BENGALURU: Days after former Karnataka DGP and MP H.T. Sangliana made highly inappropriate remarks on Asha Devi - the mother of Nirbhaya, who was brutally gang-raped in a bus in New Delhi in 2012, Ms Devi has penned an open letter launching a scathing attack on the former top cop.
Ms Devi not only wrote about Sangliana's inappropriate remarks on her, but also took exception to his advice to women to "surrender if someone overpowers you. That way you can still be alive".
Mr Sangliana stoked a controversy with his remarks on Ms Devi saying, "Nirbhaya's mother has such a good physique. I can imagine how beautiful Nirbhaya would have been." He had made the remarks at a function to mark International Women's Day in Bengaluru on March 9, in which Ms Devi too was present.
When you commented on my physique, you did not think twice about the inappropriateness of it - in fact, you thought nothing of further associating it with the beauty of my daughter, who is no longer alive, who died such a brutal death.
But after making these abominable comments, your advice to young girls is what crossed all limits, I feel. You said that if someone overpowers you, then what a girl should do in that moment is surrender, because at least that way, she will live.
Not only did you disrespect the fight that my daughter put up in those monstrous moments, you also displayed the sick, patriarchal attitudes of our society at large. My daughter's rapists too had expressed a similar thought - how they could not tolerate the fact that she was fighting back. It is indeed a matter of great shame that the thinking of the so-called caretakers of society such as yourself and the thinking of the criminals, seems to me, to be exactly the same.
You are perpetuating the same regressive attitudes we've been living with all our lives as women, telling girls again and again, that they must remain weak, that no matter what, they must keep making compromises with the ugly situations they find themselves in. And when someone forces himself on you, you must make your peace with it, so that he deigns to spare you, your life.
In the end, I would also like to ask you if the same advice should be given to our Indian soldiers too? Shall we say to them, those who protect our borders day and night, that the next time you are attacked, you must throw up your arms, and surrender? At least our soldiers' lives will be saved.
