Throwing of acid not only burns down a women’s face, but also her life is turned into ashes. Personally, I feel that, it’s better for acid victim to die rather than to survive, because in the aftermath her survival becomes a burden and curse in itself. In the age of google-lization, simply a click takes us through various incidents of acid attack and gives us an insight into the victims; however it never gives any account of mass protest against it, because that is yet to be done.
This gives us reasons to worry and make us feel really very cynical. However, there has been some people whose initiatives show us certain ray of hope. Among such right thinking citizens are Aseem Trivedi and Alok Dixit. Though they don’t require any introduction and perhaps anybody associated with the activism world knows about them, however speaking briefly Aseem Trivedi and Alok Dixit are crusaders fighting for the online freedom of speech and scraping of the undemocratic Sec 66 A of the IT Act. Aseem is the one, whose arrest woke and united the whole nation against the IT Act and fight for freedom of speech in the online arena.
Speaking in the context of acid attacks, Aseem and Alok along with their other teammates have decided to raise this issue in the society and make the people aware and realize the pang of the acid attack victims. For this they initially started off with lunching of a website ‘http://www.stopacidattacks.org’, they are also running a facebook page to support the cause. Further on the 8th of March i.e. on Women’s Day, they have planned a seminar at the Hindi Bhawan, Delhi where the website would be lunched and relevant points would be discussed.
These initiatives give us a lot of hopes, however without the mass support of the people it can’t be a success. Also, till now the government has been sitting with tied hands and until the government intervenes, it would be tough to draw positive outcomes.
At the last, wishing this noble campaign a success, it would be interesting to watch how things move on.