It is not very usual for the Presidents to comment on internal developments but the series of dastardly and fatal attacks on women has President Droupadi Murmu break her silence and demand justice for the victims, and respect for women. The President used the strongest possible words in saying enough is enough, not just to condemn the crimes against women but also to ask the Indian society to shed its conventional notion of women as “less powerful, less capable, less intelligent” and treat them as equals instead.
The President was legitimately “dismayed and horrified” by the recent events, including the rape and brutal murder of a post-graduate resident doctor in a Kolkata medical college and hospital. True, there was national outrage at the heinous crime but that was not enough to deter the criminals and rapists. “Even as students, doctors and citizens were protesting in Kolkata, criminals remained on the prowl elsewhere. The victims include even kindergarten girls,” the President said, spotlighting a reality that Indian women face before the whole world. The immediate and specific references may have been to the rape of kindergarten children in Thane of Maharashtra or that of a teenager in Assam but her anguish had a wider context, too, considering the fact that a woman is raped in India every 15 minutes. As per the National Crime Record Bureau, more than 31,000 rapes were reported across in India in 2022.
The first citizen’s note comes in the background of question a visiting schoolgirl posed to the President if she can guarantee her that a Nirbhaya-type incident would not happen in India in the future. That question must make every Indian, administrator or not, squirm as it indicates that every girl child in this country has internalised the horror of that crime and has kept it in the back of her brain to haunt her whenever it gets a chance. The President being a woman could relate very well to the angst being suffered by her young visitor.
The girl’s question speaks to the failure of the Indian state to safeguard one half of its population from the paranoia of being assaulted. In fact, the number of rapes reported in 2012 when Nirbhaya was attacked was around 25,000; but today that has increased by about 30 per cent, despite amendments to the law and providing for harsher punishment.
This brings one to the core of the President’s address: While the recent horrendous crimes provided an immediate background for her to speak out, the real message was to force Indian society to shed its mindset of treating women as secondary citizens. To “those who share such views then go further and see the female as an object” she would say “we owe it to our daughters to remove the hurdles from their path of winning the freedom from fear.”
In a way reminiscent of Martin Luther King Jr warning the American people against returning to “business as usual” after denying civil rights to the black people, the President reminded the nation that “as social protests petered out, these incidents got buried into a deep and inaccessible recess of social memory, to be recalled only when another heinous crime takes place”. This is not done, and the fear of the girl child of being assaulted one day must be eradicated, the republic’s first citizen told her fellow citizens in the simplest words that they could understand. It’s a wakeup call all must hear.
