President Droupadi Murmu broke her silence on the rape and murder of the trainee doctor at RG Kar Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata as she issued her first public statement on the incident and on the continuing crimes against women in India. Declaring "enough is enough", President Murmu on Wednesday stated that it is time that India deals with "perversion" in a comprehensive manner and recalled how she was "dismayed and horrified" by the Kolkata doctor rape-murder case.
Flagging the dire need to counter the mindset that sees women as "less powerful, less capable, less intelligent", President Murmu said that no civilised society can allow daughters and sisters to be subjected to such atrocities. "The nation is bound to be outraged, and so am I," she wrote in an article signed for news agency PTI, titled 'Women's Safety: Enough Is Enough'.
The President said that objectification of women by a few people is the reason behind the crimes against women. "It is ingrained deeply in the minds of such people," she said, highlighting that countering such a mindset is a task for both the State and society.
"This is a rather deplorable mindset… This mindset sees the female as a lesser human being, less powerful, less capable, less intelligent...Those who share such views then go further and see the female as an object… We owe it to our daughters to remove the hurdles from their path of winning the freedom from fear,” Murmu wrote.
Society Needs Honest, Unbiased Self-Introspection & To Deal With Perversion: Murmu
Referring to the August 9 Kolkata rape-murder case, she said what is even more depressing is that it is part of a series of crimes against women. She also mentioned the December 2012 Nirbhaya case and how the initiatives taken following that brutal incident did make a difference to "some extent" yet "there is something that continues to come in the way and to torment us."
"In December 2012... there was shock and rage. We were determined not to let another Nirbhaya meet the same fate. We made plans. These initiatives did make a difference to an extent... but our task remains unfinished as long as any woman feels unsafe..." she said.
Recalling her recent interaction with a group of schoolchildren on Raksha Bandhan, Murmu wrote: "They asked me innocently if they could be assured that there would be no recurrence of the Nirbhaya-type incident in future." She further stated how India has witnessed countless tragedies of similar nature in the past 12 years, but only a few of them managed to draw nationwide attention.
"Did we learn our lessons? As social protests petered out, these incidents got buried into a deep and inaccessible recess of social memory, to be recalled only when another heinous crime takes place," she said.
President Murmu said that history "often hurts" and those scared to face history resort to "collective amnesia" and bury their heads in the sand like the proverbial ostrich. "Now the time has come not only to face history squarely but also to search within our souls and probe the pathology of crimes against women," she appealed.
“Let us deal with this perversion in a comprehensive manner so as to curb it right at the beginning. We can do this only if we honour the memory of the victims by cultivating a social culture of remembering them to remind us of our failures in the past and prepare us to be more vigilant in future,” Murmu said.
Pointing out at the need for an honest and unbiased self-introspection by the society, she requested each to ask themselves these questions: "Where have we erred? And what can we do to remove the errors?" adding that "without finding out the answer to that question, the half of our population cannot live as freely as the other half."