INCREASINGLY, in India, women live on edge, fearing assault, abuse or rape by men, known and unknown to them.

Opposition MP Najma Heptullah said so in parliament. She lived in Delhi alone, and she lived in fear. What about women who have to live with the men-turned-beasts or who gave them birth?

Let’s share the responses of two mothers of such men that were published in the Indian Express and Times of India this week.

I think the stories do open up the aperture to allow a better peep into the nightmare that women face, be they victims of rape or relatives of rapists.

The Express interviewed the mother of an alleged member of a group that raped and fatally brutalised a woman in a Delhi bus in December.

The Times of India wrote of a mother whose son was reportedly among the rag-pickers or drug addicts who raped a woman journalist in an abandoned cloth mill of Mumbai last week.

After reading about the Mumbai mother named Chand Bibi, a male reader of the Times replied: “This Chand Bibi should be raped in front of her rapist son to teach him a lesson.”

This is not a stand-alone opinion in the increasingly violent and callous society that India is becoming. An element of desperation too is becoming evident.

A woman reader spoke of an “urgent need for compulsory birth control (which) is evident from the situation that these youths are growing up in — no opportunities available, and yet (we have) parents who keep producing kids”.

Meanwhile, the Times reported that 21-year-old Qasim Shaikh, was arrested on Sunday for the alleged gang rape of the Mumbai journalist. He was kept in the police lockup where he was visited by his mother Chand Bibi the next day.

“He was clad in a burqa and started crying upon seeing me,” Chand Bibi said, weeping. “Barey sahib (a policeman) told him to narrate what he had done. Qasim admitted to having done a wrong thing to a girl. I asked him why he did so. He kept quiet. I was shattered.”

Chand Bibi’s husband died 10 years ago and she lives with her three children in a shantytown.

Describing her ordeal she said: “On Sunday, some journalists came home and told me the police had caught my son. I went to the crime branch office at night and waited for hours, but barey sahib did not let me meet my son. So I visited again on Monday morning.”

There is an interesting pointer, in the Times report, about how the police go about their investigations, or deal with women. “Sahib told me to come after two days. I begged him to let me meet my son, but he slapped me twice on the face. I tolerated this since I wanted to see my son. A few minutes later, they brought Qasim before me.”

So that’s the lot of Chand Bibi: apparently, let down by her son, abused by readers of the media report on her visit to him, and slapped by a constable for wanting to meet her delinquent offspring.

The Express report showed the equal trauma of the mother of a man who has been named in the Delhi brutality. We have to go to an unnamed village in western Uttar Pradesh to meet her.

“On a winter morning last December, a sleepy Uttar Pradesh village woke up to police vehicles in its lanes, asking for the address of a boy no one knew,” the report begins.

The police, in pursuit of the boy’s father, were taken to a “half-brick, half-plastic structure”. Being mentally unstable for a number of years, the father was unable to understand what the police were telling him.

The police then told the mother that her eldest son had been arrested in the gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old student in Delhi.

Some months later, she heard that her son’s fate would be decided on Aug 31 by the Juvenile Justice Board. With no money or acquaintance in Delhi, she is hardly likely to be there when the verdict is announced.

In fact, as a farm labourer, this mother of six, who mostly gets work during the harvesting season, will find it difficult to feed her family for the next few months.

The media attention following her son’s arrest might have given her some much-needed cash, but despite this occasional charity, the journalists’ questions irritate her.

“I have too much sadness in my life to keep dwelling on my eldest son all the time. His father, so many mouths, no food, no work, no money, no relatives,” she says dismissing the thought that her son’s arrest caused her pain.

Rape is of course not the exclusive preserve of the poor, not at all. It was, on the contrary, the powerful feudal satraps who led a truly institutionalised assault on women, mostly Dalit women. The country’s caste mix offered a bizarre challenge to upper caste women as their men inflicted what was regarded by then prevailing customs as socially acceptable violence on lower caste women.

Did a high caste Thakur woman, for example, endorse the gang rape of a Dalit orchestrated by the scion of her landlord family? There could be no easy answers to the question.

Women in a patriarchal set up faced the ignominy of brute power at two levels — first, what was inflicted on them, and, second, having to endorse or being forced to remain silent when lower castes were subjected to sexual violence.

‘Bandit Queen’ Phoolan Devi resisted the gang rape inflicted on her by shooting her tormentors. But what about the women in Gujarat who endured or sometimes applauded spectacles of rape and massacre of people of a different religion in 2002?

I’m sure Bob Marley would have cried.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com