From School to Sansad: The Segregation of The Lambs

PROLOGUE:

April 13, 2018: Union Minister for Women & Child Development, Maneka Gandhi demands death penalty for those who rape children under 12. April 21, 2018: Cabinet approves death for rape of girls under 12 years. Did you notice the difference when you first heard it? It was an old story that an Indian man can’t be raped. The Criminal Law (Amendment) Ordinance only rubber-stamped the fact that he can’t be raped even when he is 11 years old.

PART-IV: Womanhunter

I don't claim to know any solution nor I claim to be someone who can really sympathize with a rape survivor or who can understand the psychology of a person who rapes someone. Usually my mind remains engrossed in how far we think whenever we think about the two persons concerned- the survivor and the perpetrator. For perpetrator, much of outrage (which is justified) demands the Capital Punishment and we give them tags like wahashi, darinda, and prescribe remedies like forced marriage, death by stoning, castration or something similar. For the survivor, in the heart of the hearts, we think- Poor Girl! Bad luck! Bad clothes! Bad company! Bad relatives! Bad timing! Bad Area! or some other cocktail mixture of these explanations. We tend to find our own reasons and we tend to find our solutions. We amend laws and we try to define what "rarest of rare" case may be and should be. We agree on bad executive, poor infrastructure and non-functioning Judiciary. We decree on night curfew, pepper-spray and the innate bestiality of the man. And then we send our ward to a school where he would ultimately learn what sex means from a horny teenager whose words would be filled with unexplained desires and half-baked misconceptions. Those words would be the first and ultimately the last lesson of our son's sex-education and we would never bother to append or edit out anything from the knowledge our boy has just acquired.

Five years after Nirbhaya, the nation is ashamed and outraged once again. Kathua and Unnao are getting their unwanted moment of Prime-Time. News channels are sending their reporters in heaps and bundles and their analysis, their diagnosis (if any), their treatment and their reasons to have caused these atrocities are as wide as the topology of India across Tropic of Cancer. A certain reader of The Hindu, Mr Sukumaran C.V. from Kerala wrote to the editor: " We cannot eliminate rape simply by punishing the rapists in a barbaric manner (Editorial -Clamour for death). We have to eliminate the idea of women being viewed as a sexual object which is etched in the collective conscience and strengthened by our upbringing, education, media influences. By resorting to simple logic such as drastic measures/capital punishment we conveniently forget to see the ubiquitous misogynistic culture from which sexual crimes sprout. The ultimate solution to end rape is to make society a gender egalitarian one. And it also doesn't mean that rapists can go scot-free." I have always found the culture like ours the root cause of many heinous crimes such as acid attacks, eve-teasing, molestation, rape, murder and suicide too. Why suicide? Well for any Bollywood character who is not main female lead, the first thing after getting raped is try to attempt suicide successfully. It has been mandated for hero's aunt, sister, neighbour or any other secondary character by all unknown writers & by all famed directors. Or she should be mercy-killed by the perpetrators. Or she should die heroically before the climax of movie avenging the outraging of her modesty, killing the perpetrator along. But the only acceptance the movie makers were ready to give her was death. The main female lead on the other hand would often get lucky to get away because the hero would appear miraculously to save the day and to beat the pulp out of bad guys. And that’s why the female lead would be fit and worthy to remain alive ever after (and not dispensed off before the movie ends). Because raped women must die! That's why I agree verbatim with what Mr Sukumaran says. But when the dust settles after a storm, and we are left to pick our pieces, I usually go back to a childhood memory which has remained etched in my mind forever. The segregation of boys and girls begin so early in India that we often forget the place from where we are coming from.

PART-II: Back to School

When I was small, like really small, I didn't know the difference in between Private Schools and Govt Schools. Or Public Schools or State Schools if that's what they are called in your state. I went to a Public School till my 5th standard. And thence I went straight to a Govt School, situated 3 km away from my home. I would board a state-run bus and reach there every non-Gazetted morning of my next seven years. And I loved every bit of my new school. It was so big and I was so small (did I mention that before?). It had a lot of trees and shrubs unlike my treeless, groundless primary school. For me, it was like going inside Garden of Eden.

My new school was so vast and full of greenness that each morning brought a pristine joy in my mood. But there was a very peculiar system of classes which was also new for me and confusing too. In our school, all sections of a particular class were All-Boys or All-Girls sections with only one exception, the English Medium class, my class which was always co-ed. As I had already had girls as my classmates in my previous School, I naturally boded well with my girl classmates in new school. There was an air of familiarity when we saw them. On the other hand, our All-Boys or All-Girls section contemporaries looked at each other either with a mischievous gaze reminding me of a deer caught in headlight, or they were like those stolen glances as if they were guilty of the Original Sin, banished from each other to talk, the forbidden fruit just out of their grasp. With cursive glances and accidental passes, they harbor whatever they had to harbor inside their minds and remained tacit as if they couldn’t communicate with each other. Like two separate species, miles and miles apart. We found their level of communication with each other or the lack of it, appalling. And then came our eleventh class and we got to choose our stream amongst the Trinity, classified in the social mirror as The Father( Science),The Son (Commerce) and The Holy Ghost (Arts). Some classmates of our section chose Humanities, some Commerce and we chose to pursue Science. But we also gained some students- defined as the cream of other sections, who had also decided to pursue Science like us. And then for next two years, we witnessed first hand how a guy who had never had a girl classmate interacted with them. That is if they ever could. They would remain hidden away until there's an absolute need to be face-to-face with them and when they did have had to talk to any girl for as simple request as borrowing a notebook, they needed us as mediators. In front of girls, while talking, they would avoid to look into their eyes and would remain clueless how to proceed, act or simply exist. They had their own paradigms. Like "I don't talk to girls" when they actually should have said "I don't know how to talk to girls". We assisted them when we could or when we were in mood. We ignored them at other times. But I often wonder how a man who was a boy once, ultimately overcome this ordeal of ever opening up in front of a girl. Years later, I have only come to know the two extremities of those boys or men. There is a significant number of exceptions, but those boys' or men's emotional, physical and romantic needs or wants often hang around what we can only call the male version of Madonna-whore complex. Either they turn out to be the introvert shy guy forever longing for a glance from his beloved or they go the other way. They want to jump over all the hedges of the past and turn wild. They want to express their anger of years of depravity from touching or even talking to a girl and often the recipient is either the fairer sex or the men themselves. Furthermore, they categorize the women of world in these two groups too. Women are either worthy of their respect or worthy of their lust. They find the mixture of two more forbidden than any banishment of their past!

PART-III: The Wrath Of The Lamb

When I was doing my MSc in a remote rural campus of Haryana, I was completely taken aback by a report I read once in a local newspaper. It was about a school where the main gate was locked by its own students in protest because the authorities had decided to make the school co-educational from single-sex schools in two shifts. The girls of that school went on record to say that the motion would only increase the lecherous and obscene behaviour among students! Boys concurred and the authorities had no choice but to rollback the co-educational program. This is the state with highest income per capita after Goa (and lowest sex ratio). This is the state which gave us the highest number of medals in recently concluded Commonwealth Games and our first medal (by a female athlete) of Rio Olympics. The nature of these protests was so self-defeating and self-affronting that I can’t find any word to describe it. In short, what students were saying was they doubted their own nature. They were alluding that if they would be left alone with one another they would start all kind of proclivities in the playground and wouldn’t study at all. And they are not alone. Jamaat-e-Islami (Hind faction) in 2013 suggested to ban all co-educational programs. While some parts are holding these irrational notions close to their orthodox hearts, there are some positive stories too where people have recognised the benefits of co-ed system. In the Pandora's box of our education system, the state of the matter now is that while in some parts of country, people are protesting co-ed, in various others they are asking for it and protesting the opposite.

PART-I: First Blood

A week ago, one of my decades-old pride died in a moment. I was coming back to my house after meeting a friend and I found a boy in school uniform and I recognized his belt. It was my school's colors but what the hell he was doing in a bus at 6 pm in the evening? So I asked him apprehensively and he confirmed me what I had feared. He told me that the lambs of my day school had also been segregated finally into morning and evening shifts. He was a tenth class student and saw the diktat applied two years ago so he had been studying with girls for two years. I tried to see from his perspective how they had remained friends with the girls after the separation. Maybe it was the lack of proper infrastructure which forced the Delhi Government to separate them so that more children could be accommodated on a fixed land. The myriad of elsewhere Sarvodaya Vidyalayas had been already turned into Sarvodaya Kanya Vodyalaya in morning and Sarvodaya Bal Vidyalaya in evening while I was still in school. So why feel sad? Population makes Delhi the biggest metro of India after Mumbai. And what Delhi Govt has to make do is no ordinary task so subtleties like gender psychological development and interaction are bound to be subjugated to the target of putting more children into schools. Whatever was the reason, I would feel immense pity that some of them had to study till 6 pm in evening. And I used to consider myself lucky to get admitted in a school which was co-ed at least from outside and no male student had to wait for all girls to vacate the school since then only he could put his foot inside the gate. Nostalgia had filled me as I bade goodbye to a lingering image of my school. If we go even more back and inquire about the primary schools of Delhi, we will find a gross mismanagement at hand. There is infrastructure in place, but students are still kept in different same-sex schools throughout National Capital Territory. Try to find any Nagar Nigam Schools ( Municipal Corporation Schools) which are I-V primary schools and you will see their wards forever in blue dress, and you will also see that despite having only day shifts, the schools are still run into all-boys or all-girls schools only. Some of such schools even share a wall but that’s what ultimately is built around them too and there is no future plans to make them Co-Ed at all. There is absolutely no reason either financially or morally to keep different schools of boys and girls and not intermixed them into two co-ed primary schools. But apparently, the State doesn't trust even 6 years old with each other and have them segregated at a very young age depriving them of any kind of social interactions with the opposite sex. Maybe the lambs will never stop screaming?

EPILOGUE:

No book or article can explain sufficiently enough the anatomy of rape. And no gender can be guaranteed to be immune to this mental trauma. The Central Govt gave yet another proof when it brought out the ordinance for punishment of rape under 12 year girls and not children that we would keep them separated and segregated. Maybe it was time that before bringing any more stringent laws, we should amend the POCSO Act and rename it as POFSO as in females? Or maybe we should start giving a chance for our boys to grow like nature intended. We should let them understand girls at the young age and let them understand each other so that they don't turn into someone who doesn't know them at all. Girls often get their first sex education from their mothers. Boys, on the other hand never get the infamous embarrassing "talk" from their fathers. Maybe because the fathers didn't get it too. So how can they give something which they never had? But if you are a father, you have the chance now to remedy what skipped generations. You have to protect your daughter and teach her too, I know. But maybe only you can counter the slogan and start Beta Bachao, Beta Padaao?

“ Look at the sea, Mum.

Look at the sea.” - The Milk of Sorrow, 2009 .