'We all must pledge to be the change'

Oh, shut up! All of you.

Each one of you hiding behind the guise of an “outcry”; yet complacent that yet another child has been raped, giving you another statistic to nod your head at and tsk tsk about together.

Please, just keep quiet, says the voice in my head, lashing out at commentators, keyboard warriors and those with an opinion on all things rape.

Put down your placards and stow away your keyboards. It’s clearly useless.

Did that offend you? THAT offended you and not the rape of an eight-month-old baby?

Let that sink in a bit.

Eight. Months. Old. Raped and in need of a three-hour surgery to stop her from bleeding to death.

Look around you. Do you see a child around you, anywhere? No?

Ok.

Can you think of that one child who is very precious to you? Yes?

Ok.

Now, try and comprehend what horror that eight-month-old infant may have been subjected to.

“Oh, shut up!,” says the voice in my head to me.

“You’ll be over this by evening. Getting on with your life, until another headline somewhere in the world makes you skip a heartbeat, gasp in horror and say a little prayer for the victim. Until this incident, too, becomes a part of a special package’s “timeline”. What have you done to change anything? You, in your comfort zone, tucked away in a landscape that is miles away from “unsafe places in India”. You, who judges and hides behind the keyboard too. What have you done?”

I talk to my son. Talk to his friends. Talk to children that are not my own. It may not be much but such conversations are important if we intend to change the discourse on rape.

I see my baby in that baby and my children in all other children that have been abused. And I ask myself - “what would you do if you were the mother of that eight-month-old?”

Several options cross my mind.

Reinforce capital punishment, the voice of reason tells me.

Chop him to pieces, hang him in a public square -- the voice of a broken mother feeling the pain of another, screams.

The voice of reason wins.

It says let the law of the land prevail, let justice be served.

It took the horrific gang-rape of a medical student in 2012 for the Indian Supreme Court to rethink and pass a new rape law in 2013.

New clauses were added, with capital punishment prescribed in the “rarest of rare cases”. That is really ironic since rarest of rare seems not so rare anymore.

According to the National Crime Records Bureau data, nearly 20,000 cases of child rape were registered in India in 2016 alone. That was a rise of 82 per cent from 2015 when 10,854 cases were recorded.

What will it take for this to stop? I don’t know.

Three decades ago, as a five-year-old proud Indian, I would mouth the national pledge as part of our school’s morning assembly routine.

Three decades on, the words ring empty.

We probably need a new pledge - a promise to let every child be and a country where every woman can walk free.

Pledge to be warriors in the truest sense and those that are not limited to black, white and grey keyboards, adding yet another opinion to each other’s virtual conscience.

We all must pledge to be the change.