New Year’s Gift from Mumbai

Since the start of 2008 India’s creamy layer seems to have been in a big economic dilemma. Whether the publication of photos of two young women getting stripped in the heart of Mumbai by an upwardly mobile English-speaking drunk 70-80 New Year’s reveller will bring in more Foreign Direct Investments or it will drive them away? The issue is really serious as the FDI, GDP and Sensex are the only criteria left for the sex-starved Indians to measure the country’s progress.

Apparently, there is no big deal in such photos. After all women are often stripped, beaten and paraded in the name of teaching a lesson to witches, and even thieves, everywhere in our country. And a village headwoman of Rajasthan, sometimes back, was gang-raped at the order of panchayat as she started asserting herself. One can have access to several such photos in the newspaper offices or TV studios.

What ‘outraged’ us is not the mere stripping; but that it happened to two hapless Gujarati NRIs from California, a big city of the country, which promised to help us in the field of nuclear technology. One of the victims got married just one day before the incident and had gone to Hotel J.W. Marriott with her husband and two cousins to celebrate the New Year.

After all there is no dearth of such Bacchus-loving Indians who may be proud of their New Year’s performance as they at least got better off than the first day of 2007 when only one woman, then too an NRI, had her clothes torn off by the ‘civilized’ lot of revellers at almost the same spot in the (Sen)sex-maniac commercial capital of India – the city which boasts of attracting maximum FDI. This year Kochi too tried to match Mumbai. Here a European woman had to undergo almost the same sort of trauma and that too when she was accompanied by a male family member.

For the money-minters in our media the issue is not moral – in fact capital – as it is being made out. What they were more concerned about was to know whether the incident like Mumbai – and their publicity – will bring in more money or not to their respective media groups.

The publication of the photos of the girls being publicly molested by the Hindustan Times on the first day may be justified as the media wanted to highlight this shameful crime. But why was the same photo repeated in the same daily for three consecutive days, not to speak of other television channels and newspapers? The answer is very simple: they all want to mint money through these photos. The victims and the husband of one of the girls later became so outraged that they made a fervent appeal to the Press to stop showing these photos.

Perhaps they realised, albeit very late, that the publication of photos does not serve any purpose. After all last year too a young woman was stripped naked on the same occasion here, yet those involved are yet to be punished. This notwithstanding the fact that another newspaper of Mumbai published her photos.

It is not only that Mumbaites did something unusual on the New Year’s day – the only thing is that the incident became a good photo-feature. A 13-year old girl and a 30-year old woman were raped in nearby Thane on the same day and a woman was attacked by inebriated revellers in Pune too. And further east in Nitish Kumar’s Patna girl students of Nalanda Medical College Hospital had to spend the whole night shuddering in their rooms as the drunk boys – many of these would-be doctors – soon broke the lock of the girls’ hostel to storm inside. They tried to molest them. The girls shut themselves in their respective rooms and spent harrowing time for over 24 hours. When the boys failed to molest – or they may have some other plan – they ransacked the furniture of the hostel and broke the windowpanes. They made bonfire of the girls’ clothes hanging outside the rooms. And when the girls through mobile phone complained to the police, the boys threatened them of dire consequences. The college authorities, according to victims, held the girls themselves responsible for the incident.

If in Mumbai the police at least swung into action – though much late – and rounded up some of the hooligans, in Patna not a single boy could be arrested. Unlike in the case of Mumbai, there was no problem in identifying the 15 of the hooligans involved in the incident. The media’s response in the case of Patna story was quite different. Here for the first two days the matter was pushed to the inside pages of most newspapers having their edition in Patna. The TV channels too grossly under-reported it. This obviously because the media in Bihar are blindly supporting the Nitish Kumar government and they did not want to tarnish its image. However, when no action whatsoever was taken, the media had to finally bring the story to Page-one on the third day. The irony is that this was for the third consecutive New Year day that the girls of this medical college in Patna had to live in traumatic conditions.

Media pundits claim that news, exposes, scoops, photographs, etc. are published to reform the society and contain crime and corruption. May be. But why are they selective? Why the Mumbai photos were over-blown and the Patna incident under-reported? Just because there was no lensman to freeze the event in camera as in Mumbai. After all the Mumbai photos are better for marketing sexy news than news reports on Patna, Kochi, Thane or Pune.

A drunk TV journalist, Neelu Ranjan (35), mowed down an ice-cream vendor in New Delhi while he, along with his wife, was returning from Press Club after celebrating New Year. The irony is that this gentleman, who took wine in the Press Club, not far away from Parliament and Rashtrapati Bhawan, immediately got bail.

But the big question is: Why this outrage? After all our ruling class – politicians, business tycoons, film-stars, ad-men, bureaucrats, mediapersons, judges, academics, etc. – especially, in the post-liberalisation era, want India to go this way. Our films, our television channels, our newspapers and magazines, all are proud that the consumption of liquor in this land of Gandhi has increased many times in the last few years. Be it Left-ruled Kerala, or Vilasrao Deshmukh’s Maharashtra or Narendra Modi’s – nay Gandhiji’s – Gujarat or Nitish Kumar’s Bihar or Sheila Dixit’s Delhi, liquor flows like anything everywhere. In Bihar the government last July introduced a new excise policy, according to which wine shops will be opened after every three kilometres all over the state. The reason: the government thinks that this is the best way to increase income through excise duties.

Liquor-barons like Vijay Mallaya have replaced Gandhiji as our model. Then what type of country we expect India to become. Our cricketers – the Indian Idols – go berserk and shower champagne on each other after every victory. Our actresses and models openly present strip-dances on the screen. Then what more can we expect from the irresponsible youngsters of Mumbai indulging in Jawani Ki Bhool. Mind it this was the expression used by the former Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, to condone Rahul Mahajan, when the latter collapsed after taking drug and his late father’s secretary died in the process in the summer of 2006 – and that too in highest security zone of New Delhi.

The BSF in Meghalaya has stopped supply of liquor to the officers and jawans serving on the international border with Bangladesh as they now realise that manning the frontier under the influence of wine is a great security risk. Yet the ad-men, film-stars, business executives, journalists, etc. find all the virtues in having a peg or two every evening.

We are fast emerging as a hypocrite nation. While we had no problem in repeatedly showing the hapless girls getting stripped with their faces very clearly towards the camera the media persons for the sake of ‘protecting’ their identity, had changed their names while reporting the event. The unanswered question is: what type of identity they are talking about when everyone is seeing the desperate faces of the young victims – not once, but innumerable times. If this is not hypocrisy then what it is?