Silence has a deafening voice. Its articulation is beyond grammer.
A word qualifies a thought, while silence charges it with feeling-which is
unfathomable depending on the gravity of the situation. Silence is a naked
allowance to one’s depth of agony or ecstasy as the case may be, while anger is
its weak manifestation. Word conditions the meaning and gives a limitation to
it. It is what it meant and nothing more. Silence opens a window with the skies
at the outer periphery and it communicates directly to the onlookers’
mind.
You love a dog, a cat
or a parrot because you qualify its silence with your thoughts. They express
what you intend them to. Their correspondence is as deep as your communication
and as warm as you choose to. Silence, in short is a weapon, a lethal
instrument and a volcano because it is a universal language.
While the world was
watching with bated breath, with prayer on its lips, seething anger in
its heart for that braveheart to survive in the medical ward of Singapore’s
Hospital, the mutilated soul and the withered body of the unfortunate girl
relented and the expected denouement followed. Death caved in.
The saga of the shortened
life of this girl is a clinical judgement on the sad apathy of the system and
the mindless patriarchy and male-chauvinism of this society. In her death this
faceless girl decreed the society to hang its face in shame and that has become
the symbol of its malaise. Death is the ultimate price she paid. But suffering
is power. Who else can say this any better than Jesus Christ? Suffering is
silence’s other bank. For thirteen long ages- the suffering of that unfortunate
girl- charged millions all over the country- each day, each hour, each minute
and kindled a flame of sorrow and anger.
On 29th Dec, when people heard that her lithe body could not take it
anymore and succumbed to it- the
streets of every conceivable town and village were filled-not with bullets, not
with slogans, not with cries- but with tears and millions of candles. The
collective angst of humanity has its own language and has its own power. The
country empathized with one another. It was a silent out-pouring. An emotional
anti-climax. A crescendo. A silent roar. A seething moan. A searing anguish.
People wailed saying enough
is enough. Platitudes had their say and have become sick innuendoes with
political class looking the other way. Jantar Mantar was lit with tears and
candles by tearful millions. Jaya Bachchan wept. The Gnanapeeth Award winner
and a writer Prof U.R.Anantha Murthy moaned saying that there is something
wrong in our minds.
Watching these young girls
with drawn faces one cannot help remembering the famous epithet of Mahatma
Gandhi, when he sowed the first seeds of civil disobedience saying “When the
establishment reacts to our peaceful protest, they may take our bodies but not
our obedience’’. Several editorials and several demonstrators wailed vouching
that they will not allow her death to go in vain. That faceless girl is the
stern ultimatum to the crippled will of the ruling class and the people want to
resurrect the girl’s will to demand a safe tomorrow for every girl. Is
this not a warning signal and a message that it is time to have one-third of our
elected representatives are women and not rapists or criminals as is the case
now?
Our leaders have
specialized in knee-jerk reactions and tongue-in-cheek statements and our home
minister is more conscious of the limitations of the protocol when he said that
100 tribals killed in an encounter doesn’t warrant a people’s representative to
interact with them directly. A glorious legacy of the colonial mindset. We have
Mahatmas who rehabilitated the killers into a secular mould and kept their
hearts in place, rather than their chairs in the South Block. Shame on these
leaders.
Every second minute a girl
is raped in this country. A police constable, a politician, an officer, a boss,
a leader, a father molests a girl each time. It is a sickening monotony.
Lack of political will and lack of motivation to implement the existing
laws result in the cold blooded and unabashed tyranny of these savages day in
and day out.
Young students walked
silently from Jawaharlal Nehru University to the bus stand where the deceased
girl alighted the bus- silently and with black ribbons tied to their mouths.
They courted silence- a powerful negotiator to do the job. Hundreds of them
paraded at India gate, at Hyderabad, Chennai, Ahmadabad, Trivandrum- you name
it. They are fighting a mindset creating a memorial to the hitherto
unknown girl, a tired generation warning the system saying enough is enough.
Silence is the highest combustible material, indicating that
the nation’s conscience is badly shaken by this mindless tragedy- a message
demanding a better and safer world to live in. One placard held by a girl who
resembles my grand daughter at the India gate that shook me among hundred
others beseeched: “Don’t teach me what I should wear. Teach your son not to
rape me”. I wept.
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