A child disappears; A body is found; An Outrage erupts; Leaders condemn, Arrests are made, Justice is promised and finally Memory expires.
Rattan Singh Gill
A child set out for darsgah and did not return. The distance between her home and where her body was found was reportedly around 200 metres. Civilisation, it turns out, can collapse within walking distance.
The brutal rape and murder of a 12-year-old girl in Budgam’s Galwanpora has understandably convulsed Kashmir valley rather whole Jammu and Kashmir.
The political leaders condemned it. Religious leaders mourned it. Schoolchildren marched. Women protested. Social media demanded blood. “Hang the beast,” became the collective refrain. The police moved with unusual speed, constituting a Special Investigation Team and announcing, within 36 hours, the arrest of a local resident based on alleged confession and corroborative material evidence. The courts must now determine guilt and punishment.
But there are certain crimes whose charge sheet extends beyond the accused.
They indict society.
Every civilisation rests on a few assumptions too sacred to be written into law. That the children can walk to school. That neighbours recognise vulnerability before opportunity. That parent can release tiny fingers and trust the world to return them. That prayer, education and play are destinations safer than danger.
Galwanpora has cross-examined all these assumptions.
A little girl left home for religious instruction. She did not vanish into a war zone or a wilderness. She disappeared within the geography of familiarity. Somewhere, her schoolbooks remain bookmarked at lessons she would never revise. Somewhere, a mother still hears footsteps that will never climb the staircase. Somewhere, a father continues negotiating that impossible bargain between memory and reality — the one in which grief asks him to accept what love refuses to.
Childhood itself has been put in the witness box.
Predictably, there will be renewed investment in fear. Our daughters have long been enrolled in its curriculum.
Do not go alone.
Do not stay late.
Do not trust strangers.
Do not speak loudly.
Do not attract attention.
Do not exist without caution.
The timetable seldom changes.
Curiously, sons often escape this educational rigour. We assume that respect, empathy and self-restraint will somehow descend upon them through atmospheric transmission. Girls are trained for survival; boys are trusted with instinct. Then society expresses astonishment when instinct graduates into entitlement.
The arithmetic has never worked.
The Galwanpora child was reportedly neither returning from a concert nor wandering midnight streets. She was on her way to darsgah. If caution was the antidote, she had complied. If modesty was the shield, she wore it. If supervision was the answer, she was within sight of home.
Which victim-blaming advisory shall we issue now?
The more uncomfortable truth is that evil rarely arrives carrying visiting cards. We imagine predators as strangers lurking in distant shadows because the alternative is unbearable. The monster, however, often knows the map. He speaks the language. He inhabits the neighbourhood. He may exchange greetings and pleasantries before exchanging humanity for impulse.
The beast seldom descends from the mountains. More often, it emerges from among us.
Faith is another casualty.
Not merely faith in God, which somehow survives even wars and earthquakes, but faith in ordinary arrangements. Faith in locality and neighbourhood. Faith in familiarity. Faith that community instinctively protects its weakest members. Every such crime lowers that reservoir by a few inches until suspicion becomes parental duty and innocence an unaffordable luxury.
Parents begin counting distances not in metres but in risks.
And then arrives outrage — society’s favourite seasonal festival. We are magnificent mourners.
We light candles with efficiency, organise protests with sincerity and manufacture hashtags with industrial precision. Politicians condemn in the strongest possible terms, as though weaker terms had ever been under consideration. Television discovers conscience between commercial breaks. The public demands immediate justice. The media obliges with hourly instalments of indignation.
Meanwhile, the law attempts the unfashionable task of being methodical.
The police deserve credit for acting swiftly. Yet speed is not justice’s twin; accuracy is. The temptation in such cases is to confuse public closure with judicial closure. An arrest satisfies emotion. A conviction withstands scrutiny. Between the two lies evidence, procedure and proof — those tedious inconveniences without which justice degenerates into theatre.
The mob hangs; the law must establish. Both have ropes. Only one is supposed to have reason.
Even conviction, however, is a poor carpenter. It cannot rebuild what was broken. It cannot return laughter to the dinner table or erase the image of parents staring at untouched belongings. The law punishes offenders. It does not resurrect futures.
Perhaps the deepest wound lies elsewhere.
We are a society endlessly preoccupied with guarding honour while repeatedly failing to protect innocence. We monitor hemlines, friendships, cinema, speech and romance with astonishing vigilance. We patrol morality in public while neglecting humanity in private. We invoke culture at the slightest provocation.
Yet civilisation has a remarkably simple examination.
Can a child return home safely?
The answer cannot be outsourced to the police, politicians or courts alone. It begins in homes where boys learn that strength is not domination and masculinity is not licence. It continues in schools that speak of consent without embarrassment and communities that prioritise protection over reputation.
Otherwise, this story already has a familiar sequel.
A child disappears; A body is found; An Outrage erupts; Leaders condemn, Arrests are made, Justice is promised and finally Memory expires.
The tragedy of Galwanpora is not merely that a little girl died. It is that every such horror adjusts our threshold of disbelief. The unthinkable becomes thinkable. The exceptional becomes routine. The headline becomes a template awaiting the next name.
And perhaps that is the final victim.
Not innocence, not trust but conscience itself.
For the day we stop being shocked that children are unsafe among their own people is the day we stop pretending that the crisis is criminal.
It is civilisational.
