"The girl should have taken God's name and could have held the hand of one of the men and said, 'I consider you my brother' and to the other two, she should have said, 'Brothers, I am helpless. You are my brothers, my religious brothers'. Then the misconduct wouldn't have happened”- Asaram Bapu
This is what a self-proclaimed spiritual leader, whom we have all unfortunately heard of, stated in the wake of the Dehi rape incident that took place on the 16th of December 2012. This is a clear example of the chauvinism in our country and an entire belief system that compels women into the category of ‘the weaker sex’. Asaram Bapu dismisses the brutal act of rape as mere “misconduct”. We are talking about dehumanising sexual violation and murder here, and not some petty misdemeanour. This statement valourises the entire derogatory concept of how women should wear “decent” clothes and “cover up” and only then will they not be sexually harassed. More importantly, it assumes that the victim in any instance of brutality can control and change the perpetrator’s bestial behaviour simply by appealing to their apparent innate humanity.
This supposed spiritual leader has been charged with sexual assault, murder and what-else-have-you, and yet he has the utter audacity to say that the victim who was beaten with a rod, raped not by one man, but by four, and succumbed to the most gruesome injuries, was actually also to be blamed for the incident because she was on a bus at 9:30pm with a male companion, and that means that she was of loose moral character! I think we are all intelligent enough to judge whose character and reasoning is flawed here.
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