JHARKHAND
Maharashtra takes pride that women are safe here and Mumbai is considered to be good that way… But since the past 3 years the highest number of rapes have been occurring in Mumbai… I had conducted a study on rape. I wished to find out who are the women who are being raped and who does it…On the basis of the FIRs filed for a year, I found that 89% of the women raped were those who had been displaced i.e. they had come to Mumbai from other places. Some had been uprooted from villages; some had come for mazdoori… In 1993 I had conducted a similar study in Delhi to find that more that 80% of the rapes take place in jhuggies and on displaced women. I am from Jharkhand and I have seen the impact of displacement on the oustees of the Subernrekha dam. As child I have seen that people of this area are not cunning or manipulative. And now when my work took me there, I found that nobody dares to speak the truth now… This is the cultural breakdown that we should take note of. Neither was suicide common here. In one village I found that 4 women had committed suicide because they had been raped. People were very upset that day. They said this never used to happen here even in the face of the worst disaster…
Another change that disturbs me a lot is that earlier relationships between men and women were that of trust. Eve-teasing, molestation or rape was not common. People would form relationships of their own free choice. And today those women who have never looked upon any man with distrust look at every man with suspicion…This is a deep, internal fragmentation of a community and we need to consider this. Even if land for land, house for house and crop for crop were to be given to the people, displacement destroys a very fundamental aspect of life-aspiration-on the basis of which a lifestyle, a culture is formed.