I. Ahmed Wani 

Decades ago, the writer Saadat Hasan Manto described a dark truth about how our society views women:

“ہم عورت اسی کو سمجھتے ہیں جو ہمارے گھر کی ہو، باقی ہمارے لیے کوئی عورت نہیں ہوتی بس گوشت کی دکان ہوتی ہے اور ہم اس دکان کے باہر کھڑے کتوں کی طرح ہوتے ہیں جن کی ہوس زدہ نظریں ہمیشہ گوشت پر ٹکی رہتی ہیں۔” (“We only consider a woman human if she belongs to our own home. To us, the rest are just a meat shop, and we stand outside like hungry dogs with our eyes fixed on the meat.”)

It is a harsh statement. Yet events on our streets continue to prove him right.

Recently, a woman was molested during a busy protest at Lal Chowk. A camera caught the entire act. But the footage showed another chilling fact: almost no one standing nearby noticed it happen.

The crowd was shouting slogans. People were pushing forward. Police were everywhere. The noise and confusion hid the crime. The crowd was not looking, so the man made his move. That does not make the act any less serious. It shows how unsafe a woman remains, even in the middle of hundreds of people.

As the writer Rebecca Solnit once said, “Violence doesn’t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.” A woman’s safety in public still depends on pure luck. It depends on whether someone happens to look her way at the exact moment she is touched.

Around the same time, another incident happened in plain sight. Police officers pushed and manhandled women lawmakers from the Jammu and Kashmir Legislative Assembly. These were elected leaders doing their constitutional jobs.

These two events are connected. One shows how easily a woman can be assaulted in a crowd without anyone seeing it. The other shows how quickly the state can push women leaders around instead of listening to them. Both point back to Manto’s words: once a woman steps outside her home, she is seen as easy prey—whether by a stranger in a crowd or by officers in uniform.

History tells a very different story about women. Long ago, the Trưng sisters of Vietnam built an army, fought an empire, and ruled their own land. During later wars with France and the US, Vietnamese women stood deep in rivers. They held heavy wooden planks on their shoulders so soldiers could cross broken bridges. They turned themselves into bridges.

In the 1970s, Gaura Devi and village women in Uttarakhand took on loggers with axes. They hugged the trees and dared the men to cut them down. Sudesha Devi and others spent cold nights guarding the forest. The scholar Vandana Shiva wrote, “The women of Chipko understood that the real value of the forest was not the timber, but the springs and the soil that sustained their lives.”

These women did not wait for help. They stepped forward and took control. Their courage stands in sharp contrast to our streets today, where a woman can be attacked in broad daylight while a crowd looks the other way.

Our homes must answer for this. When boys are taught to respect only their mothers and sisters, they learn that other women do not matter. When leaders talk constantly about how women should dress, but say nothing about how men should behave, they give men permission to act without fear. The video from Lal Chowk does not just show a single crime. It shows a broken system of raising boys.

The poet Maya Angelou wrote, “Each time a woman stands up for herself, without knowing it possibly, without claiming it, she stands up for all women.”

Women are not asking for special treatment. They are asking for basic safety. A woman should be able to join a march, walk through a market, or speak in parliament without fear. Until we change the mindset Manto spoke about, crowds will keep hiding crimes, cameras will keep catching what we fail to see, and public streets will stay unsafe for women.