May 8, 2016: The date is no mistake. In fact, I normally don’t post the date when I’m developing a new article. This time, the date on which I began to write this article is important: Mother’s Day 2016.
It’s now a week later. It’s been another green rainy day, and I’m finally preparing to put this article to bed; that is, to post it to Feature Articles on my site. I suspect it will be three parts long. There was no way around it.

I started following this story about five days ago, when the news first caught my eye. I couldn’t let it pass. The headlines took me back about 3 years 2 weeks and 3 days to December 16, 2012–or maybe I learned on the 17th. The news was gruesome, macabre, a gang rape in Delhi that would eventually become a particularly brutal murder by the time the 23-year-old physiotherapy student then known as Nirbhaya succumbed to her injuries in the wee hours of December 29 in Singapore.

Outrage about Jisha’s attack grew far more slowly than the protests did in Nirbhaya’s case. But protests have also been rising in Jisha’s case now too.
Yet although Jisha apparently had been harassed for about a year prior to her rape and brutal murder, police failed to follow up on her mother’s effort to report the incidents since they didn’t believe the mother. (You’ll see commentary in some of the articles related to the mother’s mental instability as the reason police gave for the lack of follow up.)

In the days, weeks and months after that case–and now years later–I have continued to plead for people to demand that the *conviction* rates in India need to be raised. But please don’t misunderstand. While the Nirbhaya tragedy even with her name now commonly known–and now this one–both took place in India, the world statistics are simply stunning. In fact according to RAINN, an American is sexually assaulted every 107 seconds! NYC Against Rape lists their findings , a few of which caught my eye so strongly I’ll share them here:

• One woman in four will be sexually assaulted during her lifetime.

• 683,000 adult American women are forcibly raped each year. This equals 56,916 per month; 1,871 per day; 78 per hour; and 1.3 per minute.

• Only 16% of rapes are ever reported to the police.

• There is no such thing as a type of person that is more likely to get raped. Women and men of all ages, religions, class, cultures, beliefs or geographic locations can become a victim.

Now mind you, that’s just in the United States! These crimes are global and epidemic and are not singular to India, which is part of my point for posting these facts and links. Nevertheless, I can’t ignore Jisha.

Jisha – Home for Her and Her Mother
Living in Perumbavoor, Kerala, Jisha was hoping to pursue a law degree so she could improve the quality of life for her mother and her. They lived in a one-room house and pretty much stayed away from everyone else in the community since her mother felt they were more vulnerable to issues where they didn’t have a man in the home to protect them.

On the night of April 28–the exact time appears to be up for grabs although apparently sometime between 6 pm and 9 pm, depending on who’s telling the timeline–Jisha was raped, stabbed 30 times and viciously kicked in the belly until her intestines fell out.

Now please understand, I’m sitting in my home some 13000 miles from Kerala and the Ernakulam district where it occurred  From what I’ve seen of the news about Jisha’s death, there may be a question as to whether she was gangraped or raped. I first heard it was a gang rape. That apparently was changed to a single individual. From where I sit, whether it’s one or a dozen, rape is still rape. The end result in this case was fairly identical to Nirbhaya’s, only that she wasn’t even out and about: she was assaulted in her own home.
An article appeared in Huffington Post less than two months before the tragedy that claimed Nirbhaya’s life, stating that the United States was #13 in the world for sexual assault. You’ve probably seen many statistics already, so even the article on rape in The Nation magazine might not have presented you with any new updates.

There are, however, more stats to rattle you if you aren’t rattled already–even if you don’t know that in parts of Africa, an average of 48 women per hour are raped. And according to Wikipedia, roughly 20% of gang rape victims die from their injuries. Wikipedia also notes that India is not alone in mutilation after these already violent acts. Africa apparently also claims the record for that as well as South Africa’s being “rape capital of the world” from what Wikipedia says there too.

So let’s move on because you have the basic gist of the story. It’s painful for the reader–or at least it is to me. But then I’ve been writing about the abuses of humanity since Malala Yousefzai’s assault in Pakistan just months before the brutal gang rape and murder of Nirbhaya. In respect to her memory, while I know the name now, knowledge of her name has done nothing to stop these attacks, nor have the increased threats of punishment. That won’t change either–until arrest and conviction rates rise.

First, a look at the assault as originally noted. While the New Indian Express stated a contradiction of one of the family and neighbors’ report of the murder taking place as early as 6 pm, the post mortem report indicated it might have been around 9 pm. I’d seen other articles claiming 8 pm and that her mother arrived home shortly after and possibly as late as 8:30 pm. With that in mind, I’ve decided to hold to the charts with which I began, set for 8 pm. There’s too much correlation to this particular time for me simply to walk away from it and look at 9 pm. It’s seems just too iffy for me especially when the various media wasn’t even sure of her age. Some articles indicated she was as young as 27 while others stated she was 30.

Not a Love Story

Several articles said Jisha had had a problem with several men in the area who had made several advances toward her, a point of concern for her mother. This may have also been the reason behind her mother’s icy relationship with the rest of the community. Her family had mentioned the refusal of neighbors to assist when she was crying for help and how Jisha and her mother had been subjected to various attacks on their home.

In an op-ed for The Hindu, Dr. Shiv Visvanathan, a professor at Jindal Law School where Jisha had been a student, wrote, “According to the autopsy, she had been subject to extreme violence and assault. In short, her body had been brutalised. What was even worse was that hers was a classic case of indifference by the police. The horrific case has inevitably drawn comparisons with the brutal gang rape and death of a student in New Delhi in 2012.

“One can go on with a series of such anecdotes. At one level, one senses the limits of the law in understanding such cases of violence. Yet, at another, it makes one ask why and what it is that makes society react with such indifference to brutality, dismissing it as an aberration when such instances of violence are becoming all too frequent. If society considers this to be normal or treats it with indifference, one has to wonder if society itself is normal.”

In all fairness to India, a nation I dearly love despite its flaws, this issue of indifference to violence is not singular to India at all. It’s a global problem just as all domestic violence is. As I write these words, memories of my college years flood my mind again to when someone told me the average student at my school was blasé about events at that time. My own passion for life and subjects that fully captured my attention tended to stand out in such an environment, the person noted. So please, dear reader, don’t think this is a put-down of India. It most definitely is not.

But it is a strong reminder that India, like the rest of us, has problems paralleling and sometimes even surpassing the level of astounding occurrence in the rest of the world. It didn’t start there however: I saw it in college long before crimes like these reached the proportions they have today. My noting the words of Dr. Visvanathan are here to point out his concerns as well.

“This is a question that goes beyond rights and democracy. It plunges deep into the basics of what constitutes that which is social. Is not the primordialism and the banality of violence being used to construct a new kind of social? Are the current strategies of law enough to ponder over and philosophise about such events?

“The stomach churns and the mind revolts when the media report such events. Yet, one realises that there is little follow-up. It is almost as if such events pile up on the assembly line of memory as society seems unable to assimilate such events,” he says.
The 35-minute partile quincunx between the 1st house transiting Mars retrograde (Rx) in Sagittarius and the 6th house Sun in Taurus brings to mind Marion March and Joan McEvers and their caution (reiterated by Lois Rodden some years before her death) to “adjust” with a quincunx. This word also reminds me of the words Nirbhaya’s attackers said the night she was attacked, if only she hadn’t fought–or perhaps it was that she shouldn’t have resisted. The verbatim comment is now lost from memory, but the appalling self-righteous righteous, self-serving, self-aggrandizing authority in those words takes one to new heights of disbelief.

I used the first time I saw reported by the news for this chart. 8:00 PM IST. Since then, there have been several other times listed as possibilities. This chart spoke very loudly to me, as you’ll see in the rest of the analysis, and I’m inclined to believe this is the one that should be considered. I’d lay odds that the attacker had probably been watching for a while to note the time Jisha’s mother would come home, but I suspect the attack was a symbolic one against her mother as well. Note the antiscion of the Moon conjunct Mars in the attack chart while Venus’ antiscion conjuncts the Midheaven (MC). I’ll be pointing to an uncanny sequence in the charts as I move on.

Note as well how the antiscion of Chiron falls in 1° opposition to the attack chart’s Ceres, indicative of the mother. It seems to imply this was not only a symbolic attack against Jisha’s mother but against all mothers and therefore all women. The midpoint of the semisextile between the South Node (Ketu in Vedic astrology) and Uranus–6 Aries 01–forms a 46-minute partile conjunction to Ceres and a 14-minute partile opposition to the Chiron antiscion. But this isn’t simply a midpoint opposition. The precision here is critical in understanding that we are also looking at a Resonant Blooming Undecaquartisextile (UQSXT) at the point where Chiron’s antiscion sits!

If the time of the attack on Jisha then is truly 8:00 PM as I believe it is based on that first report, the Mutable T-square with the Jupiter Rx-Neptune opposition was positioned and intercepted respectively in the 10th and 4th houses. Saturn retrograde (Rx), the arm of the T-square completing the Peeling of Life’s Onion, fell in the 1st in Sagittarius. But the Ascendant degree pointed ominously in this case to an anaretic degree of 29 Scorpio 27. Although we can certainly look to the next sign in this case, directing us to the law becoming an important factor as it surely is, Saturn’s presence in that first house hints at the delays that took place in this crime–another point Dr. Visvanathan noted in his anger at the indifference of police to address the attack much sooner than the ten days it actually took.

Uranus plays a significant role in the chart, of course. We know, obviously, Jisha didn’t invite the attack based on the mother’s effort to get into the house for several minutes before finding her daughter’s body. It’s important then to note as well the semisextile between Mercury and Uranus in the chart.

Despite my having mentioned Ceres in this analysis, I normally don’t take note of these additional points. However, perhaps I should in this case since even Juno has some relevance we might consider. The midpoint of the Mercury-Uranus semisextile falls at 7 Taurus 34, conjunct the transiting Sun and forming a Blooming UQSXT to Juno. As I understand it, Juno is often thought to be relevant to contractual agreements–like marriage. I normally wouldn’t use it, but I confess it seems to be relevant here as well. On the other hand, if I ignore this point as I would if Juno weren’t showing, we’d still see another Resonant Blooming UQSXT which is even more significant, given the nature of the crime:

Please take note that some parts of this article will almost seem redundant since you’ll feel like you’ve read one part or another earlier. That will indeed be the case, not because I’ve become confused rather to avoid your becoming confused as all of the contact points are flushed out.
Break to part 2