevalent the world over. I fully agree with you, Jitu. We all like to see a good society. But hardly anybody comes forward to improve things.
Luciana Lhullier says:
Great post!
Oswald, I know very little about Indian society, but what you describe resembles so much our own western ultra-individualism. I guess(and I´m so sorry)it´s contagious.
I often get appalled at those demonstrations of collective,absolute, lack of empathy towards a fellow human being. I could give hundreds of examples of that in urban Brazilian society, but one that I really think illustrates my point and complements yours is of a group of upper middle-class college students who, in order to fight boredom, decided to beat up a woman who was waiting for her bus at a bus stop. She was black and was wearing simple clothes, so they decided that she was going to be their punch bag that night. They only stopped beating her up because the police came and arrested them.
Later on, one of them said that they were sorry about that because they didn´t know that the lady was a working mother of two - they thought she was a prostitute. Little they knew that it was a group of prostitutes who were standing in the corner who called the police and aided the woman!
My question is similar to yours in its essence: what went wrong with those kids that they were not able to recognize that woman as a human being? or that they were not able to think that a prostitute was a human being? One of them was a Law student, for Heaven´s sake! I´m really, really concerned with that. I´m concerned with this egocentric, selfish culture that is being formed and fed in most societies. As one of my favorite songs, Solo le Pido a Dios, says: I only ask of God that I am not indifferent to injustice...
Oswald Pereira says:
Callous and indifferent
Yes, Luci, we seem to have little feeling or compassion for our fellow human beings. Motorists sometimes drive past a person knocked down by a speeding vehicle, without bothering to help him or inform the police. If you tell a policeman about an injured person on the road, he gives you a strange look -- like you're a man from Mars.
We see so much of injustice happening around us, but we ignore it, because we are not the victims. There's not much of humanity left in us. I know what I'm saying has been said often ... we've become so callous and indifferent to other humnan beings.