The Accidental Activist - Are we safe? By Venita Coelho
The illusion of safety for women in Goa is tremendous. This is the state that has seen it all since the sixties when the swinging flower children arrived. It is only in this state that a woman can wear shorts or a swim suit, confident that she won't be ogled at. At least not by the locals. The menace are all the yokels who are ferried into Goa by buses and for a mere Rs 100 get a beer and the chance to gawk at women dressed like they wouldn't dare in their own home states. You see newly wed brides arriving by the plane load, dressed from head to toe in garish salwar kameezes. A week later you meet them on the beach, loaded with jewellery, hands still covered with mehndi, but boldly wearing micro shorts. For women across India Goa has been the holiday where they could really just be themselves without worrying. They could drink without raising eyebrows, party out late and live it up. This state seems to have the closest attitude to the west where equality of women is concerned. As I said, the illusion is tremendous. Just under the surface lies another tale that is sordidly unravelling through garish newspaper headlines. Every day adds a woman to the tally of those killed by Goa's first serial killer. We started with two, and now we are staring with disbelief at a tally that looks like it will go upto fifteen. All those women disappeared over a period of ten years. Missing persons reports were filed in some cases and yet nothing was done. Firstly the entire episode entirely exposes the police. If you are poor and do not have connections or clout to get police machinery into action, then all that will happen to your complaint is that it will languish. Twelve women missing- and not one case solved or satisfactorily investigated by the police. By any yardstick that is a shocking neglect of duty and a scathing indictment of the police force. The second thing that is exposed is the sad attitude that lies beneath the surface. The second set of people who have entirely failed the missing women and completely neglected their duty are their parents. Several parents said that the reason they had not followed up too strongly was because their daughters had told them they were going to get married. So if they vanished because they were married - all was well. As long as they were married. That was the important thing. The parents didn't want to pursue who their daughters had married, were they happy, where exactly were they living - the fact that their daughters had supposedly tied the knot was enough. That is the ultimate purpose of a girl child and it had been fulfilled. Even the women who were killed were all lured to their death by exactly the same promise - that of matrimony. Like lambs to the slaughter, they dressed up in their best and went. What a sad and shocking commentary on what the actual attitude towards women is in Goa. Only after it was confirmed that her daughter had been killed did one woman come forward to inform the police that in fact even her elder daughter had been missing for some time. She hadn't bothered to file a report. The village where Mahanand lives is up in arms, demanding that he get the death sentence. Certainly his crime is hideous, but no less hideous is the neglect and the attitudes that allowed him to carry on killing with impunity for ten long years. At one extreme are the Mahanand killings. At the other extreme is the Russian girl found dead on the tracks. If traditional hidebound attitudes led to an attitude of lethargy that killed our local girls, the opposite is true for the foreigner. Foreign women run into a completely different set of attitudes. Attitudes that are as harmful for a womans safety - Foreign women? ah anything goes with them. Look at the way they dress - of course they are promiscuous. Either extreme leaves a woman open to being the victim of violence. Ever since the Scarlett Keeling case a sense of tremendous unease has invaded Goa. We have tried hard to blame it on other things - the girl took drugs. she was promiscuous. she had a mother who really should take the blame.But the fact is that a girl was brutally raped on a public beach and killed. This is the extreme face of an attitude that sees all white women as easy. And twelve women died at the hands of a serial killer - each going to her death thinking that she was going to be married. This is the extreme face of an attitude that sees daughters as being less than sons, as being part of the family till only such time as they marry and become their husbands property. Are women safe in Goa? The sad truth is that they are not. (ENDS) =========================================================================== The above article appeared in the May 19, 2009 edition of the Herald, Goa
