Yesterday I got a message “2 years for Rape; 5 years for Cow Slaughter … Is this fair?”

I cannot say how disgusted I was with this message. One crime snuffs out a life while living and the other nonchalantly takes away the life altogether. So where is the difference? The difference is that in the first case, the victim is a human life; in the second, it is a mute animal. The former can protest, cry, voice out her pain; the later cannot even do that.

The sender of the message obviously wanted to say that a woman’s modesty is more valuable than the life of an animal. But if the woman’s modesty was indeed more valuable, why then is she raped? Immediately after I got this message, another one flashed on my computer screen – “the rapist in the Nirbhaya episode claims that she should have kept quiet; her life would have been saved.” SUCH IRONY!

In India, when we want to talk about the good qualities of a girl, one sentence comes to mind – “Gai hai gai” ie. She is like a Cow - Gentle and self sacrificing. Right! Look at the parallels:

• Both are considered as wealth in the household – Laksmi.
• Both are wealth only as long as they keep giving. The woman has to do all the work in the house, look after the children, work gainfully if required, do ‘seva’ to the husband, the parents, the guests, without complaining. The cow has to give milk, dung, urine, continuously, without complaining.
• Their health and happiness, physical and mental, don’t matter at all to the ‘man of the house’.
• If she falls ill, if there is less food in the house, in fact in all contrary conditions, she is taken care of last.
• If she complains, if she tries to protest, she is tied, beaten up and abused.
• Neither the woman’s sexual desire is important, nor is the cow’s. Most cows are artificially inseminated, a painful process, without their desire or liking.
• On certain holy days, both are worshipped and a show of giving respect to them is maintained, just to prove to the world that they are Goddesses incarnate.

In such a situation, we are hearing of innumerable comments of how banning of the slaughter of cows will cause inconceivable financial loss to many sections of the society, untold loss of freedom with respect to food choices, etc. etc. And these very people are protesting the words mouthed by the vile rapist of Nirbhaya, saying that his words should not be published or splashed over the media. And what did he say? “Now when they rape, they won’t let the girl go like we did. They will kill her. Earlier, they would rape and say, ‘Leave her, she won’t tell anyone.’ Now when they rape, especially the criminal types, they will just kill the girl. Death.” What has happened here is that this man has just looked at woman as a piece of flesh. This is exactly what happened to the cow too. Earlier she was just used for her milk and dung. Then man became a beast and killed her for her leather, her flesh. Is there a difference?

Does man realize that the day is not far when he will be raped and pillaged and thrown away just as carelessly, the way he is doing it to the woman and the cow. In fact it is already happening – financially, mentally, emotionally and physically. Look around you – the stock markets, the pharmaceutical companies, the terrorists, the politicians. The joke is on you men – Husha Busha, we all fall down!