6 years ago, India united to protest against such an atrocious act and came together to ask for a better India, a safer India, a more humane India. 

It has been 6 years since but the search for that India has borne no results. 

On the contrary, the story is no longer about just a 23-year-old young woman. It is also of an 8-year-old brutally gang-raped and murdered in Kathua, a 10-year-old daughter sold by her own mother to rapists, a 3-month-old baby girl found in a pool of blood in the fields.

It’s not about a woman travelling alone at night in a bus. It is about the woman who took a lunch break with her colleagues, the friend who thought she was meeting other friends in the evening, the sister who was sacrificed to avenge her family’s honor in broad daylight. 

Today, women think before entering an auto or booking an Uber. They think before travelling in a train, taking a flight, even using their own car. 

Women always have their keys jingling in one hand, even when walking back from the society gate to their house gate, a number on speed dial as they step inside a private cab, and pepper spray handy. 

They’re constantly aware of their surroundings, paranoid of every shadow, checking every step. It’s supposed to be the behavior of long-term prisoners exiting from jail but sadly, it’s now the behaviour of every woman in India.

From a celebrity to a house maid, from a sister to an acquaintance, the wife to the sister-in-law, no relation is left sacred. Six years have gone by and India has only succeeded in becoming more unsafe for women!

Politicians ask women to stop wearing jeans but never tell men to stop being animals. 

Does it even matter anymore what the women wear? What time of the day it is? Who she was with? Where was she headed? If women are not even safe in the confines of their own home, from their own blood relations, then really which safe haven do women crowd in?

Thank you, India, for taking years to prove that women being raped is part of our culture. Thank you for telling women that ‘men will be men’ and women better get used to it. 

Thank you for showing that protests are for more important issues like banning a movie on a fictional story! A woman getting raped is just news to be consumed with the daily cup of morning chai. 

Every day, every newspaper, website, magazines will tell how another 4-year old girl was brutally raped by her father and India will shake its head, say the country is going nowhere, and continue to get their daughters inside the house before 7. 

6 years since Nirbhaya, sadly, India remains ‘no country for women’!