“Aamar Shonar Bangla” seems to be slipping fast. And now it’s not just an economic downward spiral but has become social as well. Kolkata, earlier thought of as one of the safer cities for women, seems to be striving really hard to compete with Delhi as far as the crime against women is concerned.

Consider the latest incident which happened yesterday. A girl gets molested in a pub and when she protests, she is attacked and chased on the road, the assailants joined by a group of locals who also want to have some ‘fun’. Badly bruised and bleeding, the girl manages to board a bus to save her life, but the rouges stop the bus, drag her out and beat her mercilessly till she is bleeding profusely and unconscious. To make it worse, all this happens not in a deserted alley but on a crowded road in the New Market area with hundreds of mute spectators!

More shocking was the reaction of some who blamed the girl for going to the bar at late hours and getting molested. They implied that a girl is asking to be raped if she is out of her house at night in India where law ceases to exist, wolves roam in the street and the public in general is either impotent or an abettor in the crime. How pathetic can this get? In the same newspaper, I read about a schoolgirl who was raped by her teacher. Now will these morons come and say that the girl deserved to be raped because she dared to go to school?

I wonder what kind of society are we living in. There is so much apathy and lack of sensitivity towards the fact that women are individuals and have as much a right to security and dignity as any one else. If there is a rape, we blame the victim, if a girl is molested; we say she asked for it. And in the meanwhile, we never fail to brag that we are the greatest civilization in the world, the spiritual Guru of humanity!

Read the News Reports on this incident:

India Today

Times of India