Saturday, December 9, 2017

Victim Shaming in the Independent India: Grammar of Secularism

When people start blaming a rape victim – it is bound to agitate the mind of victims beyond all controls. When you start finding faults in victims it can rightly drive them mad and crazy. Yes, you may not be in any position to extend the desired help to the victim but just a sympathetic acknowledgement is what is expected the least to pacify the victim. Sermons can only be felt like gun-shots. The victim would just wish to kill the person who would start pointing out faults in the victims. However all limits are crossed when the accused starts commanding respect instead of being blamed, and then any wild response of the victim can be easily justified. After all, when a healing touch is required to a live-wound how can you justify rubbing chilli and salt on the same?

But that is the story of modern independent India. A ‘more than secular’ majority was forced to listen to the sermons of ‘secularism’ before those who had a proven communal history behind them. While the majority could have been appreciated for its open-liberal and secular approach that they had kept since time immemorial they were being educated on ‘secularism’. Instead of acknowledging the dreaded plight and in-human treatment that the hapless majority had to live with during the forced-violent medieval era, they were preached for something that they never faulted for. When the majority should have had been asked to forget and forgive the past, motivated attempts were made to malign their own past instead. The situation and circumstances could have justified any wild response by the majority but it is their glorious and sensible past that made them wait for so many years patiently only to register their outbursts on the social media. Don’t brand them as ‘irrational’ trolls who have suffered inconsolably not only at the ‘communal’ hands of history but also continued in another manner by the ‘secular’ hands of modern India.


Padmawati - real or fictitious - represents victims of her own era....

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