I will not be shamed: Delhi's Uber rape survivor is the brave new Indian woman

When the news of the Uber rape first broke and as it played out in ceaseless newspaper headlines and television coverage, the reaction that many of us had was one of despondency and hopelessness. It felt like a slap in the face of all that we had been fighting for, because it brought home the stark reality that despite new stringent laws, much more public awareness and heightened media focus on crimes against women, nothing much has changed on the ground. The fact remains that being a woman in India is like living some sort of sordid Russian Roulette. Every time you step out of your house and return safely, you have fired a blank cartridge. The ’live bullet’ always lurks at the edge of consciousness. The next rape victim could just be you. [caption id=“attachment_2025795” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  PTI[/caption] It’s easy to bow down to the inevitable in this situation. Restrict your movements, buy into the ideology that victims somehow ‘asked’ for what happened to them, accept that this is the ‘reality’ of the world we live in and relegate feminist values of equality and dignity to the shelves of utopian and impractical ideology. But the brave decision of the Uber rape survivor to come forward and loudly proclaim via national media her refusal to be cowed down by what has happened to her and hide behind the anonymity of the faceless, nameless ‘rape victim’ tag has given us all a reason to hope. It is in fact, an extremely important step in any battle ahead for women’s equality, which is most stymied by a culture of shame. By coming out and talking about what has happened to her, she is refusing to be ‘shamed’ by the incident and instead places the ‘shame’ at the feet of the perpetrators. “This city has failed me” is the opening line of her Indian Express column. But this is not a column of false bravado.  She is frank about the impact that the incident has left on her. “Today, I find it difficult to sleep. Memories of that night keep coming back in flashes to haunt me. I try to sleep but can’t because of the constant fear. The incident has left a deep impact on my psyche, I feel scared to go out alone”, she writes. She is also frank about the difficulty of being branded a ‘rape victim’. “Some people in my neighbourhood have already started raising questions about my dignity. I have stopped going out alone and I am facing immense difficulty in coping with the pressure”, she admits. But despite the trauma of what has happened to her, she is defiant. And she is under no illusions about who is at fault here. It is certainly not her. She talks about a slew of things she feels should be done to change the existing public mindset and to sensitise people on violence against women. She is not about to quietly accept her fate, and eventually the blame, with regards to this incident. And nor should any of us. The woman is emblematic of a changing psyche among our younger generation that gives us great reason for hope. The more we refuse to be silenced, and the more we speak out against injustice and violence, the more it weakens the existing biases against women that make many men feel that perpetrating violence against them is almost a right.