The SMILE has to go...we have to make it happen
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S.P.S. Rathore has been let off lightly in the Ruchika Girhotra case. When law-keepers subvert the system, they must get double punishment. An aspiring tennis player, a bubbly daughter to her father and a doting sister... yes she was all Ruchika Girhotra.
SPS Rathore was the president of Haryana Lawn Tennis Association the girls at the coaching thought of him as their "Guru" someone who would take them a long way and indeed he did...The act he did, took Ruchika a long way...from where she never returned.
Ruchika and her friend Aradhna were tennis buffs. The teenage girls had just seen a Steffi Graf-Monica Seles face-off on TV and were itching to ape the serves and volleys. Rathore summoned Ruchika into his office, and then began groping and pawing her. Aradhna walked into the room just in time for Ruchika to disentangle herself.
Ruchika, 14 at the time, turned to Aradhna's mother to support - her own mother was no longer alive. An FIR was not lodged on time... Ruchika's father has a bone-chilling question. If the FIR had been registered on time, would Ruchika still have been alive today? Instead, a child - we forget, don't we, that she was just a child-watched her world crumble. Rathore's daughter was in the same school; so soon she was thrown out of swish Sacred Heart Convent. Her brother Ashu was slapped with a dozen fabricated cases of car thefts. Goons were deployed to trail Ruchika and Aradhna's families. Men would stand outside their homes and pelt stones at them.
All this while, Rathore kept rising up the ranks of the police force. Finally when, her brother was arrested, Ruchika could not take it any longer. She consumed poison and killed herself. Her father explains that she thought she had placed her family in all this trouble. In other words, the victim embraced the guilt the perpetrator should have.
The verdict – that has come 19 years too late – is a JOKE.The judge talks about factoring in the "length of the trial and the age of the convict" while explaining his six-month sentence.Did he forget Ruchika's age? It's bewildering why the judge did not even deliver the two-year sentence that is the maximum punishment for molestation.While the probe is on, the govt. needs to go beyond Rathore and must include everyone-bureaucrats and politicians - who facilitated the horrendous cover-up. Rathore smiles today because they made it possible.
Otherwise in this country – where women get pawned and mauled – is almost treated as a rites of passage, our bizarre level of tolerance for sexual abuse will continue as it is. Bottom – pinchers get to be great cops, without anyone blinking an eye. Instead, I would argue, when custodians of the law subvert the legal system, they should get double the punishment. When I saw Rathore on a news channel...strutting out of court smiling last week, I felt sick in my stomach, more so when I saw his wife by his side, wearing the same expression of smugness. Their daughter must be Ruchika's age.Would they be smiling, if she had been molested by a SICK,OLD POWERFUL man?THE SMILE HAS TO GO. AND WE HAVE TO MAKE IT HAPPEN .
