Now that the Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal’s personal assistant Bibhav Kumar has been named as an accused in an FIR, the police should proceed post-haste with his interrogation regarding the reported assault on AAP MP Swati Maliwal and the law should take its course, and quickly at that.
The inglorious events of an assault on a national legislator, who is a member of the upper house, at the residence of the chief minister of Delhi only adds to a dossier of insouciance with which miseries are inflicted thanks to the patriarchy and misogyny that rule in the upper echelons of India’s political class, commonly classified as netas or leaders and their plenipotentiaries.
Offences against women need to be acted upon without fear or favour lest quite the wrong message be sent to half the population of the country. Such acts of cruelty against women, common enough at home in cases of domestic violence, are intensified when committed by the high and mighty who may believe they are privileged and so can get away with it.
Swati may have waxed and waned regarding filing an official complaint for allegedly being kicked and assaulted by such an influential personage as a PA to a powerful CM. The political pressures on her regarding filing a police complaint can be imagined.
Now that she has decided to come out with it, after having suffered all the trauma, it is time to make an example out of a petty political aide. Let the case begin first by the Delhi CM home releasing relevant CCTV footage to the investigating authorities.
The kind of leeway extended to the politically connected people sends the worst signals to the common man who feels powerless when up against the power people in authority cloak themselves with.
A reported serial offender — a sitting member of Parliament — against women is on the loose after leaving the country. A common pattern to all this is the brazenness with which the politically powerful behave until whistleblowers use social media to out those who think nothing of criminal misconduct against women, be it sexual assault or just plain physical beating.
