Name Game : Brady, Megan, Karly, Jessica Law

Delhi gang rape: Shashi Tharoor favours making public identity of victim

Delhi gang rape: Shashi Tharoor favours making public identity of victim

In remarks that can stoke a controversy, Union Minister Shashi Tharoor on Tuesday favoured making public the identity of the 23-year-old gang-rape victim wondering what interest is served by keeping her name under wraps.

Tharoor, the Minister of State for Human Resources Development, also said the revised anti-rape legislationshould be named after the victim if her parents do not have any objection.

"Wondering what interest is served by continuing anonymity of #DelhGangRape victim. Why not name & honour her as a real person w/own identity?" he asked on micro-blogging site Twitter.

"Unless her parents object, she should be honoured & the revised anti-rape law named after her. She was a human being w/a name,not just a symbol," Tharoor, who is known for speaking his mind, said.

Under the law, the identity of a rape victim cannot be disclosed and printing or publishing the name or any matter which may make known the identity of any person against whom rape is committed is an offence under section 228-A of Indian Penal Code.

His comments also came close on the heels of Delhi Police registering a case against an English daily for publishing material which could lead to the identification of the victim.

Tharoor's comments sparked instant reactions on Twitter with people supporting and questioning his suggestions.

"Why are you after creating honours, idols and temples again instead of making real changes to criminal justice system?" Chirdeep, one of the users, asked.

Anil Wanvari, however, wrote: "A good suggestion. This is exactly what I had recommended four days ago. Cheers!"

The girl was gang raped and brutally assaulted allegedly by six persons in a moving bus in south Delhi on December 16. She died in a Singapore hospital on December 29.

Activist Kiran Bedi said she supported Tharoor's suggestion about the naming new law against rape after the Delhi girl's real name or 'Nirbyaya'. 

"I support S Tharoor on naming new law on rape after her real name or 'Nirbyaya'. This has been done in USA: Brady, Megan, Karly, Jessica Law etc," she tweeted. 

She said that "in naming law after her, we immortalise her will to fight and live, not on the act of rape. "This way, we may remove the stigma," she said. 

Source : PTI

Pomposity of our rulers is as bad as Delhi gang-rape

Pomposity of our rulers is as bad as Delhi gang-rape

Our politicians and bureaucrats often behave like objects out of Madame Tussad's, says Shiv Visvanathan, a social science nomad.

By Shiv Visvanathan

Emile Durkheim, the great French sociologist, once observed that "socialism is not a science but a cry of grief uttered by an animal in pain". What Durkheim was pointing out was that many forms of protest are symptoms of pain rather than an analysis of a social problem. The journalist or a writer has to capture both sides of an event to be fair. 

Recent protests in the Capital have been christened with romantic names. They have been called a revolt, and labelled as the battle of Raisina Hill. Others have skeptically called it children's crusade and adolescent outpouring. I think the truth lies in the middle. 

In recent times, India has seen two outpourings of protest which have unnerved the establishment. Our politicians and bureaucrats often behave like objects out of Madame Tussad's. But a huge crowd can galvanise them out of an administrative stupor. The drama of the protest said something about youth, the city and the administration. 

Beyond it, this act was triggered by something deep and primordial, the phenomena of gang-rape. Gang-rape reflects organised animality. Women who are momentarily a subject of desire become an object of contempt, a focus of release to be abandoned later. 

For me, gang-rape is the ultimate form of violence that terrorises woman. It can strike anywhere and often banalised through a clerical sociology. It is attributed to urban migrants, the homeless in the city with no way of relieving repression. 

However, gang-rape cuts across social strata. The woman can be sexually vandalised by men in a BMW, an Amby or workers in a private bus. Gang-rape unnerves a society. I have seen veterans, even combat-thickened journalists, tremble at the news. It is the ultimate zero-sum game of the city. Unfortunately, instead of responding to it as an animality, our politicians explain it away as fault of the victim. 

They either claim she is skimply dressed, or out of place in a city after nine o' clock. I must state that skimpiness is a more accurate description of the state of mind of our clerks and panchayats than of the victim. 

The woman here also becomes a reflection of the freedom, autonomy and professionalism that a city and its economy encourage, but which conservatives disapprove of. A shrewd observer once said: a woman as a victim is vandalised thrice - through rape, folk rationalisation and administrative response. What our leaders did not see is that the gang-rape unnerves the society. Families cannot be sure about when it will happen. 

A daily visit to the city can become a frightening encounter. Mobiles click in furious anxiety tracking the path of a returning daughter. The administration was initially callous in its response. It read it as normal as it was an occasional hail-storm. It filed it away as statistic, failing to read it as a major problem of a city. Content with dismissing the rape of Dalit women as an atrocity, it practised the same indifference to the event. It felt that the modicum of protest that usually follows would be controllable. 

A few politicians looking for photo opportunities generally wrapped up such an event. They were not ready for what followed. What incensed the protestors was not just the "un-describable" violence of gang-rape, but the pomposity of our politicians. Even the police staggered around advertising their investigative ability. What followed is being described as the battle of Raisina Hill.

Fortunately, the crowd licked away the bevy of MPs protesting. The crowd slowly found its voice, every interview became an articulation of anger because women realised it could have been any of them. In fact, as one of them pointed out, rape as an event has no predictable sociology. Men can molest a baby, a three-year-old or a thirty-year-old with an equal frenzy. 

What they were witnessing was a sick city with an indifferent administration. The protest at Raisina Hill was not led by parties and cadres. People just came out of a sense of outrage and concern. It was anarchic, and could be de-stabilised by a few hooligans. But nothing can justify the use of water cannons, teargas and frequent lathi-charges against our young people. 

What was impressive was that new generation was discovering the power of protest. Youth were realising that all that they had was the body as a medium of protest. They also realised that state is no respecter of the body. Between the lathi-charge and gang-rape they understood the vulnerability of the body in a modern society. 

I admit that some demands were unreasonable, the demand for death penalty needs deeper thinking. But one cannot dismiss such a protest as ignorant. A new generation is discovering the power of public space and realising that the dynamism of public spaces is tied to private freedom. Understanding that link was absolutely crucial for the re-discovery of the city. The crowd may make mistakes, but it showed courage and civic sense. It was a learning curve, moving from atomism to collective solidarity. 

Sadly, little can be said about the administration. We can no longer be content with homilies about rape-culture. Gang-rape has to be located between the wider anomie of the city. Two pictures stand out about the event. One is the victim fighting for life, and the other is crowd demanding that her fight for life is beginning of a new politics of pain, which understands suffering of a victim. 

(The writer is a social science nomad)

Source : IST

Delhi gang rape: Are women safer if they are armed?

Delhi gang rape: Are women safer if they are armed?

India's small but active gun lobby thinks women can be safer if they are armed. But is that really true?

KP Narayana Kumar

In the late 1980s, a middle-aged woman was stalked by an unidentified man in a deserted street in California. The woman had been gang-raped earlier. After recovering from the ordeal, she had taken to keeping a revolver in her purse. So this time, she was prepared.

As the man closed in on her, she reached into her purse and gripped the small-calibre handgun she now carried and turned to face her assailant.

The attacker spotted the weapon in her hand. "He momentarily froze and studied her, noting carefully her look of combined revulsion, hate, fear and rage. He determined in that instant that, if pressed, she might shoot. He spun and exited the scene like a world-class sprinter," says a research paper published by criminologists who studied violence against women in the US.

The incident was recorded as part of a study done by Robert L Barrow and Gary Mauser on the possibility of reducing attacks on women by arming them.

ARMS & THE WOMAN

The gang rape of a student in Delhi has made it clear that the city is unsafe for women. And even as thousands of people took to the streets and many protested outside Rashtrapati Bhavan and Parliament, a group of people who vouch for the utility of guns to ward off attackers has a different perspective on the issue.

They believe that if India has a more liberal system of arms licencing, many women who have to deal with similar situations may have a better chance of saving themselves.

Rahul Roy is an industrialist based out of Gurgaon and his company manufactures writing pads. But like many entrepreneurs, Roy also does what he believes is social service. He wants the government to help people gain access to something he believes they need desperately today: a gun.

Roy, who speaks with passion on the right of an individual to own a gun, heads the National Association for Gun Rights in India (NAGRI), a body that has been campaigning for gun rights.

SAFETY CATCH

In 2010, NAGRI gave a presentation before a Joint Parliamentary Committee on how a lack of access to guns has become a deterrent to self-defence. The association claims that more than a hundred MPs signed a petition drafted by them and addressed to the prime minister. "Everybody is talking about handing out death sentences to rapists. But this happens only after the crime takes place. Only firearms can protect people, especially women and the elderly, today," says Roy.

The businessman, who hails from the martial community of Mohyals in Punjab, is a former national skeet shooting champion. He believes that owning a gun would help an individual face any kind of threat.

He points out that in India every policeman guards about 8,000 people, while in more prosperous countries about hundred-odd people are under the watch of a beat constable.

Roy sticks to his argument even when it is pointed out that the US, which has the maximum number of licensed civilian guns in the world, has had to pay for its liberal licensing policy, with a number of trigger-happy people opening fire at schools and shopping malls. "We are a more mature society than the US. India has a tradition of owning guns and I don't think here we will see a repeat of the kind of incidents that we see in the US," he says.

According to Abhijeet Singh, another member of the organisation, as per the law, any citizen of India who is not otherwise "dis-entitled" is eligible to an arms licence.

"However, in practice, it is next to impossible for an ordinary 'unconnected' person to acquire an arms licence. Licensing authorities routinely demand proof of income, property papers and other such in states such as Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh in order to deny applicants a gun," says Singh.

CAN YOU OWN ONE?

According to the Arms Act of 1959, to acquire an arms licence, one should be more than 21 years old, should not have a history of mental disorder and should not have been convicted of a violent crime.

"Usually the licensing authorities do not easily accept applications and even on acceptance of applications, they sit on them indefinitely. In other cases, licences are denied without stating a reason or by simply saying that the applicant has been unable to demonstrate any real need for a firearm," says Singh.
The applicant also has to convince the district magistrate concerned that he faces a threat to his life, which makes the process all the more complicated. Political psychologist Ashis Nandy, however, says that a rampant gun culture could have dangerous consequences for India.

"The argument for arming people is absolutely silly. Why don't we talk of disarming everyone instead of arming everybody? That way we will definitely have a peaceful society," says Nandy.

A society can be made better by improving the judicial system and policing. However, if people were to take to arms to protect themselves, there would be a flourishing gun culture and criminals will also have easy access to guns. "Look at what is happening in the US where they followed a liberal licensing system," says Nandy, referring to the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School. "This argument for selling weapons to people comes from vested interests."

Source : IST

Not a zinda lash: Don't stigmatise rape victims

Not a zinda lash: Don't stigmatise rape victims

It is entirely in keeping with Indian tradition and culture to blame and shame the victim of rape rather than the rapist.

It might be unfair to Sushma Swaraj to attribute to her the view that rape victims are the living dead (zinda lash): her comment in Parliament could well have been with specific reference to the woman whose entrails were poked out with an iron rod by her enraged rapists —how dare she resist her biological purpose? — and who now battles death in hospital. But it is entirely in keeping with Indian tradition and culture to blame and shame the victim of rape rather than the rapist.

It might seem presumptuous for a man to analyse a traumatic subject like rape, so let me clarify at the outset that all I seek to do is paraphrase well-known feminists on the subject. Regardless of who says this, it stands to reason that the trauma of rape goes up with the level of social stigma attached to the crime. If a woman were subjected to violent assault, say, hit upon the head with a hockey stick, she would feel angry and hurt, not ashamed. But when the assault takes a sexual form, she is made to feel that she has been defiled, violated, shamed, with the public at large, including women, singing laments for the zinda lash. Sympathy and support for a victim of non-sexual assault, stigma for a victim of sexual assault. This schizophrenia stems from social control of female sexuality.

Chaste is a value-loaded term, imbued with a normative elevation that takes it beyond the scope of personal choice. Thus, fidelity and chastity are not voluntary individual choices but socially-ordained virtues that are essential for women. Women with such virtue are goddesses. Those without are little better than whores. Since fidelity is not a voluntary, individual matter, being raped can also make you unchaste and, thus, put you in the company of whores. Gautam, in Ahilya's tale in the Ramayana, cursed his wife and turned her into stone because she made this descent from goddess to whore by being made love to by Indra, who expended his amour in Gautam's guise, deceiving Ahilya. Sita had to prove her chastity, after being rescued from Lanka, through trial by fire, but still had to be abandoned by her Lord because she was not above suspicion in the eyes of at least one subject in his kingdom.

That being sexually assaulted can debase a woman is ingrained in Indian culture. This norm has to be challenged and overthrown, to reinstate the balance of justice, for the assailant to bear the burden of shame. The point is not to argue that Indian culture is specifically misogynic. Almost all pre-modern value systems around the world have sought subjugation of female sexuality to social control. But in many parts of the world, society has changed, and so have values. The value system must change in India, too.

Protests rage across the country over the Delhi rape. The sound bites chomp and chew to pieces the rapists, the police, the laws and the lawmakers. You hardly hear a voice of cultural introspection. When mothers give preferential treatment to their boys over their girls, in little things and in big things, they replicate the values that stigmatise the victims of rape. When women peer into that plateful of water through a sieve on Karva Chauth, they see what they have been trained to see, filtering out a value system that offers them binary slots of goddess and whore, and stonily gives the task of sorting to a random assault.

Source : T K Arun, ET Bureau

Intestinal transplant: How it can save the Delhi rape victim’s life

Recently the news has been flooded with how the Delhi rape victim has been offered an intestinal transplant by Sir Gangaram Hospital. The offer was communicated by D.S. Rana, the Chairman of Sir Gangaram Hospital who said that the private hospital has performed India’s first and only living donor intestinal transplant which has been reported in peer reviewed journal this year. 

So what is an intestinal transplant? Why does she need it? Will it work? Here are some things you need about intestinal transplants.

Intestinal transplantation has evolved in the past decade from being considered an ‘experimental’ procedure to what is considered as a last-resort treatment option for patients with intestinal failure who develop life-threatening complications from total parenteral nutrition (TPN). Long-term TPN can result in complications including bone disorders, catheter-related infections and liver failure. Over an extended period of time, TPN also can damage veins used to administer the nutrition via the catheter. The procedure has shown a advancement in number of surgeries performed without complications due to the advancement of techniques relating to organ preservation, surgical technique, immunosuppression, and postoperative management.

 Why is it needed?

Transplantation is the only treatment available for patients diagnosed with irreversible intestinal failure in the short gut syndrome (a mal-absorption disorder, in which removal of the small intestine is necessary),defective intestinal motility ( when the intestines are not able to move food through the gastrointestinal tract) or in cases where the intestines need to be removed in part or totally due to cancer or trauma.

Without a transplant, patients with intestinal and liver failure have an expected median survival of 6 – 12 months while continued on TPN. 

Procedure:

An Intestinal transplant is a complex surgery, which requires a highly skilled multidisciplinary transplant team. A transplant surgery usually takes about 3-4 hours, where as if the patient requires multi organ transplant the procedure might take upto 12 hours. Either the small bowel or intestine is transplanted in isolation, or can be  transplanted with the liver and/or other gastrointestinal organs.

Intestinal Transplant Procedure

In this procedure the intestine and other diseased organs are replaced with healthy donor organs. The blood vessels of the patient and donor are connected to establish blood supply to the transplanted intestine. The donor organs are then connected to the patient’s intestine.

Usually an ileostomy is then performed. It is a surgically created opening through which the ileum (a section of the patient’s small intestine), is brought up through the abdominal wall. This opening allows the waste from the body to directly pass out of the body. This procedure is important for transplant patients because it allows doctors to keep a close eye on the patient’s progress. In time, the ileostomy is closed. A feeding tube is also placed into the stomach to help the patient transition to an oral diet.

Post Transplant Complications:

The commonest complications from a transplant are infections due to the high doses of immunosuppressive medication, rejection of the transplant and/or intestinal ischemia and leaks from the anastomoses due to surgical technical difficulty in reconnection of the intestine and the vessels.

Recovery:

Care after an intestinal transplant differs slightly for each patient, depending on their medical history, type of transplant and medical condition at the time of their transplant. The length of stay in the hospital varies for each patient, but can last for several weeks or as long as several months.

Immediately after a transplant the patient is shifted to the ICU and is closely monitored. After he/she has stabilised and shifted out, close monitoring is required to prevent bacterial, fungal and viral infections. Some patients also may require blood pressure, diabetes or anti-ulcer medications. It is important to remember that an intestinal transplant is not a surgical cure, but rather a last-resort therapy that requires meticulous administration of medication and close monitoring to be successful. We hope this helps our Delhi rape victim to lead a healthy life!

Source : Pavitra Sampath , http://health.india.com

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Delhi rape case – why such brutality?

Picture this – A 23-year-old girl with dreams of a great future shifts to Delhi from her hometown for further studies. She’s travelling in a bus with a friend when four men assault the duo with an iron rod and proceed to rape the girl with such unspeakable brutality that would make you shudder. 

The girl is now in such a ‘critical’ condition that she needs a ventilator to breathe. The men not only raped her repeatedly but also beat her with a blunt object and shoved it into her vagina leading to multiple injuries all over.

Dr B D Athani, medical superintendent at the Safdurjung Hospital in Delhi said ‘She has sustained serious abdominal and genital injuries. It seems she was repeatedly hit with a blunt object on her abdomen or an object was shoved into her private parts. She has several injury marks on her body but the injury to the intestines has created a life-threatening condition.’ The girl has been operated on and large portions of her intestines were removed. She has lost a lot of blood but has regained consciousness.

India.com health view:

What drives people towards such barbarism? What kind of frustration pushes men to commit such heinous crimes against women? Are they men who are pretty ‘normal’ otherwise, have decent jobs, married with kids and are frustrated? Or are they alcoholics and drug addicts beyond redemption?
What encourages these men is perhaps the fact that justice in such cases takes years in the court and leading to mere mockery of the woman, albeit as public entertainment the second time around. Perhaps it is the fact that these cases are forgotten soon enough. Perhaps they have ‘connections’ they could use to get out of the mess. 

Whatever it is, such crimes are not justified.  It is time our Government gets such cases into fast-track courts. It is time our media realize that it isn’t just about TRPs and eyeballs when the case is on fire and that they could make a bigger difference following up on such cases. It is time men realize that women are not mere objects to help them get rid of their frustration or ‘up their game’.

Source : Dr Reshma Nayak , http://health.india.com