Castrate them? Sure go ahead, if the law permits

Kill them, then? Sure go ahead, if the law permits

Vote out all politicians? Sure go ahead, if you think so

What then, carry a gun and shoot potential rapists? Sure go ahead, if you deem so

Rape is more about power than lust, so cut all male power cords? Sure go ahead, if you so feel

Flood the news channels with little boxes of opinion thrusters? Sure go ahead, if advertisers permit

Ban all Bollywood films “glorifying” the male gaze and demeaning women? Sure go ahead, if your senses permit

Protest for the next three days? Sure go ahead, if your employers permit

Agitate at city chowks with posters saying ‘STOP RAPE’? Sure go ahead, till the candles burn out.

But all said, done and dusted, at the end of the day everything, and then nothing, is only an option till the time the legal system/judiciary changes tack/track. Or unless we decide to lord over kangaroo courts, or the much prescribed “Gulf country” syndrome.

Without raising the temperatures of the television studios or the social media platforms, what needs to be understood first is that rape is a crime. It’s of course more – as the social-psychologists say it’s got to do a lot about the male power psychosis; the mentality to dominate over what appears the weaker ‘object’ with brute power. But that’s not all. The biggest mistake would be to treat it only as a socio-psychological-pathological malady. That’s undoing a lot of the criminality behind the crime.

Let’s start by treating rape as a crime – a heinous crime? yes; a crime as monstrous as homicide? yes. And then take it forward. Getting emotional and charged up, and then advocating castration and/or death penalty would not land us anywhere barring TV studios. Unless, of course, we are ready to abdicate all freedom – like those “Gulf countries”, whose instances do a thing or two to our thought process every time we get, rightly, worked up after each rape case.

And let us not dilute the whole argument as some pop-socio-psychological psychosomatic disorder. Yes, rape is more about power, and mostly about the male mind than the body, but that’s not the be-all and end-all of it. What power did a few men hanging around a deserted central Mumbai mill compound on a weekday evening of August 21, probably doing drugs, think they wielded over a photographer out to do a story? Show her her ‘place’? Or, perhaps, show that she doesn’t have any business venturing out after a certain time and on to a certain place that they deemed fit? Or, may be, show that they are better photojournalists than the victim?

Or, for that matter, what point of power did the men who raped and battered a 23-year-old physiotherapist in a bus in south Delhi on December 16, 2012 want to prove? If the men who raped the 16-year-old in the fields of Kadhamirigi village in Nayagarh district of Odisha (the girl, according to reports on August 24, is battling for life in a Cuttack hospital) tried to prove their power equation vis-a-vis the girl, what was it?

We do not, and would not know – unless we study the accused after they are tried and found convicts, which on its own could take months, if not years (the Delhi gangrape trial, which necessitated a special anti-rape law is still far from over despite being tried in a ‘fast-track’ court for nearly eight months). What we do know is that there are laws that can throw a rapist to up to 20 years behind the bars, and even get him hanged if the law deems so.

Rape is not a syndrome; it is a crime. And crime is dealt with by the legal system. So accelerate that system if you have to fight, rather than working up your vocal cords and tap-dancing on the keyboard to usher in a new system.