Girl on Mercedes Benz: The real lesson is not for UP netas but Indian women

Guess what’s a woman’s best friend on Facebook? Nope, it’s not the ‘check-in’ option. And at times, it’s definitely not, the ‘add friend’ button. In case you didn’t know already, it’s the ‘block’ button. Some of us obnoxious slaves of grammar use it to not forget what original English words look like, most of us have used it to fend off queries about our sex lives or advice about the utility of our private parts. From perfectly strange men at that. However, Delhi college student Prerna Pratham Singh had had enough. She replied to a similar query that landed in her inbox a few days back, took a screenshot of the conversation and posted in on Facebook encouraging her friends to share it. The next we knew, her reply had gone viral and the man who sent her the lewd message apologised on Facebook and tried to save his back. Today, Sadhvi Pandey, a young girl in Agra climbed onto a Samajwadi Party politicians’ Mercedez and smashed its windshield as a crowd watched in shock. Reason? The politician’s bodyguard had winked at her.  When Singh had made an effort to shame her harasser on Facebook, some of us were actually quite amused that she had even chosen to send a reply. Because online harassment has become so normalised in our times, that it bothers us only as much as a traffic jam or a power cut in summer does. What’s even worse is that we are equally immune to several forms of street harassment - winking, leering, comments on our breasts, solicitations of sex - by passersby. None of us could imagine yelling at a man who winks at us, forget climbing on his car and bringing traffic to a halt like Pandey. Most of us - empowered and independent women - don’t miss once chance to rant about the several injustices on women in the country. But when it comes to being active protesters instead of passive commentators, we take the easier way out - look away and move on. We make for fine Facebook ranters, but when it comes to actively hunting down harassers, the enormity of the process snuffs out our zeal. While we think we are behaving like practical creatures with a list of priorities that doesn’t include activism, we just end up emboldening all kinds of sexual predators. [caption id=“attachment_2252336” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Prerna Pratham Singh and Sadhvi Pandey.[/caption] If we have been giving ourselves and our peers excuses, like pointing accusing fingers at the ‘unfriendly’ police or the futility of fighting patriarchy in India, the young college student from Delhi and the young girl in UP who climbed onto a SP leaders’ car in protest, holds the mirror in front us. We are lazy bums. Angry yes, but still lazy. Singh, the Delhi student who called out a Facebook harasser is one end of the range of ways to respond to harassment, Sadhvi Pandey, the Uttar Pradesh girl who broke the windshield of an SP is the other. Together they show that harassment need not be tolerated and fighting sleazeballs is neither impossible, nor futile. In fact, Singh followed up her Facebook protest with an FIR. She wrote on her Facebook wall, “For the record, an F.I.R. regarding the online harassment has been filed at Economic Offences Wing of Delhi Police, Mandir Marg complex. Authorities have taken cognizance of the matter and it would soon result into action outside the virtual world.” It took as little as a Facebook post for Singh to have everyone from peers to a police officer to be moved. The police officer who responded to her post, also urged her to lodge a complaint against the said harasser in the local police station. Chances are that some fellow creeps like Singh’s harasser will now know that sending sleazy messages to women on social media sites can lead to grave consequences. Onlookers who have seen Pandey take on Uttar Pradesh’s biggest party and its blatant endorsement of misogyny, would now know that winking at a girl, in the same bus as you, won’t go unpunished. The reason why various forms of sexual harassment thrives in India is because most of these men have great confidence in the country’s women’s unwillingness to act against them legally. Be it fear of stigma in certain social sections and be it the hassle of pursuing a complicated legal process, harassers in India know that women will not be bothered to come after them at all times. And we women have played an important role in convincing them about the same. However, we can hope that we have been shamed enough by Singh and Pandey, to whine less on social media and act more in real life. We have know this all along, but the two young women show us that we don’t need to swallow sexual harassment in fear of being slapped down, or worse still, ignored. So what are you going to do about the next abusive message that lands on your Facebook inbox? Or the co-passenger on the train that winks at you?