How much do we care?

AT 9-40 a.m. last week, when thousands of people rush in and out of Mumbai Central station, a woman was burned alive. The crime did not occur behind closed doors. She was doused with kerosene and set alight in front of the people hurrying to work.

She screamed for help. No one stopped. Only after she was almost dead, with 95 per cent burns, did some people try and help by pouring water over her. A social worker called the police and they managed to admit the woman to a nearby hospital. By then it was too late. The woman died.

This terrible incident has continued to haunt many of us since it occurred last week for a number of reasons. Primarily, it is a ghastly illustration of the indifference that cities like this breed in people. The dead woman was Vidya Prabhudesai, a typist at the Reserve Bank of India. The motive for the attack is as old as the hills, dating back to the cave ages when men believed in dragging women by the hair to force them into submission.

The 41-year-old woman had spurned the marriage offer of 55-year- old Rafique Solanki. For this she was punished, with death. The man tried to kill himself too, by swallowing insecticide, but he has survived.

Of course, this is not the first instance of this kind of violence. There have been acid attacks on women by spurned lovers, stabbings, and other incidents of setting women on fire. Each such reported incident sets off shock waves for a few days - what is this anger that drives men to destroy those they claim they love? - and then life returns to normal.

This is also not the first incident of this type of indifference. How many times do we stop to check whether the man we find sprawled out on a pavement is merely sleeping or is dead? Indifference to human life is also evident in the constant hit- and-run incidents that are reported, where people driving powerful cars mow down women, children, old people, young men and drive away. If you are looking after an elderly person in a city like Mumbai, you live with the constant fear that you will hear that they have been knocked down when crossing a road at an authorised pedestrian crossing. There is no security for the vulnerable.

We also know as city dwellers that big cities are anonymous places. People often do not know their neighbours. Everyone is fixated on survival, on getting to work, or getting back home. Nothing can slacken the pace of the phalanx of office-goers emerging from the various stations in Mumbai every morning or marching back each evening. Life is rough for the majority of people in this city; from housing, to water supply, to finding work it is an uphill battle. Thus, the lack of sentiment is sometimes justified.

Yet, not responding to a woman who screams as she is doused in kerosene and set alight in broad daylight stretches the limits of indifference. It represents a frightening aspect of modern life that should give all of us reason to pause. As the media celebrates every minor achievement of an Indian, including Amitabh Bachchan making it to Madame Tussaud's wax works in London, we need to open our eyes and ears and recognise what is really happening in this country.

For the start of a new decade, a new century, a new millennium has not altered the mindset where you subject to violence, or destroy, those who are different, or who disagree. Whether it is another community, another caste, or another gender, that is the attitude. As civilisation progresses, people are supposed to be able to talk, to negotiate, to arrive at mutually acceptable solutions without bludgeoning each other. Yet, we are clearly a long way from that. The incident also highlights the reality that laws alone cannot deal with crimes against women. You can tighten laws, you can try and make the implementing machinery more effective, but as long as this type of attitude prevails - where there is no tolerance of another perspective, where women are not given the right to refuse - then no law can intervene.

We know practically nothing about Prabhudesai except that she was a typist, that she was single, and that she was looking after an elderly parent. What we do know is that she was independent- minded enough to say "no" to something that she did not want, even if society decrees that women are more acceptable if they are married. For this she had to pay a terrible price. The message from her anonymous life is sad and utterly disturbing.

KALPANA SHARMA

E-mail the writer at ksharma@vsnl.com

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