Varsha Tiwary 
Safety is a basic human need. All women want to be safe. What could be wrong with a step for women’s safety?
In India, women’s safety has always been a double-edged weapon that can be as much wielded against them as for them. The focus of policy measures in our patriarchal society is often not on solving the problem, the crime, or the issue at hand but in asking women why they must do it (go out, drive, live alone.)
I hail from central India and my grandmother did not have the right to study. My mother’s generation got educated but did not have the right to dress or marry as they pleased. We savoured more freedoms, especially the small ones, like dressing the way we liked, going to a gym because our foremothers made space for it and time was kinder to us. But the river of time is flowing backwards now.
In today’s India, women of my daughter’s age must strategise on their own how best to negotiate Delhi streets when drunk-to-gills Kaanwariyas felicitated with garlands are let loose on streets for a month every monsoon. They do that during other ‘freepass’ festivals – Holi, Navratra, college fests as well.
Conscious of the way safety works here, women continue to rely on common sense and internalised threat perception to stay safe. Surviving and staying safe on day-to-day basis make women only too aware of the danger posed by people who claimed to save us. Relying on fragile egoed fathers, brothers, husbands and busybodies whose need to preserve their own saviour image exceeds their ability to act viably, brings its own complications.
We are acutely conscious that if we were to let too much protection be inflicted on us, we would end up confined in some arid ‘protectorate’ of a permanently constricted life.
Aren’t they right to be concerned, you might ask. Yes, concern is nice – the way we are all concerned about pollution. There’s danger in breathing the polluted air, we know. But no one says not breathing is a solution.
Yes, there has been an occasional touchy-feely man in position of power over each one of us – a school master, a dentist, an uncle sitting next to us on the bus – hence we devise and contrive ways to be clear of them, because often we don’t have the means to confront them.
But a tailor? A gym-boy?
You could decimate them in seconds. The power to bring or take away business here belongs to the woman. That gives us our safety. No woman would patronise a business that does not pamper her or bring a sense of ease.
In most cities I have lived in, from Gwalior to Bhubaneshwar to Raipur, Hyderabad and Chandigarh, not to speak of Delhi; the common knowledge of a tailor master’s tehzeeb and sharafat precedes the shohrat about his wizardry at work to a cliched degree. The best tailors are courteous if talkative gentlemen. Hence to get their time and attention is the chief problem.
Literature too, reflects this socio-cultural truth.
The focal character of Rambhakt Rangbaz which I translated into English (1990, Aramganj) is Ashiq Miyan, a Muslim tailor, who runs a popular men’s tailoring and women’s boutique in a Hindu mohalla. Ashiq Miyan is able to run a successful business with largely women clientele, only because his mere presence makes mothers and daughters and sisters feel safe as well as welcome.
A sign on the door of Ashiq’s boutique proclaims, shohdas (loafers and layabouts) are not allowed to stand on the verandah. If over-inquisitive gents tailoring customers even try craning necks to the women’s side, they get booted out. Whether they be – upper caste Didis, Mausis or Maanjis or Valmikinagar Bhabhis and Bhaujis – they all come to Ashiq Miyan not just due to his skill and his solicitousness and courtesy, but for his extraordinary ability to be genuinely empathetic.
The details and dialogues that etch Ashiq’s character echo the ethnographic of the heartland with great authenticity. A society riddled with differences yet managing to grant dialogue and co-exist.
Over the years, not just with respect to women’s safety but with regards to citizens’ safety in general, a refusal to deal with actual crimes has become the norm. At the same time the citizen’s circle of responsibility in ensuring own safety has expanded. The police keep putting up posters exhorting citizens to be responsible for their own safety, to be alert because bombs, lurking criminals, suspicious objects and people may target them.
Certain zones are labelled as accident prone/theft prone. We must mind ourselves and our belongings. When a crime or mishap occurs the legal and judicial systems spend considerable time in proving that the victims of misfortune themselves brought it forth. Alongside, there is a constricting of existing freedoms by making more and more activities unlawful by definition. The latest example comes from Uttar Pradesh.
In a state where women are found raped and hung from trees, where raped, beheaded torsos are thrown on the highway; the concern displayed by the UP Women’s Commission to save women from potentially lecherous tailors and gym instructors takes the breath away. The proposal – wrapped in righteousness to veil its misogynist bigoted core – is a perfect example of sanity-eroding wickedness posing as ‘policy.’
It truly boggles the mind. Vile eager beavers, who never blink when unspeakable atrocities occur now run to stigmatise an everyday innocent activity like tailoring or gymming! The ones who snore on through complete mayhem suddenly turning their hypervigilant dog whistles on potential criminals of imaginary crimes!
The situation can only be summed up by Kabir’s ulatbansi in Arvind Krishna Mehotra’s lively translation (Songs of Kabir, 2011)
‘How do you…
…Patrol a city
Where frogs keep snakes
As watchdogs,
And Jackals
Go after lions?’
But something also tells us that this dissonance is by design. The logic that deems as policy something that would further restrict and control women’s lives, and the logic that controls potential crimes by outlawing ordinary activities; is the very logic that displays benign unconcern for justice for rape victims. That shows extreme tolerance towards sordid crimes and their perpetrators.
Any exercise of designating and defining ‘unsafety’—in places/groups of people— is an insidious way of defining who is legitimate or not. Once defined legitimate you get to commit crimes and be felicitated for them. While even existing becomes a crime for those deemed illegitimate. Their right to livelihood can be snatched on any imaginary pretext.
In fact, an order that sustains itself on a perpetual state of unsafety needs to grant impunity to select few and keep taking intermittent smokescreen measures to further stigmatise the designated ‘other.’ That’s the way the order keeps granting itself legitimacy.
All in the name of our safety.
Varsha Tiwary is a Delhi based writer and translator.