It’s a shame

Although, no irony should be greater but then again it shouldn’t surprise us, the sort of social fabric we have. A few days ago a Mumbai cop raped a minor girl in a police station in broad daylight. This is outrageous, but then a few days ago I read in the newspaper that a father-son due kept raping the daughter-sister until she became pregnant with their child. So I don’t want to comment on the moral putrefaction the society suffers from — this has gone very deep.

The rapist cop had been given the job on “compassionate grounds” as his father was in the force when he died. This was not the first crime the cop had indulged in, and he should have been thrown out long ago. He used to drink on duty; he used to be rude and abusive and he got engaged in various shady activities. He always got away with all this because one of his relatives in the police kept bailing him out. This ghastly incident wouldn’t have occurred (but then, there is no guarantee) had he been dismissed on time. Even when people outside the police station came to rescue the girl, he yelled that he couldn’t be harmed because he was in Mumbai police. So this must have been a great psychological boost for him, and consequently, could have encouraged him to rape the girl.

The girl was merely taking a walk on the road with a male friend. As it often happens in the chauvinistic society, the cop thought it was his moral right to ask the girl why she was roaming around (at around five in the evening!) with a male. He took them to the police station where he decided the girl could be easily raped and he could easily get away with this.

Since it has evolved into a national issue, the Mumbai police, after initially trying to hush the matter, had no choice but to arrest the cop. The protestors literally demolished the police station in a spate of anger — that’s quite understandable. I hope the police don’t say that all evidence was lost.

We live in times when ordinary citizens have to deal with three kinds of anti-social elements: the criminals, the politicians and the police. One thing is common in them: they enjoy power and the associated impunity that ordinary citizen does not have. The ordinary citizen is the lesser mortal. He or she can be yelled at and bullied; he or she can be easily cheated; he or she can be easily deprived of his or her fundamental human rights. Money can buy you protection for a certain extent, but it is not as powerful as the three kinds I mentioned above.