Usually we criticize American press for their blinders when reporting a story from India. Not today and not in this article. Here we feature an article by Mark Magnier of LA Times, an article that is out of the ordinary simply because it tells the new reality of India. Magnier’s article brings to you the nightmare of a young Indian man named Vijender, a poor laborer who has been
- “sentenced to work and live in a cow shed for six months, feeding and bathing the animals and shoveling their dung 10 hours a day, seven days a week,”…..That is in addition to a year the laborer spent in jail.”
Vijender’s story begins in 2007 when he was 17. He had a 15-year girl friend named Pooja. Pooja’s family disliked him and so she pleaded with him to run away with her. When he discouraged her, she threatened to commit suicide. Readers may not know that abetting suicide is a serious offense in India and “abetting” is a very liberal & expansive term in Indian criminal justice system. So Vijender Kumar knew that he would be jailed for “abetting” Pooja’s suicide if she went ahead with her threat. Here is how he explained his choice:
- “I knew I’d be blamed either way, for her abduction or her suicide,” he said, sitting on a red plastic chair in the cow shed. “And she promised to say it was her idea, even if we got caught.”
So Pooja & Vijender eloped. The LA Times article adds:
- They boarded a train and spent three days sleeping in stations and eating cheap roadside food. On the third evening, a police van spotted them at a bus station. Pooja, true to her word, told them running away was her idea. But her family leaned on the police, Kumar said, and he was charged with kidnapping and rape. “The family gave the police a $500 bribe,” he added.
So what happened to Vijender?
- “Although he was a juvenile, he was sent to an adult prison. He got bail
after a year, but it took three more years for the case to be heard. He
was sentenced to six months tending cows captured by the police in
anti-smuggling operations. He received no credit for time served.”
The quotes below from Vijender vividly show his this sense of hopelessness:
- “They didn’t even investigate my case,” Kumar said, surrounded by 300 lumbering beasts. “Punishing young people for having consensual sex is unfair and backwards….Only the big people get justice,” he said. “The jail was full of cases like mine.”
Vijender Kumar is not alone. The LA Times article reports that,
- “parents frequently file rape and kidnapping charges against boys who have consensual sex with their daughters, consigning the boys to jail and the girls into quickly arranged marriages to “protect their honor.””
So Vijender Kumar went to jail/cowshed for 4 years, got kidnapping & rape on his record and essentially got his life virtually destroyed for no fault of his own except getting involved with a demanding girlfriend. But the girlfriend was neither punished nor reprimanded. Her parents would probably get her married off to a man without telling that man any part of the Vijender-Pooja story.
This is the story of the new law written to protect woman in the aftermath of the Delhi rape-murder. Under this law, women are essentially defined as “victims” and men as “oppressors”. This categorization seems to supercede all facts and evidence of innocence or guilt. Because with this law, the Indian legal system virtually removes from women all responsibility & liability of their own actions and dumps it on men. This is why Pooja, the girlfriend of Vijender, was deemed blameless and Vijender was deemed solely & completely guilty and punished.
This would seem totally unjust to the point of being uncivilized & barbaric to any honest observer or analyst. No civilized or even semi-civilized society would tolerate such a categorized system of discrimination. Heck, even Jewish victims of the Nazi holocaust refused to levy such a blanket blame on Germans of that era.
But Indian Legal Syatem has become this uncivilized, brutal and devoid of any internationally accepted principle of individual innocence or guilt based on facts & evidence. Witness the quote from the LA Times article:
- “We have tried to bring in a strong law, which is pro-women and will act
as a deterrent,” Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde told lawmakers
Thursday.
Vijender was doomed the moment he decided to have a relationship with a woman, a member of the “victim” class. Had he instead chosen to become a homosexual, he wouldn’t have suffered what he did. Because, according to Indian law, “rape” only happens to a woman. But once he decided to love a woman, the only choice left to him was to be either jailed for abetting his girlfriend’s suicide or be jailed for kidnapping & rape.
By the way, men don’t have to be poor laborers like Vijender to be declared guilty just for being men. Executives in an urban corporate setting find themselves in the same jeopardy as Ms. Sonal Matoo, director of the NGO Helping Hands, describes in her Hindustan Times article Adrift in no-man’s land.
- As an ombudsperson and member of several complainant committees, we receive a number of grievances from men. They raise issues ranging from fear of a false sexual harassment complaint because they gave a woman team member a low rating due to poor performance or being threatened by women team mates who were advised to look at other opportunities because they were unable to meet targets despite being put on a performance improvement plan.
Every society has problems, every society has to deal with problems with class, race and gender. But civilized or even semi-civilized societies create fair, balanced and reasonable ways of addressing these problems, ways that move the society forward without creating new & reverse injustices. In contrast, uncivilized and colonized societies behave in just the opposite manner and create new blatant reverse injustices to satisfy base emotions of revenge.
This “colonized” nature of Indian Society is what makes the Indian Government act in this fashion. The Indian Government & “English-educated” Indian Society desperately wants to be considered as a “modern” entity by the West. To achieve that stamp of acceptance, Indian Government & English-Educated Indian society will inflict any level of injustice on Indians that they feel is necessary.
The reality that this new law is already tearing apart the relationship between genders in India, that anger against women is actually increasing is deemed completely irrelevant by the Indian Government and by English-educated Indian Society. That is why they do not listen to the wisdom of women like Sonal Matoo who write:
- “Being committed to the cause of women doesn’t mean one turns a deaf ear to the genuine problems faced by men. Equality is giving a common platform to all employees regardless of gender, caste or creed. We don’t have to be anti-men to be pro women!“
We thank Sonal Matoo for her courage to state publicly what the majority of Indians know to be true. We thank Mark Magnior of the LA Times
for his illuminating tale of how Indian politicians and
Indian legal system makes a mockery of Justice in the name of being
“pro-women”. This
is not a story, not a reality you will see reported in the New
York Times, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post.
So next time you see or hear the term Incredible India, think of the harrowing tale of Vijender Kumar. Then you will realize how Incredible Indian reality is.
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