HATHRAS — THE CREMATION OF OUR COLLECTIVE SOUL

But every morning, I cower.
My ego slouches
as it is castrated at the hands of
crotch-clutching goondas.
I have lost count: there are too many to fight — excerpts from ‘I am a Woman in India’, Chandni Singh

It was just like another day. The 19 year old was going about her morning chores. Little did she know that the day would be the beginning of the end. A group of men lying in wait attacked her as she was collecting fodder. The teenager was allegedly gangraped and strangulated by her dupatta around her neck, resulting in serious spinal injuries. Struggling for life in various hospitals from 14th September, she breathed her last on 29th September and was cremated by the police in the dead of the night, allegedly in absence of family. She never saw her home for the final time. Hearth rending scenes of the family pleading with officials in the road in the middle of the night, to allow her normal final rites fell on deaf ears. Her dignity of a cremation as per established rights was raped, perhaps denying her peace in the afterlife. It is now time to add a new stanza to the above qoute — about the afterlife of a scheduled caste rape victim.

As a people, we now have a new low. With incidents of rape featuring on a daily basis in our media, the event has stopped troubling our conscience. Where it is perpetrated by the rich and the powerful, we know that money will be paid out and the case closed. In other cases, the state does the pay-out and substandard prosecution and investigation will not allow the full might of law upon the perpetrator. Despite the outcry over ‘Nirbhaya’ and tougher laws, rape statistics are on the up and like corruption, it has settled into the national psyche as the normal. I have quoted previously from Sir John Bagot Glubb’s study on ‘The Fate of Empires’, where it emerged lucidly that the 11 prominent civilisations in human history collapsed due to moral decay. While writing about the national obsession with the Sushant Singh Rajput case at the cost of other key humane crises such as the Pandemic, poverty, unemployment et al, I had ventured that we had lost our soul as a people. I will now put forth that it has also been cremated. While the perpetrators of this rape will be tried, how can we justify the forced cremation? The inhumanity and callousness of this action, on a family that had suffered such tragedy is beyond comprehension. Not only were religious beliefs violated, but basic fundamental rights brushed aside. This is not about politics or any government, but about our lost moral mooring as a people. Not a single official amongst the many present there chose to support the family of the victim during their pleadings with the District Magistrate. While this District Magistrate may be penalised, how do we correct a few generations of officials who are bred to think this way? Perhaps it’s time to accept that we have been building broken men.

So where ought our souls dwell and how far have we travelled down the road to its cremation? It’s appropriate to quote relevant extracts of Rabindranath Tagore’s “Geetanjali” to draw perspective to the morass we are in. “Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high, where knowledge is free, where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls, where words come out from the depth of truth, where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit, …. Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake”.

The Hathras Rape will occupy our mindspace for a few days more before the more TRP grabbing Sushant Singh Rajput case comes back to keep us entertained. For most of us staying in cities, Hathras is too distant and what happens to the scheduled castes cannot happen to us. But I would like to end by quoting excerpts of William Ernest Henley from “Invictus”.

“Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

………………

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.”

Let’s reclaim our souls and awaken in the heaven visualised by Guru Rabindranath Tagore.