The new Indian woman
-Astra

There is an amazing discovery to be made about the new Indian woman, but first you will have to find her. She may not be real or forever, say, like diamonds (after all, who wants real woman?) and if you can’t find her, you can always find a Lara Dutta. With a little help from fashion divas and fitness gurus — not to mention the right family genes — the prototype of the New Indian woman is yours to behold. As for the rest of them, they don’t count. Except as statistic. Or just for the record.

Like the baby girl who rounded up the one billionth of the country’s population. Or the poor tribal women of Tripura labouring in the fields, raising their children or just getting through the day. So unreal, so un Lara-like are they, they can hardly be the toast of the nation. Or win titles. Their lives are not strutting their stuff on stage. But they end up as meat anyway. For the militants of Tripura, tribals themselves.

Like Nandita Debbarma, a 22-year-old who was picked up by NLFT militants on April 13 from West Tripura district, gangraped in a forest and thrown, senseless, into a ditch. Or 25-year-old nanibala Debbarma who was raped by Madhusudan Debbarma, an NLFT militant on April 11 at Tarapada Bare in West Tripura.

Or the young tribal girl who was picked up from her house near Birgonj in South Tripura by militants who raped her and whose body was found hanging from a tree.

Or the two adolescent girls, daughters of a temple priest who were raped by a gang of militants after they broke into the temple complex in South Tripura’s Belonia’s subdivision.

Or Niyate Jamatiya a pretty 25-year-old girl who was raped by an NLFT militant in West Tripura’s Bisramganj area. Or the scores of minor girls and young women of the Reang community who have been sexually abused and killed by militants in West Tripura’s Bhandarima and Simnapur areas.

The conundrum about the new Indian woman is this: if the images are new, they are not real; if they are real, they are not new. So you may well ask: "Will the real new Indian woman please step forward?" Perhaps there is nothing to be discovered about the new Indian woman, other than that she exists. Well, does she?