Here is another headline which you must have seen somewhere in news, which I feel that if put as a head line, also implies something different. I am talking about the headlines which explicitly put the caste of the rape victims, especially if the victim belongs to some lower caste of India. When rape happens somewhere, how much chance is there, that it happened on them because of their caste, not because of their vulnerable position and the criminal mind of attacker put together. Atrocities towards the weak elements of society are not a new thing. You can see it at every point irrespective of caste. It is like Survival of the fittest. Only better administration can prevent this. This has its origin as far as the human evolution. It is just because of selfish human mind. It has nothing to do with the caste of the victim. An assaulter never asks the caste before assaulting the victim.
So if we put the caste to which the victim belongs as first two words of headline. This means that we are emphasizing the fact the “lower caste of female victim” was more important than the fact of “being raped”. Which is ironic, because in most of the cases newsmakers don’t know the caste of the assaulter because they are unidentified? And if they are identified, you don’t know the motive or driving force of the rape. I am not denying the fact that few times rape also happens in order to show power of a community/caste/army towards other. But, if we are talking about the daily rape cases of India, motives and driving forces are essentially different statistically.
When you say that, a minor girl/boy was raped, you are emphasizing the severity of crime by the age of victim and the sickness of human mind. This seems fine. When you say that a foreigner got raped in India, you are emphasizing that somebody has just smeared upon the India’s face and the crime also was against a guest of India, which also seems fine. You just showed that this rape can be seen in another perspective too, and this perspective is related to severity of crime. But when you repeatedly say that a female of this particular community/caste was raped, you just increased the rift, which many politicians have been digging since ages. You just showed that this rape can also be seen as a crime of upper caste towards lower caste. And I don’t see any point in increasing the rift in society just make the news more spicy and eye catching.
You should start to see these things in more generic way, as crime arising from excessive male domination, unemployment, poverty, lack of judicial system, societal norms, criminal mind etc. Or crime of stronger part of society towards weak irrespective of gender or caste etc.
