I have been in New Delhi for the last ten days. This is such a beautiful city, both imposing and intimate in parts. With its seven historical layers and a new cosmopolitan, global one over those, the city captures the syncretic and plural quality that is Indianness.
But New Delhi is also the city in India that is least safe for women. Girls and women face harassment and molestation at home, in their neighbourhood, on the streets and in their workplaces far more than they do elsewhere.
In this city, today, I heard a story today that warmed the cockles of my heart. It’s a story from a few years ago, when the driver of the autorickshaw I was using was at a traffic light when a girl ran towards him from a park begging for help. She had been brought to a brothel in the guise of ‘placement’ and the pimp was now attempting to rape her. The auto-driver asked her to sit, took her to another place, got her something to eat and drink and inquired about her home.
A typical story. Three sisters, the other two married. Mother helpless. Father drunk. She had somehow been bought/ sold/ lured into this awful situation.
Her good fortune was that she chose to ask a good person for help. The auto-driver took her to his home, saying one more girl in the family is just two more rotis and a little vegetable. He had a neighbour from the same part of India as the girl, a young, marriageable man. So he called up the young man’s parents and said, “I know a young girl. She has absolutely nothing by way of dowry, but she is a good girl and will make a good homemaker. Would you accept her as a daughter-in-law?” They agreed. He told the girl to forget her parents who had placed her in this situation and build a new life for herself.
The young couple married and have two children.
The auto-driver complained to someone he knew in the CBI and got the pimp/ trafficker arrested.
I felt privileged to meet a person who, faced with a girl in distress, did not pause to think: What did she do to bring this on herself? How will it affect me to help her? What will it cost me to take her home? How can I bring a person like this into my home with my children there? Or, she’s already been exploited, what difference does it make if I also exploit her for profit?
The auto-driver’s solution may have been traditional, but it got for the girl a better life than she would have had. And she is now safer and happier than she might have been.
This is an imperfect world. Those of us that study its imperfections and ponder their causes and those of us that provide the support services that help people surmount and survive the challenges they pose, both know that angry polemics and esoteric theory go only so far. But humane and altruistic responses have a way of fixing at least one problem at a time, right here, right now. This may be the everyday essence of feminism. And every other ism.
The Author Dr. Swarna Rajagopalan is a political and security affairs analyst and writer. She is the Founder of Chaitanya – The Policy Consultancy and the Managing Trustee of the Prajnya Trust. Dr. Swarna Rajagopalan’s complete bio is available here .
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