31 December 2012, 03:02 PM IST
Like other communities around the country, the National Media Centre (NMC), the co-operative housing society in Gurgaon where I live, shared the nationwide grief over the tragic death of the young woman appropriately named Nirbhaya by The Times of India. The NMC had double reason for mourning: a couple of days before the young paramedic was savagely gang-raped in Delhi, 19-year-old Vicky was killed by a hit-and-run driver in Gurgaon.
Vicky was the trainer in the NMC gym. A dedicated bodybuilder with a formidably muscular physique, he was a gentle giant with a shy, charming smile which immediately endeared him to all those he met. Vicky was planning to compete in a forthcoming bodybuilding contest for north India, where he was hoping to be one of the prizewinners. To supplement his income as a gym instructor he worked as a late-night bouncer in Gurgaon bars. I doubt he ever had to use force to eject a troublemaker. One look at Vicky's sinewy size would have been enough to quell the most belligerent of would-be brawlers.
Vicky was killed at 8.30 in the morning by a speeding vehicle that hit him and ran without stopping. Had the driver stopped and taken him to hospital, Vicky might well be alive today. When finally some passersby took him to hospital, Vicky was declared dead. There were no eyewitnesses who came forward to give any details of the crime. The registration number of the vehicle that hit him is not known, and it remains untraced.
Vicky leaves behind a mother who works as a cook in an embassy in Delhi and who is the head of the household which consists of a mentally disturbed father and Vicky's school-going sister. The residents of NMC are raising a fund to help her complete her school education.
Nirbhaya - who has become a tragic national icon for the often lethally brutal repression that Indian women are subject to - and Vicky - who will be just another faceless number in India's road death statistics, which are among the highest in the world - have only one thing in common: they were both innocent victims of our increasingly brutalised society, in which human life is the only commodity which seems to become cheaper each day.
Rapes, honour killings, road rage which results in fatalities, hit-and-run accidents, murderous inter-caste and inter-community clashes have become a daily commonplace in the land of the Mahatma who preached ahimsa and non-violence.
Why are we such a violent society? Why do we hold human life in such callously scant regard? Is it because when you have a population of a billion-plus, and growing daily, the life and death of a single individual becomes insignificant in the overwhelming multitudes that make up India? The greater the numbers, the less the value of a single entity that goes to make up the total.
Delhi CM Sheila Dikshit has blamed 'migrants' for the capital city's notorious record of attacks on women, and violent crime in general. The argument is that the migrant worker - often a daily wage earner and near the bottom of the economic ladder - is uprooted from his family and traditional village values when he comes to the city and in its anonymous and desperate rat race for survival get desensitised to human values.
A neat argument, which echoes Sartre's remark: Hell is other people. But the hell that we've created can't be blamed on 'migrants' , or any other people. Rape, like other forms of extreme violence, is far from unknown in villages and the countryside, almost one-third of which is seething with so-called Naxal insurgency.
We accuse a 'foreign hand' (read Pakistan) for recurrent terror attacks on us. But what about the terror attacks we inflict on ourselves, particularly on our women, and on innocent children? Who is the worse, more dangerous terrorist: Ajmal Kasab, or those guilty of the unspeakably sadistic attack on Nirbhaya? The demon within us seems more bloodthirsty and terrifying than any demon across the border.
Who is to exorcise this demon within, and how? Another Mahatma, who might meet the same deadly fate as the last one?
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