The Hindu
SHAKING SOCIETY’S CONSCIENCE: It is important for women to raise their
collective voice, but it should be for all women and all victims of the
violence embedded in our society. Photo: S. R. Raghunathan
As I write this, there are protests going on all over
Delhi, and in other parts of the country, against the gang-rape of a
young woman on a moving bus a few days ago in the city. People are out
there in large numbers — young, old, male, female, rich, poor — and
they’re angry. They want the rapists to be caught, they want them to be
taught a lesson, many are suggesting they should be hanged, or
castrated, but also that the State should act, bring in effective laws,
fast track courts, police procedures and more. Not since the Mathura
rape case have there been such widespread protests. The difference is
that then, it was mainly women’s groups who were protesting; today’s
protests are more diverse. Sometimes, tragically, it takes a case like
this to awaken public consciousness, to make people realise that rape
and sexual assault are not merely ‘women’s issues,’ they’re a symbol of
the deep-seated violence that women — and other marginalised people —
experience every day in our society.
At a time when
every politician, no matter what colour, is crying foul, every judge and
lawyer, no matter what their loyalties, is joining the chorus, every
policeperson, no matter from where, is adding his/her voice, it is worth
remembering some key things. First, more than 90 per cent of rapes are
committed by people known to the victim/survivor, a staggering number of
rapists are family members. When we demand the death penalty, do we
mean therefore that we should kill large numbers of uncles, fathers,
brothers, husbands, neighbours? How many of us would even report cases
of rape then? What we’re seeing now — the slow, painful increase in even
reports being filed — will all disappear. Second, the death penalty has
never been a deterrent against anything — where, for example, is the
evidence that death penalties have reduced the incidence of murders?
Quite apart from the fact that the State should never be given
the right to take life, there is an argument to be made that imposing
the death penalty will further reduce the rate of conviction, as no
judge will award it.
Then, and this is something that
women’s groups grasped long ago: a large number of rapes are committed
in custody, many of these by the police. Mathura was raped by two
policemen, Rameezabee was raped inside a police station by police
personnel, Suman Rani was raped by policemen. There are countless other
cases: will we hang all police rapists? Put together, that’s a lot of
people to hang.
Police action is, in fact, one of the
demands. Yet, the police’s record, whether in recording cases or in
conducting investigations, is nothing to write home about. On a recent
television show, a police officer put his finger on it when he said: how
can we expect that police personnel, who are, after all, made of the
same stuff as the men who gang-raped the young woman last week, to
suddenly and miraculously behave differently? I was reminded of a study
done by a local newsmagazine not so long ago of the attitudes of high
ranking police officers in Delhi about rape. Roughly 90 per cent of them
felt the woman deserved it, that she asked for it, that she should not
have been out alone, or should not have been dressed in a particular
fashion. Strange that women’s bodies should invite such reactions —
could it be that the problem is in the eye of the beholder? Why, for
example, does it seem to be more ‘legitimate’ for women to be out during
daylight hours, but not at night?
Lawyers and
judges too have joined the protests — and this is all to the good for
the more diverse the protests, the more impact they will have. But it’s
lawyers who use every ruse in the book to allow rapists to get away,
judges who make concessions because the rapists are ‘young men who have
their whole lives in front of them’ and so on. Do women’s lives not have
a value then?
And then there are our politicians.
Perhaps we need to ask how many politicians have rape cases, or
allegations of rape pending against them. Perhaps we need to ask why no
one is asking this question: that here you have an elected politician,
your next prime ministerial candidate, someone under whose rule Muslim
women in Gujarat were not only subjected to horrendous rape but also to
equally dreadful violence. How can we, how can the media, how can
journalists — all of whom are lauding the success of this politician,
how can they not raise, and particularly at this time, the
question of his sanctioning, encouraging the use of rape as a weapon of
war? And more, we need to ask: if the politicians are indeed serious
about this issue, why are they not out there with the protestors? When
Anna Hazare was fasting, there wasn’t a day that went by when one or
other politician did not go to see him. Where are they now?
Rape
happens everywhere: it happens inside homes, in families, in
neighbourhoods, in police stations, in towns and cities, in villages,
and its incidence increases, as is happening in India, as society goes
through change, as women’s roles begin to change, as economies slow down
and the slice of the pie becomes smaller — and it is connected to all
these things. Just as it is integrally and fundamentally connected to
the disregard, and indeed the hatred, for females that is so evident in
the killing of female foetuses. For so widespread a crime, band aid
solutions are not the answer.
Protest is important,
it shakes the conscience of society, it brings people close to change,
it makes them feel part of the change. And there is a good chance that
the current wave of protests will lead to at least some results —
perhaps even just fast track courts. But perspective is also important:
we need to ask ourselves: if it had been the army in Manipur or Kashmir
who had been the rapists, would we have protested in quite the same way?
Very likely not, for there nationalism enters the picture. Remember
Kunan Posphpora in the late nineties when the Rajasthan Rifles raped
over 30 women? Even our liberal journalists found it difficult to credit
that this could have happened, that the army could have been capable of
this, and yet, the people of Kunan Poshpora know. Even today, women
from this area find it difficult to marry — stigma has a long life.
Would we have been as angry if the rape had taken place in a small town
near Delhi and the victim had been Dalit? Remember Khairlanji? Why did
that rape, of a mother and her daughter, gruesome, violent, heinous, and
their subsequent murder not touch our consciences in quite the same
way.
It is important to raise our collective voice
against rape. But rape is not something that occurs by itself. It is
part of the continuing and embedded violence in society that targets
women on a daily basis. Let’s raise our voices against such violence and
let’s ask ourselves how we, in our daily actions, in our thoughts,
contribute to this, rather than assume that the solution lies with
someone else. Let’s ask ourselves how we, our society, we as people,
create and sustain the mindset that leads to rape, how we make our men
so violent, how we insult our women so regularly, let’s ask ourselves
how privilege creates violence.
It is important we raise our collective voice for women, but let’s raise it for all
women, let’s raise it so that no woman, no matter that she be poor,
rich, urban, rural, Dalit, Muslim, Hindu, or whatever, ever, in the
future, has to face sexual violence, and no man assumes that because of
the system and people’s mindsets, he can simply get away with it. And
let’s raise it also for men, for transgenders, for the poor — all those
who become targets of violence. Let’s not forget that the young rape
survivor in Delhi was accompanied by a friend who too was subjected to
violence and nearly killed. Let’s talk about him too.
