Thank you!

In a corner of a bedroom in our Chennai home, cleared of furniture and all other encumbrances, there sits an urn.

It is actually a fairly simple clay pot, about eight inches tall and six inches across at its widest. It is covered by a Kerala-style thorthu (towel), the same one I wore around my waist when I and three others carried my mother’s body on her last journey. And in it rests a couple of handfuls of ashes and a few shards of bone.

This is all that remains of a 77-year-old lady who lived a full life — as professional, as wife, as mother and grandmother, and as the go-to friend to the many dozens who, unbidden, arrived at our home with stories, most of which we were hearing for the first time, of how mom had in her unobtrusive way helped them at times of dire need.

A good friend once pointed out to me that the true test of character was how you behave with, what you do for, those who can do nothing for you in return. By that litmus, mom had ‘character’ to burn — and it is an integral part of who she was that we are finding out how pervasive her influence was only after her passing. When she was alive, she never spoke of any of this — nor, as we are learning, did she permit the beneficiaries of her generosity to speak of it.

That urn is warmed by a lamp that burns bright 24/7, and it will stay lit till the morning of the 26th, when I consign to the elements all that remains of my mom.

Meanwhile, what has warmed me — and the immediate family, with whom I have shared all of this — is the kindness of strangers, the compassion of friends, the empathetic readiness of strangers and friends alike to reach out a supporting hand. You imagine, when something like this happens, that all you want is to be left alone, to be able to crawl into your personal space and nurse your wounds. And that is what I told the friends who called. Some heeded that, others ignored me and kept calling, messaging, writing mails, reaching out in many different ways. And I realized that they were right, I was wrong —  isolation is no cure for grief. To those friends I owe more than I can articulate (to say ‘repay’ would be to insult them beyond measure).

To the many who on this blog and through calls and emails and Twitter DMs shared their personal experiences – with parents, with children, with illness, with life, with death – what can I say that does not come out cliche?

Hearing your stories helped me make sense of my own; reading of your pain helped me cope with my own; knowing I was not alone helped me arrest my emotional free fall and  recover a sense of balance and perspective.

To say ‘thank you’ is to insult your generosity of spirit. Yet ‘thank you’ is all I have, for now. I hope you know there is a wealth of feeling packed into those two words.

PS: There are many mails, and messages in the comments section here, that I haven’t been able to respond to. I will, though. Soon.

R.I.P, Mom

One day, I had a call from mom.

It was one of those routine calls she used to make to my wife and I, more as a means of reaching out than because she had some news of import to convey – the telephone line as umbilical cord.

So she would call and ramble on about my eating habits and smoking and how the neighbor was remodeling his home and the dust was settling in thick layers all over our home as a result and about the other neighbor whose daughter, based in the US, was pregnant, and…

I listened patiently to those stream-of-consciousness chronicles of the mundane ticks of her time because I knew she was, in her own way, trying to make up for lost time. Through a torrent of words, she was trying to make up for the grim silences of the past.

So that day, she rattled off the news from the extended neighborhood and then, just before signing off, asked me, ‘So when is she coming next?’ Who? ‘She… you know…’, there was a pause, and then in a voice driven an octave higher by frustration, she said ‘Never mind! I am getting old! One of these days I am going to forget my own name!!’ And she banged the phone down.

I did not realize at the time that it was the first manifestation of a trauma that would progressively engulf our family, plunging us into a state of helplessness beyond comprehension.

And it happened one painful day at a time.

One day, in the middle of a call, her voice trailed off. I thought the line had gotten cut. Hello? ‘No, wait, I am trying to remember something I want to tell you, I am still here,’ she said.

One day the phone rang. I answered. There was silence. Then, without a word of greeting, she said “I called you because there was something I wanted to tell you. And now I have forgotten what it was.” I heard a sob. And then she slammed the phone down. The sound hurt like a physical blow to the gut.

One day, in the midst of a long ramble punctuated by many pauses and as many repetitions (by then she had begun to forget that she had told me something, and would go back and start all over), she asked me to wait while she got herself some water. “My throat feels so dry,” she said. I waited. She never came back. Long minutes later, I panicked and called my sister on the other line. It turned out that mom had forgotten she was talking to me, and wandered off, and was watering the plants. The time was around nine — at night.

One day my niece called and asked, did grandma speak to you today? No, I said, why? “She asked me to dial a number for her because she has forgotten the number — but she won’t tell me whose number she wants me to dial, and she is getting angry with me for not dialing it,” my niece, a teen bewildered beyond measure by her grandmother’s progressive deterioration, wailed. Never mind, I said, give her the phone. Mom came on the line. And said hello, how are you, it has been a long time, why haven’t you called, are you okay?

And then she called me someone else’s name.

One day my sister called. “We were watching something on TV. Mom got up and walked off towards the bathroom. After a while I realized she was missing, and I went to check, and she was just standing there, staring at the wall,” sis said, in a voice made moist with sadness.

One day, I was visiting mom in Chennai. A call came in that I had to attend. When I was done, I walked back into the room, and found her standing in front of the bank of light switches in her room. She was just standing there, staring at it. Mom? What do you want? She looked at me and then she looked at the switches and then she looked at me and her eyes were blank. You want the lights on? She stood there thinking about that. And then her eyes teared up. I flicked the switch on for her. She looked up like she had never seen a bulb light up before, with a sort of child-like wonder. And she flashed me a blinding smile. It was just around noon, then.

She forgot to shut doors when she opened them, and she forgot how to open a door that was shut and she would stand in front of it, trying to figure out what she was supposed to do next. And if you noticed and opened it for her, she had forgotten what it was she wanted in whatever room it was she was trying to enter, and she wandered away till something else stopped her in her tracks.

She forgot how to put on her clothes. And she got angry when sis helped her put the blouse on the right way. This most private of persons could not tolerate these daily reminders of her own helplessness.

She forgot how to eat, and would hold a spoonful of food poised in the air in front of her, and stare at it till someone actually guided it to her mouth — and then she forgot she had to open her mouth and take in the food.

One day, I got out of the car and turned and saw mom waiting by the door, a beaming smile on her face. “Did you have a good trip?”, she asked. “Have you eaten anything? You are looking so thin!”

And then she called me by the name of her only brother – the man who had disowned her when she got married against her family’s wishes; the man she had never spoken to for over 50 years; the man who was long dead.

One day, my wife went to Chennai by herself. Mom smiled happily at her, reached out with fingers that trembled with the effort to convey affection and stroked her hair, and then asked her “Why didn’t he come?” Who?, my wife asked. She knew; she was just teasing. Mom struggled to get my name, her mounting frustration evident in the furious workings of throat and jaw and the tremble of her lips. And then she broke down and sobbed like a baby.

One day – April 14 – when I went visiting, she stared at me as I walked in the door. She did not say a word, nor did her expression change. I asked her how she was doing. She just stared. As I moved around the room, her eyes followed me — blank eyes, empty of life.

Eyes like glass, reflecting what they focused on, absorbing nothing.

And then, one day, she went to sleep – that is to say, she went back to sleep, because by then she was sleeping all the time, with the briefest periods of wakefulness.

And thus she died, at 4.40 am on May 11, when she finally forgot how to breathe.

THEY used to call this madness, back in the day.

My great grandmother on the paternal side was “mad”. “Possessed”, some of the elders would say, nodding wisely.

There was a room in our ancestral home that was always kept empty, and dark, and closed. That is where the souls of our departed ancestors lived. (That is also where we stored those enormous porcelain jars of freshly pickled mango and jack and peppercorn and papaya. There is a mordant, witty connection to be made there, but I am not in the mood just now).

Great grandma was kept chained in that room till the day she died. The awful clank of those chains on the wooden pallet that was her bed, and on the floor when she moved about, and her screams of rage and of frustration as she repeatedly tested the limits of her freedom, formed the disorienting soundtrack of my days and nights, back when I was a very small boy.

By the time I moved into my teens, it was my grandmother’s turn. They didn’t call it “madness” then, not openly. They simply didn’t refer to it, is all. And so my grandmother would sit, in the chair my grandfather alone had the right to sit in when he was alive. And she would point to someone in her line of sight and ask, “who is that?” Oh, that is Jayaraj. “Who is Jayaraj?” Your son, grandma. “Ohhhh, Jayaraj — when did he come?” This morning, grandma. “This morning? Really?” She would smile and even as the smile blossomed it would change to a puzzled frown. “Who is that?”

After a few rounds of that, I would slip away. It didn’t matter — she sat there and stared into the distance and repeated the questions and answers to herself, until something distracted her and she went off on some other loop, muttering away.

We cousins would invent our own dialogues, in imitation of grandma’s rambles. And with the casual cruelty of the very young, I once built a segment of my mimicry program around her ramblings, and brought the house down at the annual college cultural fest.

Now we have a name for it. Dementia. Even my young nieces know it is dementia – not madness. Not even Alzheimer’s, which was the original diagnosis when mom first showed signs of “losing it”.

In an Alzheimer’s patient the brain will be shorter and more square than normal because that is what the disease does — it shrinks the brain. In the case of dementia, the brain will be of normal size, but will show the presence of lesions — softer, darker areas — throughout.

I learnt all this through an article  in the New York Times. Elsewhere I read of how, and why, cases of Alzheimer’s and dementia are proliferating, and how this has the potential to become a health-care disaster of epic proportions. I learnt that there was a subset of dementia, called “pleasant dementia” — the kind my grandmother suffered from, if I were to make a posthumous diagnosis.

My mom’s disease progressed in incremental stages, and so did my knowledge of the disease — because what else is there to do when confronted with such than to read, and try to understand? So I googled dementia and collected links and read and made notes, all to what purpose I did not stop to ask myself.

Late one night, I was sitting at my mom’s bedside. She was drifting in and out of sleep and each time her eyes opened, she would look around the room till she saw me, and there would be a momentary flash of recognition in those eyes, and then she would go to sleep again.

So I sat there and I googled, and I stumbled on Nora Ephron’s piece on her own encounter with dementia.

Once I went to a store to buy a book about Alzheimer’s and when I got there I found I had forgotten its name. I remembered this as I sat at mom’s bedside that night and I thought it was very funny.  I  laughed out loud. I don’t know when I stopped laughing, and when in the dead of that night the fat, hot, wet tears began to sting my eyes and rake red-hot furrows down my cheeks.

This is what I learnt during that night, during that vigil without end: dementia does more damage to the bystanders, to the family members, than it does to the victim. The latter just fades away, imperceptibly and, one hopes, painlessly – “the long goodbye”, someone called it. But even as the victim forgets, the bystander is forced to remember.

LITTLE memory bubbles, trapped too long in the muck of the mind, keep breaking free and bursting on the surface with liquid plops.

I cannot claim to ‘remember’ that my parents, both with nascent careers to nurture and grow, outsourced my own nurture and growth to my grandparents, leaving me in their care when I was just 20 days old.

What I do remember is that from when I was old enough to talk — and even to this day — my parents have always been ‘mom’ and ‘dad’. ‘Achchan’ and ‘Amma’ — father and mother respectively, in Malayalam — have always been my grandparents. That is how I thought of them and referred to them when they were alive, and that is how I think of them today, when they are long gone. They brought me up, they taught me stories from the epics and the puranas and the meanings underlying rituals; they instilled in me their values and their ideals.  Mom and dad were the people who visited once every summer and brought me toys and clothes and books and then went away again, leaving me in peace to play with those toys and read those books.

Today we talk of the trauma of being “abandoned” in childhood and the resulting scars on the psyche. Those days, it was just how life was.

I remember being taken away to Madras, to ‘my own home’, when I was 14. I remember my parents rushing off to work by eight and coming back home around six and asking me how school was and did I do well and did I have a shower after playing cricket in the dusty field opposite my home, and then leaving me alone while they wandered off to discuss their work and colleagues and all the other things they had to talk about — so many other things, they had no time to talk to me.

I remember that as I grew older, they began to talk AT me. What electives I should take, what marks I needed to get to qualify for a seat in medical school. They talked at me, their words reflective of their own ambitions for me. But they never talked TO me. They never listened to me. And they never knew what, if any, dreams and ambitions I had for myself.

I rebelled. Bunked class. Started smoking, drinking, doing drugs. I majored in psychotropic pharmacology before I’d finished pre-degree.

I don’t remember the day – I was 17 – when mom came home and found me in bed, froth around the edges of my mouth. I don’t remember swallowing an entire strip of Mandrax. Attempted suicide, the doctor said.

I don’t remember wanting to die.

I remember being shipped back to my grandparents’ home to “get better” (the ancestral home appeared to be a kind of left luggage place for inconvenient baggage).

I kicked drugs. I couldn’t kick the rebellious streak, though. I dropped out of college.

I remember grandad dying. I remember grandma losing first her mind and then her life. With their passing I lost my anchor; I lost the only benign influences in my life; I lost the only two humans who believed that there was more to me than “hopeless wastrel”.

By then, I was a burden to my parents. I know this because they told me so. Repeatedly. Then my mom stopped talking to me (I wrote of it here) – but she managed to convey the message anyway, with words sharp as knives hurled at the space above my head.

I finally found a job in Bombay, and I left my home. I met a girl, and I got married to her. My parents did not attend. They did not know the girl, but disliked her on principle – how could someone who I liked possibly be any good?

So I made my life and lived it. And my parents made their life around my sister and my nieces, and lived that life. We were parallel universes with no channels of communication, with no connection.

And then came the morning of March 17, 1997, when my cousin landed on my doorstep to tell me my father was no more.

That afternoon, as I lay prostrate before the corpse of my father, seeking to wash away with tears the bitterness, the regrets of a lifetime, I felt a gentle hand on my head, a touch that transmitted absolution. A  benediction.

Shortly after that day, my mom began to call.

She kept it up for the next sixteen years – till the day her mind failed her.

PS: I wrote large chunks of this on April 12. I had barely reached office that morning when my sis called. She told me mom was no longer even opening her eyes. There was a heartbeat, yes, and a pulse. And if you looked closely you could see her chest rise and fall in time with her slow, labored breathing.

But her eyes were closed. And save for fleeting micro-seconds, she never opened her eyes again, ever. I went down to Chennai late that night. And I saw her lying there – desiccated, shriveled, still, a shell within which once resided a person who, among other things, gave me life.

I knew, then, that she was gone. For it is not a pulse, or a heartbeat, or a breath, that makes a mom.

That morning, after I got that call, I wrote. And in Chennai next day, sitting at her bedside, I wrote more (Not everything I wrote has made it to this post).

I wrote to remember. And I wrote so I could forget.

I wrote to cauterize wounds, to exorcise demons.

And at some level, I wrote because who knows? A day may come when I’ll stare at the keyboard of my laptop and not remember what it is for.

Just like mom with the light switch.

Tumbling into something new

For the longest time, folks on Twitter have been complaining that there is no easy way to follow the various links I keep tossing up; elsewhere, blog readers complained that ‘eye browse’, an occasional series of blog posts I used to do where I linked to interesting reading matter, is now defunct.

Okay, two birds, one stone. Meet my new Tumblr avtaar — a site dedicated entirely to curating all the stuff I read, as I read them. (in other words, when I want to write something, that will happen here; if it is just a link to something I read, that will go in Tumblr).

Too confusing? Okay, making it easier — see the right side of this blog? The segment called ‘Reading Matter’? That is the RSS feed of my Tumblr blog; it tells you what I have added new, and you can avoid or click based on interest levels.

The answer to one final question I’ve been getting a lot of in email: when will I get back to blogging. The short answer? June 1. See you here, then.

Truth is sadder than fiction

“Na tho sachchayi ke liye ladnewala rahega, na insaaf maangnewala. Reh jayega tho sirf tareeq!“

Remember the classic Sunny Deol rant from Damini?

January 3, 2013: Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Altamis Kabir declares that the Kerala High Court will hear afresh the Suryanelli rape case of 1996. Hearings will begin in three weeks, he says.

A little over three weeks later: Justice TR Ramachandran Nair of the Kerala High Court, heading a special bench constituted to hear cases relating to crimes against women, recuses himself from fresh hearings of the Suryanelli rape case on the grounds that he had earlier appeared as defense counsel for one of the accused. He could have recused himself the same day the SC order was passed. Or the next. Or the next. By the expedient of waiting for the day of the hearing to declare his recusal, the system buys three weeks.

February 25, 2013 (A little over three more weeks later): A new bench comprising Justices KT Shankaran and ML Joseph Francis are scheduled to begin hearing bail pleas filed by 9 of the 35 accused. The judges say the appeals filed by the accused, and related paperwork, has not yet arrived from the Supreme Court. The hearing is postponed to March 4.

March 4, 2013 (One week later): The bench comprising Justices KT Shankaran and ML Joseph Francis say the appeals filed by the accused, and related paperwork, has not yet arrived from the Supreme Court. The hearing is now postponed to March 15.

Seriously? In this age of instant communications, this gives ‘snail-mail’ a whole other meaning. (And do note that all this pertains only to the hearing of bail pleas of 9 of the 35 accused. There will be pleas from the others, the snail mail syndrome will strike again, dates will be announced — and we haven’t even gotten down to hearing the rape case itself).

William Gladstone’s ‘Justice delayed is justice denied’ is often used in such contexts, but a far more nuanced statement on the responsibilities of the legal system is that of former Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court Warren Burger:

“A sense of confidence in the courts is essential to maintain the fabric of ordered liberty for a free people and three things could destroy that confidence and do incalculable damage to society:

that people come to believe that inefficiency and delay will drain even a just judgment of its value;

that people who have long been exploited in the smaller transactions of daily life come to believe that courts cannot vindicate their legal rights from fraud and over-reaching;

that people come to believe the law – in the larger sense – cannot fulfill its primary function to protect them and their families in their homes, at their work, and on the public streets.”

Cui Bono?

From the time of Cicero, advocates have been asking this question, whenever justice miscarries:

Cui bono? To whose benefit?

The second and third weeks of February showed an unusual amount of activity on the margins of the Suryanelli case. Congress spokesperson PC Chacko made a statement in Kerala that the “party will decide on the demand for Kurien’s dismissal”. Less than a day later, another Congress spokesperson, Sandip Dikshit, made an ‘official statement’ that what Chacko, his fellow spokesperson, had said was ‘his personal opinion’.

On February 14, PJ Kurien met with Sonia Gandhi and with Rajya Sabha chairman Hamid Ansari, among others, to plead his innocence. He then wrote a letter addressed to the members of the Upper House, exonerating himself. On February 26, Minister for Parliamentary Affairs Kamal Nath, no less, took it on himself and his government to defend PJ Kurien in the Rajya Sabha.

Elsewhere, the demonization of the victim began. Judge Basant, one of two High Court judges (the other, Ghafoor, is now dead) who overturned the Special Court judgment and dismissed charges against all but one accused, said the Suryanelli rape victim was a child prostitute, and hence ‘rape’ did not apply. (Taking his strictures about the then 16 year old at face value, forcible sex with even a prostitute is rape, or did they change the laws on that? Apparently the judge believes that if you are a ‘prostitute’, even by external determination and not necessarily because of your own actions, then the question of consent is moot — a mindset that flies in the face of all established canons of law.)

Congress Member of Parliament from Kannur K Sudhakaran went one better, dropping the ‘child’ and stating flat out that the girl was a prostitute. Period.

By way of aside, “Read our judgment”, Basant kept repeating. You (the media) haven’t read the judgment, and are simply making comments, he alleged.

Okay. Here’s the judgment, in full. (And yes, some of us do read.)

Here is what the Supreme Court — which, as even Basant will have to concede, did read his judgment — had to say about it while asking for the case to be heard again.

And here is what a practicing Supreme Court attorney, who read both the judgment and the SC comment, had to say:

“On the issue of consent, this is where this egregious judgment went most wrong: they took one sessions case, found consent, then imputed that consent to the other 35 accused in the case. The SC is pretty clear on this and it is the basis on which they sent it back to the HC.”

Turns out the judgment is not as Kevlar-coated as Basant would have us believe.

So, as I was saying before I interrupted myself, the first half of February saw a flurry of activity: On the part of Kurien, who defended himself against anyone who would listen and many who would not; on the part of the Congress at both state and central levels, who pushed back against any suggestion that Kurien’s actions merited some investigation; on the part of individuals and collectives who launched attacks on the victim.

And it didn’t end with statements. We had the Kerala government telling the court that the victim’s complaint against PJ Kurien is ‘legally unsustainable’ (Isn’t the legality of a case a matter for courts to determine?). How did the government know? It sought “legal opinion” — from who, is left unsaid.

On March 2 (two days before announcing the latest postponement), the court took the government’s advice to heart and ruled that there was no basis to reinvestigate the case against Kurien. Why? Because The Director General of Prosecution T Asif Ali said so in a report. Where did the matters set out in the report come from? From the government. Where did the government get it from? From “legal opinion” it “solicited”. From who? Wouldn’t you like to know?!

So why this sudden flurry of activity on the part of all concerned? What was the trigger?

This: early in the second week of February Dharmarajan, main accused in the Suryanelli case, ‘surfaced’. And told a TV channel that he had personally driven PJ Kurien to the guest house where the victim was lodged at the time.

And lo — a sandstorm of activity erupts.

Hark back a moment: how was Kurien’s name first implicated in the rape? Back in 1996, when the story broke and the police began investigating, the victim noticed a photograph in a local newspaper, and identified the central figure in that photograph as one of the many who had raped her.

She did not “drag” Kurien into the case to settle some political vendetta. She picked out his image, of her own volition, because she recognized him, and gave the police the date, and the venue. The police at the time “deemed” that there was no sufficient evidence to even investigate Kurien’s possible role in the serial rape. Kurien himself stated that he had not been to that guest house, and had never met the victim.

And so to Dharmarajan, who states otherwise. (Within days the Kerala police, who till then had shown little interest in the absconder, manage to “nab” him and bring him back to the state).

An accusation that has been often levied is that there was, back in the early 2000s, a concerted effort to make the Suryanelli case go away, because politically connected people were involved. Everyone, up to and including Judge Basant, has vociferously denied the charge. So — a quick recap:

In September 2000, a Special Court set up in Kerala handed down prison terms to 35 accused in the Suryanelli case. The main accused, Dharmarajan, was absconding at the time. He was subsequently arrested; in 2002, he was sentenced to life in prison.

Just two weeks later, the High Court let all of the accused out on bail, while reducing Dharmarajan’s sentence from life to five years (plus fine of Rs 50,000). Dharmarajan appealed even this reduced sentence. This man — who, remember, was earlier absconding when the case in chief was being tried and would thus, by elementary logic, qualify as a flight risk — accepted the court’s munificence  and jumped bail again. He has been ‘absconding’ for all of 12 years with nary a yip from anyone. And thus the prime source of information about who was involved and who was not went into the deep freeze.

He has now re-emerged, for reasons best known to him. Spoken his piece. Promptly gotten “nabbed”. And is now in captivity — which among other things guarantees that he won’t go shooting his mouth off on any more TV channels.

Meanwhile: The Kerala government says there is ‘no fresh evidence’. Kamal Nath says there is no ‘fresh evidence’. The DG of Prosecution says there is no fresh evidence. The court says there is no fresh evidence. Oh, and Kurien says, wait for this, there is no evidence at all, fresh or stale.

Really?

The victim identified him out from a photograph and provided details of date, time, and venue. Now, the accused in chief comes forward and corroborates the victim’s statement.

Sounds to me like there is prima facie reason to investigate — how does it strike you?

But the Kerala government, having “sought legal opinion”, believes there is no reason to investigate. The Kerala police believes there is no reason to investigate. The Kerala High Court believes there is nothing to investigate. And Kurien — against whom there is “nothing to investigate” — continues to plead his innocence from charges that don’t officially exist.

Cui bono?

It is not my contention that the man is guilty. But surely the victim deserves — and it is sad that we have to say this sixteen years after the crime — a proper, thorough investigation against all whom she accused?

What was it Warren Burger said?

that people come to believe the law – in the larger sense – cannot fulfill its primary function to protect them and their families in their homes, at their work, and on the public streets

Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn!

Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn:

#Not for the likes of Kailash Vijayvargiya who displayed appalling misogyny and a corresponding lack of knowledge of the epic he was citing when he talked of women having to live within a notional Lakshman Rekha.

#Or an Abhijit Mukherjee who seems to have a thing for ‘dented and painted’ — and beautiful — women.

#Or a Raj Thackeray who believes that if a fence could be built around Bihar and that state could be isolated from the rest of the country, rapes wouldn’t happen.

#Or a Mohan Bhagwat who in the face of all quantified evidence holds that rape is a phenomenon peculiar to the ‘westernized’ cities of ‘India’, and absent from the villages and forests (forests?!) of ‘Bharat’.

#Or for Chhattisgarh minister Nanki Ram Kanwar who suggested that the fault lay with the alignment of the stars and the planets.

#Or for the countless others of both sexes and all party affiliations who, over the past few days, have vitiated the atmosphere with comments that are risible when they are not downright reprehensible.

I don’t give a damn for the Jamaat-i-Islami Hind, which suggests that in order to stop rapes and make women safe, all sex outside the marital bed should be made punishable offenses and co-education should be banned;

#Nor for Rajasthan MLA Bhanwari Lal Singhal who believes that schoolgirls wearing skirts is the problem;

#Nor for the Pudhucherry government that wants to put our schoolgirls in overcoats and ferry them around in segregated buses;

#Nor for ‘spiritual leader’ Asaram Babu who said The Delhi Rape Victim (I capitalized that to distinguish her from the 635 or so other women who were raped in Delhi these last 12 months) could have avoided her fate if only she had called her assailants ‘brothers’;

#Nor for the dozens of other ‘solutions’ being proposed that show a total ignorance of the problem and an absolute focus on whatever antediluvian agenda the proposer holds dear.

In passing, I don’t give a damn too for a tendency, at least on my timeline, for the conversation to segue into whether the ruling party or the opposition is more to blame or whether the media is ‘biased’ towards this or that particular political grouping — because, frankly, every political group currently active in this country has come out of recent incidents reeking of the medieval, the antiquated, the regressive, the repressive. All these conversations tell me is that we are still unable to move beyond our own peculiar, particular mental cocoons.

I don’t give a damn for any of the above because much as these statements give the media pegs to hang their ‘righteous indignation’ on, none of this is new, or startling. I haven’t heard anything in recent times that I hadn’t heard already — from an uncle who during dinner table conversation casually condemned a cousin as ‘fallen’ because she chose to leave the family fold and live life on her own terms; from parents who, sight unseen, refused me permission to marry the girl I wanted to because in their worldview, any girl who would ‘fall in love’ and ‘go out with’ men (or at least, with me) couldn’t be a ‘nice’ girl worth being invited into an ‘ancient family’; from ‘well-meaning’ ‘family friends’ who denied me shelter for the crime of marrying an ‘improper girl’; from a ‘friend’ who over rum and coke casually discoursed on the ‘bed-worthiness’ of a girl who had, just some weeks earlier, tied a rakhi around his wrist; from another ‘friend’ who once got up a dinner party and invited a bunch of us over just so the invitation could include a girl he hoped to take to bed that night…

The attitudes reflected in recent statements by various political worthies is neither new, nor particularly remarkable; tune our antennae inwards, and all of us can recall much worse being said in our presence — and sometimes, even said by us.

I notice that some of the more egregious statements have been ‘withdrawn’ — but how do you withdraw the mindset that spawned them? I notice that some political groupings have distanced themselves from those of their fellows who recently gained foot-in-mouth notoriety — but how do you ‘distance yourself’ from what is in your midst?

I don’t give a damn for any of the above because while we collectively obsessed over such asininities, a teacher and a watchman were found to have raped tribal girls in a school in Chhattisgarh; another minor girl was first raped, then forced to consume a poisonous substance in Faridkot; an 18-year-old in Alwar found life so insupportable thanks to constant harassment that she preferred death by self-immolation; a 15 year old was set on fire because she resisted rape… (okay, I’m stopping here — if your stomach isn’t turned yet, just google ‘rape’ for yourselves).

And? Even as the Delhi police take prompt action against Zee News for airing an interview with the Delhi victim’s friend in which he accused them of playing with red tape while he and the brutalized girl lay naked, cold and bleeding on the roadside, elsewhere in Delhi the discovery of a raped, murdered woman’s body turned the spotlight yet again to a seemingly endemic refusal on the part of the police to take timely action.

That’s what I give a damn about, just now — that even now, even after all this, nothing has changed.

Or at least, that is not quite true: something has. In Noida, the discovery of the woman’s body triggered mass protests and that in turn led to punitive action against the errant cops — just as the Patiala cops involved in harassing an 18 year old rape victim and hounding her to her death were suspended/sacked.

This is what we need more of: more protests when such things happen, more heat on the law enforcement machinery to force them to act. We need for police forces across the country to realize that here on, there is a penalty attached to not doing their job.

While on that, I don’t get the rubbish being spouted by top cops about holding courses to sensitize police to take action in cases of rape.

Say what?! Isn’t it the primary job of the police to take action when someone comes to them with a complaint? Any complaint? They don’t need to be ‘sensitized’ into doing their job — they need rather to be severely penalized when they don’t do it.

These are the things we need to focus on, I’d submit. The rest? Mere noise, of no significance whatsoever.

Reading Matter:

1. Via Nilanjana Roy and a new hub created to document, discuss and act on gender violence, a curated list of stories worth reading from the past one week

2. Natasha Bhadwar on the tyranny of silence and how the victims are finally finding a voice again

3. Harini Calamur, eloquently making my case for me, on why we need to focus laser-sharp on the basics

4. Annie Zaidi on why women are proving to be their own worst enemies

5. Law professor Mrinal Satish on the startling ways in which the law on rape is applied in practice. An excerpt:

Let me provide a concrete example of how the stereotypes find their way into the trial process through medical examination. Assume that in examining an unmarried rape victim, the doctor notes the presence of old tears on her hymen. The doctor also notes that she was able to insert two or more fingers into the vagina of the victim. Although the doctor does not expressly opine that the woman was sexually active, this information is conveyed to the court by way of the medical report. My study showed that in cases where the medical report indicated that the woman had been sexually active before marriage, lower sentences were imposed on the offenders who raped them. In contrast, in cases where the offender had raped a virgin, the sentence was relatively higher. Thus, the sexual history of the victim had an impact on the sentence imposed on the offender. Another factor related to virginity is the perceived loss experienced by an unmarried victim, in terms of her marriageability. The Supreme Court has in a number of cases noted how rape adversely affects the chances of a woman finding a suitable groom. In this context, the Court has even held that the marital status of the woman can be a relevant factor in rape sentencing. It is not surprising then that offenders who raped unmarried (and virginal) women got higher sentences in contrast to men who raped married women. Further, courts tend to impose lower sentences when a victim who was unmarried when the offence was committed, gets married during the trial. Since the rape did not impact the victim’s ability to get married, the harm caused by the offence is discounted. An egregious example of this approach is the Supreme Court’s decision in Baldev Singh v. State of Punjab (2011), another gang rape case that got a lot of media attention. One of the reasons that the Court gave for reducing the sentence in this case was that the victim was now married.

PS: Even as I finished writing this post and checked Twitter to see what else was going on, I found a teaser for a TV chat show coming up. Apparently the likes of Pooja Bedi, Chitrangadha Singh, Arjun Rampal and spokesmen from the VHP and Asaram Babu’s outfit are about to debate the latest hot topic: should Asaram Babu apologize (for idiotic remarks already alluded to earlier in this post).

Seriously?

PPS: It also turns out that in our haste to find new statements to outrage over, we are even making some of these up now. Vide this furor over a ‘second’ Mohan Bhagwat statement. Do we think of the disservice we do, the credibility we collectively lose, when in our rush to judgment we forget to fact-check?

PPS: I am traveling, with limited time and access; blogging will be intermittent for the duration. See you when I do.

Suryanelli rape case reopened

Just how good is this news?

For nearly eight years, a woman from Kerala who was gang-raped by 42 men in 40 days has been waiting for the Supreme Court to take up  her case.

Today, the Chief Justice of India Altamas Kabir said hearings will begin within three weeks.

No, not that the poor girl had to wait eight years for the highest court in the land to find time for her, but the fact that the Supreme Court is in fact going to hear the case — for it is one that represents much that is wrong with our police and judicial systems. Here’s a quick recap, quoting from an earlier post:

Do you remember Suryanelli? The story of a 16-year-old girl who was abducted from a bus, raped by the conductor, then handed over to a couple who, over the next 40 days, transported her like a traveling circus all over Kerala and pandered her to 42 different men, all of whom raped her?

The story has an instructive coda. A Special Court was set up three years after the incident (the first time in Kerala history that such a court was set up to fast track a case of rape; it happened because of massive public protests). In September 2000, the court handed down major prison terms to 35 of the accused. Dharmarajan, an advocate and main accused, was absconding at the time; he was subsequently arrested and, in 2002, sentenced to life in prison.

All good, right? Not. Two weeks after the Special Court verdict, the Kerala High Court gave bail to all 35 accused and let them out of jail. And in 2005, the aforesaid High Court acquitted all 35. More, it deemed that Dharmarajan, the man who had along with his lady friend taken this minor girl the length and breadth of the state and facilitated her serial rape, was guilty only of the crime of “sex trade” — and sentenced to just five years and a fine of Rs 50,000. There was, the honorable judges deemed, no evidence of any “conspiracy” to commit crimes against the girl — like, you know, Dharmarajan was just sort of accidentally escorting her around Kerala, and accidentally, some things happened, too bad, so sad. Oh, and the judges also had some acerbic comments to make about the “character” of the teenager and her “motive” in filing a complaint.

That young girl — in keeping with the Joneses of the media, I’ll name her Mayoos, The Hopeless One — who, last heard from, was employed in a menial job and attempting to get on with her life, lives with the trauma of the multiple rapes she endured for over a month and the knowledge that the authorities she turned to for succor deemed that all that happened to her was somehow her own fault.

In 2005, her family filed an appeal to the Supreme Court asking for justice. Years rolled on. Early last year, in a sudden, surprising development, she was charged with embezzlement of funds and initially, suspended. When various rights groups protested, she was reinstated and transferred after securing some form of written apology. (Additional details of the case here).

The question most found baffling was this: She was a very low level staffer, in a rank where normally you don’t get to handle significant sums of money. Ergo, the accusation that she had somehow walked off with over Rs 2 lakh seemed, prima facie, to fail the smell test.

This, in tandem with the High Court verdict that completely overturned that of the special court, has created in popular perception the impression that the entire case was manipulated with the sole purpose of saving the high and politically mighty — an impression italicized by some of the comments the High Court, in its judgment, made about the then 16-year-old girl, and the downsizing of charges against the principal accused.

How much truth there is in that perception will be known soon enough when the Supreme Court begins its long overdue hearing of the case. However, that nothing is black and white, that there are layers to even seemingly straightforward stories, was underlined for me yet again when, on Twitter, I asked a couple of lawyer friends to explain the dichotomies in the case.

Here is a transcript.

Bottom-line, the wait is almost over, the case will be heard — and, given everything that is at stake, it will be a trial worth following.

Chidambaram’s open letter to…Ashwani Kumar?

While reading all I could find about police and judicial reform, I came across this gem — a checklist of five ways to un-clog courts that are affected by severe arteriosclerosis. With apologies to the original publisher, quoting this in full:

• There are several experienced judges in high courts on the verge of superannuation who because of their low seniority do not have a chance of being considered for appointment as judges of the Supreme Court. Many of them have excelled as trial and appellate judges on the civil side or the criminal side. Select 10 such judges and appoint them as ad-hoc judges of the Supreme Court. Let them sit as two – judge benches and hear the old cases only. The arrears of cases will be wiped out in about 500 working days. (By the way, this suggestion found a place in the 1991 Congress election manifesto.)

• Repeat suggestion No.1 for high courts by choosing suitable district judges.

• The chief justice of India, the attorney general, the president of the Supreme Court Bar Association and you should prepare a list of senior advocates who (waiving the age limit) are otherwise undoubtedly qualified to be high court judges. The chief justice should make them an offer and tell them they do not have the option of saying no! Each one should be asked to agree to serve for eight continuous weeks in a year, for five years, as an ad-hoc judge of a high court of his/her choice. It will be a form of compulsory service akin to military service. Many will accept and the few who may decline will invite public opprobrium.

• Give two law clerks to every judge of the Supreme Court. Thank God, there are outstanding young men and women graduating from the National Law School, Bangalore, and some other universities. Let them clerk for two years each on a modest stipend. Once the law clerks are in place, the chief justice should make a rule that, in all cases listed for final hearing, the rival parties will submit written arguments (not exceeding 20 pages) two weeks in advance and limit oral arguments to one hour for each side. Once written submissions are filed, many of the cases will be concluded in 30 minutes.

• Set up an in-house three-member panel (judge, lawyer, civil servant) to grant or refuse permission to file an appeal in the Supreme Court by any government department or agency. Just before filing the appeal paper-book in the Supreme Court, the intending appellant should present its paper-book to the panel and also be allowed to make brief submissions. If permission is refused, the appeal shall not be filed. No doubt this will add three days to the process but the advantages are manifold. Change the panel every year. Depending on your response to these suggestions, we can discuss long-and medium-term plans.

Make sense to you? More courts and speedier trials was, in fact, top of the list when Supreme Court advocate Karuna Nundy recently thought through urgently needed reforms.

Where did this set of solutions come from? An open letter written by P Chidambaram to then Federal Law Minister Arun Jaitley back in January 2001, and published by India Today. 12 years have passed, almost to the day. And here we are again, “discussing” judicial and police reform.

Why is it, do you suppose, that when you are in the political opposition you *always* know the right thing to do — and when you are the government, you *never* do?

PS: In good news of sorts, Manish points out on Twitter that one of these suggestions — the law clerk (item 4) is already in place.