‘Enough is enough’: anguished President Murmu asks nation to wake up, end crimes against women

Referring to the August 9 rape and murder of a junior doctor in a Kolkata hospital, a 'dismayed and horrified' president said what is even more depressing is that it is part of a series of crimes against women.

New Delhi: Stating that “enough is enough”, President Droupadi Murmu on Wednesday said that it is imperative to address the “perversion” of crimes against women and challenge the mindset that views women as “less powerful, less capable, and less intelligent”. In an article for the news agency Press Trust of India, President Murmu said that women are increasingly being vilified.

“What is more depressing is the fact that it was not the only incident of its kind; it is part of a series of crimes against women. Even as students, doctors and citizens were protesting in Kolkata, criminals remained on the prowl elsewhere,” the President wrote, referring to rape and murder of a medic at the RG Kar Medical College in Kolkata as well as the sexualt assault of two school children in Maharashtra’s Badlapur.

“The victims include even kindergarten girls. No civilised society can allow daughters and sisters to be subjected to such atrocities. The nation is bound to be outraged, and so am I,” she added.

“Enough is enough. No civilised society can allow daughters and sisters to be subjected to such atrocities. In 12 years since Nirbhaya , countless rapes have been forgotten... this ‘collective amnesia’ is obnoxious,” she further wrote.

President Murmu also wrote that when the gruesome gangrape and murder of a paramedic took place in Delhi in December 2012, there was shock and rage, and as a nation we were determined not to let another such case take place.

“We made plans and devised strategies. These initiatives did make a difference to an extent... but our task remains unfinished as long as any woman feels unsafe," she said.

“History often hurts. Societies scared to face history resort to collective amnesia to bury their heads in the sand like the proverbial ostrich. Now the time has come not only to face history squarely but also to search within our souls and probe the pathology of crime against women,” she added.

The President said we must deal with this “perversion” in a comprehensive manner. “We can do this only if we honour the memory of the victims by cultivating a social culture of remembering them to remind us of our failures in the past and prepare us to be more vigilant in future," she added.