Who benefits from women MPs?

The 17th Lok Sabha elected in the 2019 polls has the highest number of women MPs.  There are 78 women members of parliament, the highest since independence.

Are you expecting any changes to take place in your daily survival,  just because more women can be seen in the Parliament? In fact, I have been asking myself: Does this high percentage of women in the Parliament ensure that women on the road and in work-places and homes will feel safer? Will women be able to walk fearlessly to the nearest police station to lodge complaints and FIRs against their political tormentors?  Will women carry the grit to take on the political mafia unleashed on them? Will women manage to oust the land mafia from their ancestral lands and fields? Will women get confident enough to pinpoint their rapists and molesters whilst rioting is made to peak?  Will women manage to cry a halt to the lynching and hounding taking place almost on a daily basis? Will women be 'azaad' enough to decide what to cook or buy or sell or bargain for? Will jailed women get better facilities in the prisons and jails of the country? Will those imprisoned women together with their minor children be allowed to breathe fresh air… will they see less of those inhuman conditions hitting them day and night? Will they get to talk more openly about their ‘jailed’ life?

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In a democracy it doesn’t really matter if you have women or men ruling; after all, all that matters is that the rulers ought to be just and secular.  And also contactable!  Tell me, if  tomorrow I’m lynched (and left somewhat alive), which woman  parliamentarian’s door will  open for me, to hear from me those torture details?  Will I have to take an appointment and wait for days to show those injuries and bruises on my form and psyche? After all, don’t we know that parliamentarians live amidst high security bandobasts, where the middle class non -descript creatures like us cannot intrude without the due formalities. After all, we are said to be living in these highly developed times!

Tell me, how many of the women parliamentarians travelled last month to Jharkhand, to meet the widow of the latest lynch victim, Tabrez Ansari. The least that could have been expected was a group of women parliamentarians expressing solidarity cum support cum sympathy to that hapless woman… In fact, though the lynching and hounding and even killing of a certain section of the population continues,  no strong counters to that series.  No women parliamentarian group visited the homes of Pehlu Khan nor of Akhlaq Ahmad,  nor of Junaid Khan …to meet their families. Nor the households of those particular families destroyed in the communal riots and  pogroms.  Not even now, when news reports have  been coming in that the  Yogi Adityanath  government is  withdrawing cases against several of the  BJP’s  top  brass in western Uttar  Pradesh, who were  involved in the horrifying  Muzaffarnagar riots of 2013.  Mind you , rapes and  molestations of  several women from the   minority community were reported in those riots;  in fact, soon after those riots  subsided, victims  had said  that they couldn’t  even register formal complaints/FIRs  because of the fear of the aftermath from the right-wing men controlling that  entire  belt.  After all, till this day it’s the right-wing political  mafia  that  holds  sway in that region. Yet, today cases are getting withdrawn from the men who were named as the main conspirators or instigators of those horrifying riots- where 60 people lost their lives and more than 40,000 people were displaced and a total of 502 cases were registered where 6,867 people were accused.

Strange or not really, anything goes in the times we are living in, where democracy and all those democratic norms are fast fading away.  Instead, faced that we are with onslaughts on a daily basis. Can we forget the hate –dripping statements of the likes of Sadhvi Pragya Thakur and Sadhvi Niranjan  Jyoti? Can we overlook the utterances  of the  likes of  Menaka  Gandhi who during  her  electioneering she had  so very  blatantly bared her inner most thoughts  - along the  strain,  that  if  Muslims of her constituency don’t vote for her  they should not  expect her  to help them out  in various  spheres?  

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I do wish our women parliamentarians focus on hundreds of some very serious  issues -- what with thousands dying or perishing in the floods in Assam. Those left alive are sitting in the grip of the upcoming citizenship verdict!

Another haunting  reality hitting us  is this - what  happens  to those  under-trials who are declared  innocent  after  they have  spent several years or  decades  sitting jailed? What happens to their lives and livelihoods and families when they are finally set free?

I’m somewhat provoked into writing this,  with this news just  coming in:  The  Rajasthan High Court has acquitted six lifers while upholding the death sentence to one and the life term to another in the 23-year-old case of bomb blast in a bus at Samleti in Dauisa district, in which 14 persons were killed.  (The blast had taken place in a state roadways bus, going to Bikaner from Agra on May 22, 1996).  The six lifers who were freed on Monday by a Jaipur bench of the high court include five Jammu and Kashmir natives Javed Khan, Latif Ahmed, Mohammad Ali Bhatt, Mirja Nissa Hussain and Abdul Ghani. The sixth acquitted, Rais Beg, is from Agra in Uttar Pradesh.   The court acquitted the six lifers ruling that the prosecution has failed to prove their links with the conspiracy of the blast.

So what happens to the lives of these innocent men, whom the system had caged for so many years? Mind you, this isn’t one of those rare cases where the 'accused' sat languishing in prison hell holes before being found innocent and with that finally released.

In several such cases before,  the State did set them free but without compensation or apologies.  What happens to them, to their survival in every sense of the term?  How do we reach out to them and to their families! After all, ruined are their lives and that of their children, parents and spouses.