Acid Attacks and Rhetoric of Love
Sudha Arora
Preeti Rathi , the victim of a heinous acid attack , passed
away on June 2 after battling between life and death for a month . Like Damini
before her, will her death too prove to be a wake-up call for our society? Our
ineffective and delayed system of justice only serves to encourage potential
attackers and criminals who think they can commit crimes with impunity. Is an
acid attack any less of a crime than an instance of murder ? This death once
again raises several questions for our law and justice system, which need to be
confronted head on.
Preeti Rathi , a nursing
graduate from Delhi had landed from Delhi by Gareeb Rath Express where some
unknown assailant threw acid on her face. The attacker patted on her shoulder
from behind and as she turned, he threw acid on her face. No one could catch him even in such a crowded place and he
succeeded in escaping. 25 year old Preeti Rathi had stepped in Mumbai for the
first time to join Aswini , her first job with Army hospital . Her statements later published in the newspaper,
though full of grief at her current plight, also emphasised the centrality of
the means of livelihood to a woman’s life. Even when she was battling for her
life, her first thought on gaining
consciousness was about her job , safety
of her younger sisters and to assure parents not to take tension and eat
properly . Before slipping into
unconsciousness She scribbled on
a paper not to shift her to a bigger hospital as it would be expensive . That
was the last conversation she had with her father and shows her concern for her parents who
come from middle class society .
A violent environment
Violence against women is
often masked in a rhetoric of love. Men justify their act of disfiguring the
woman as springing from her refusal to reciprocate their love. Love has always
been present in the human life since time immemorial. However ‘Acid- attack’
was not known to be the mode of revenge in cases of failed love affairs . Even
earlier, thousands of hearts must have been broken and thousands must have
remained sad and depressed for long time. However such vicious and violent
environment was never there even though the society at that time was much more
conservative and stratified on the basis of caste and religion. But today the
situation is exactly the opposite. Today, not only is the concept of platonic
relationship missing , this generation
demands instant gratification of desire.
Along with the increasing trends of co-education and modernisation there is an increasing awareness among the
girls about their own life and the decision making power. However exactly
opposite to this, there is a growing resentment amongst the boys towards this
development in girls. Today, where girls are coming out as winners in every
field of life, there is an increasing sense of opposition and intolerance among
the boys towards the achievements of the girls. The girls are asserting their
independence in matters such as career, love and marriage. It is this
attitude of the girls which the boys find most threatening.
As long as women
did not gather the courage to say ‘No’, it was fine with society, women
remained vulnerable and exploitable and society could maintain its status quo.
Despite all the education and sophistication, a woman’s confidence to reject a
man’s ‘proposal’ is still the most ‘humiliating’ experience for a man .
If we go back by
25-30 years, the incidences such as
acid-attacks were not known to be taking place. It is worth thinking why they
are happening today. One of the reasons may be that the male is not conditioned
to hearing ‘No’ from a woman. The violence is the revenge caused by the
intolerance of being rejected . Any boy expressing ‘Love’ or a man demanding
‘Sex’ considers it as a grave insult and wants to take revenge.
In
view of such ever-increasing ‘threats’ to women’s life in
society — and they are bound to grow as women progress and
some men are unable to cope with these changes, it has to
be dealt with utmost seriousness. We need to
delve deeper as to why such incidents are being repeated
despite new changes in the law, that now defines acid
attack as a crime. With every nationwide protest to an incident of rape and murder
we optimistically presume that this would be the last.
However even before we take another breath, there is
another such occurrence mocking our systems and mindsets
Reality of Violence
We should not forget that in India , Visual Media - Cinema influences the
attitudes and the mindset of the general public to a great extent. The Nineties
was the phase of free market and Liberalisation . In the beginning of this
phase , came certain films from
Hollywood where a scared and terrorised woman evokes excitement and pleasure in
the viewer. Bollywood was so influenced
by characters such as Julia Roberts in
‘Sleeping with the enemy’, that several Hindi Films were produced on similar concepts. Most of these films were
Box-office hits . A number of Bollywood films
such as Bajigar, Dar, Anjam, Agnisakshi etc used and expanded the jargon
of converting the emotion of Love into Violence and despite all the evil
elements of a villain, the male lead in these films were successful in gaining
sympathy from the viewers. Although at the end he was shown dying but the
audience did feel the pain of his death. Even his death was glamourised. If Shahrukh Khan expresses the height and
depth of his love for Juhi Chawla by terrorising her then why cannot a common person express
his love in such a manner?. This is how
there has been considerable increase in the slogans such as ‘I Have Killer
Instinct’ , ‘ Keep Calm and hit her ’ ‘ Keep Calm and rape them ’or other
similarily negative prints on t- shirts . We are familiar with the graffiti going
berserk flashing unprintable and the four letter word prominently flashed ,
viewed to be a sign of being ‘cool’. The Tshirts were designed in an Australian
garment factory but the after effects were felt more in Asian countries ! The
cultural cross- currents bring their own debris along and each society has to
be careful about what to choose and what to reject !
Gender-specific violence
A few months back , a documentary ‘Saving face’ based on the female
victims of acid-attacks in Pakistan was awarded the Oscar in the year 2012 .
Also, it was a memorable experience to watch the girl from Jamshedpur, a victim
of an acid-attack, coming to occupy the hot-seat on the program KBC. By
bringing the narratives of these victims into public spaces, these programs highlighted
the fact that the root of such innumerable acts of gender-specific violence
lies in the male dominated, hierarchical and regressive capitalism of our
society. These stories are not mere statistics but an indicator of the
cancerous social malaise of our society. Inspite of being granted equality by
the constitution, we have been unable to rise above the parochial divisions of
sex, caste and religion. Truly speaking we have failed to become Indian in the real sense , becoming
a universal human being is a distant dream.
It is worth considering if the media is playing its role with conviction
or just pandering to market forces . Media
perpetuates damaging stereotypes of womanhood . How long will our glossy
women magazines, ignoring their moral responsibility, continue to write about ways and means of
looking sexy in a society where every day a child-girl is raped and acid is
thrown on the faces of young girls . Instead of questioning the blatant
commodification of women, the media is often guilty of glorifying their
objectification.
The insensitive attitude of the police makes headlines almost everyday .
The culprits are able to influence them through money and muscle power, and the
woman looses the battle yet again. The way several influential people and
politicians manage to escape legal
actions against them for various heinous crimes boosts the morale of common
criminals.
To reduce the incidence of such
crimes, a sizeable section of the society is demanding imposition of strict rules. However, we need
to give it a serious thought that if our political, cultural and economic
system is encouraging misogyny at the
social level then mere legal system cannot help much in getting rid of such
evil tendencies.
Insufficient Law
Insufficient Law
The Criminal Law Amendment Bill-2013 defines acid attack as a separate Indian Penal
Code offence and proposes punishment of not less than 10 years to a maximum of life imprisonment for perpetrators and fine that could go up to Rs.10 lakh.
The new law has only increased the punishment for perpetrators, it does not have provisions to aid acid attack victims who have to live with not just the physical disfigurement but also psychological scars and social ostracisation . A separate law is needed to tackle the crime of acid- attacks, including ban on easy sale of nitric
and sulphuric acid, available for Rs.30 a bottle. Also the new law makes no mention of concrete solutions such as insurance plan or long-term and proper medical care for the victims.
Crime and Punishment
Acid is one of the cheapest, most easily available and yet deadly
weapons to take someone's life. A bottle costs only thirty rupees, and can be
lethal. Victims who survive an acid attack go through severe mental trauma and
feelings of terror and inadequacy for the rest of their lives. However, the
attacker is not tried by the courts as a murderer would be, and faces a maximum
sentence of five to ten years imprisonment, and a fine between two to ten lakh
rupees. Compared to this, the victim may have to spend upto thirty lakh rupees
for plastic surgery of her disfigured face. While the victim often has to live
with her disfigured appearance and is shunned by society, the attacker gets
away with a light sentence and modest fee, and returns to the same society with
his reputation and status intact.
The first need of the hour is to immediately put a restriction on the
open sale of acid. Secondly, an attack like this which inflicts severe
physical, mental and societal trauma on an innocent victim should be treated on
par with attempted murder. All other Asian countries have already taken steps
in this regard.
In Bangladesh, after the Acid Control Act 2002 and Acid Crime Prevention
Act 2002 put a restriction on the sale of acid, the incidents of such crimes
have dropped down by 75%.
India seems to be lagging behind. Our courts still do not regard acid
attacks with the same gravity as murder. How many disfigured faces and
destroyed lives of young, innocent girls will it take for our courts to wake up
and take some concrete steps to prevent such crimes and treat the attackers
with the severity of punishment that they deserve?
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