A former police chief’s advice to girls and women to “surrender” to the physical assault from sexual predators to save their lives “at least”, has prompted Asha Devi, mother of the 2012 Delhi gang rape victim, Nirbhaya, to write an open letter to him expressing her outrage.
Adding to Ms. Devi’s revulsion were comments by former Karnataka Director-General of Police H.T. Sangliana on her physique and its apparent correlation to her daughter’s beauty during his speech at the Nirbhaya Awards 2018 function on International Women’s Day in Bengaluru earlier this month.
In his speech, Mr. Sangliana, who has since sought to clarify his remarks, said: “When I look at her [Nirbhaya’s mother], her physique is very, very nice. Then how beautiful Nirbhaya could have been.”
Ms. Devi, who had been invited to give away the awards, told The Hindu on Sunday, “I travelled as far as I did to express my solidarity with girls and women who met similar, but thankfully not the same, fate as my daughter on what happened to be a day supposedly dedicated to us and this is what he said to me.”
“I don’t understand the language so I didn’t react when I was on the stage. It was only later when a very senior lady police officer, who was naturally enraged by the comment too, pulled me aside and told me what he had said that I realised the magnitude of his words,” Ms. Devi said.
“Not only have you disrespected my daughter’s protest at what she was being subjected to but also illustrated the cheap and patriarchal attitude of our society at large,” she wrote in her letter.
