Twelve Years After the Delhi Gang Rape, is the Media Backsliding?

The death, on December 11, of Anita Ghai, who brilliantly theorised the interstices of disability and feminism, came as a personal reminder of an important juncture in the history of the gender movement in this country: the spontaneous street protests of 2012 against the gang rape of a 23-year-old physiotherapy student. She later succumbed to the brutalisation she suffered at the hands of five men.

Hundreds of thousands of people, many of them young students, spontaneously thronged the streets, demanding justice for the student, whose media-endowed name rang out in their slogans.

Among them was Ghai, her self-steered wheelchair keeping up with the demonstrators as they marched on the streets of the capital, spiritedly lending her voice to the slogans raised by her feminist comrades.

That remarkable woman, through the miracle of memory, has become for me a placeholder for those historic protests which held out, however briefly, the possibility of a modicum social transformation, some genuine legislative reform and the potential redrawing of gender relations along more equal lines.

And, yes, because the newspapers, television channels and a fledgling social media of the time had played the role of a sutradhar in these protests, by drawing crowds to the protest sites and interpreting their mood for the country and world at large, there was also the hope that the media would themselves emerge more socially conscious and gender-sensitive through the process of telling this story.

Twelve years later, almost to the day, those hopes have been extinguished. The supposed gains of those protests have been frittered away and the expectation of lasting social change quashed in the desert sands of dead habit.

As for the media, despite gaining enormously in terms of presence from the 2012 mobilisations, they have returned to their old, patriarchal frameworks, this time fuelled by a disturbing new conservatism and subservience to the government in power.

The media now demonstrate a new appetite for glamorising wealth as the recent coverage of the Ambani scion’s wedding and its opulent religiosity indicated, and a new-found sympathy for husbands facing marital reversals. Voices demanding a rolling back of protective laws for women are now being amplified.

Consequently, legal reform for gender equality, achieved after many long struggles waged by women activists against a backdrop of murder and loss, are today in danger of being overturned. There is at present a concerted media coverage devoted to the demand to strike down Section 498A from the IPC and to repeal the Protection of Women from Domestic Act of 2005.

An occasional, undeniably tragic, case of a murder committed by a wife, or of a mother-in-law arrested wrongly, or a husband driven to suicide ostensibly by his estranged wife’s family, is given prime time and front page attention and framed to suggest that these have become national trends.

The reality is that very little has changed for women. Earlier this month, a man named Kunu Kisan, who was accused of raping a woman and released on bail in Odisha in 2023, went on to allegedly capture the survivor, slit her throat, chop up her body and discard her body parts in nearby rivers. He did it, he allegedly later said, to prevent her from sending him back to jail.

This is not an isolated incident. Gendered violence continues to be endemic in India. In 2021 alone, according to National Crime Records Bureau data, 31,677 rapes were committed, with some 49 cases of crimes against women of a more general nature registered every single hour. 

For the media to promote as credible news the dubious claim made by so-called men’s rights activists that crimes against males are rising exponentially is to perpetuate a fake narrative.

This also means that the great social churn created by the 2012 Delhi gang rape has had little lasting impact. The important, forward looking document – ‘Report of the Committee on Amendments to Criminal Law’, authored by Justice J.S. Verma, Justice Leila Seth and Gopal Subramanium – which had emerged at that point and which had suggested wide ranging reform in the way rape is perceived and acted upon in the country, is also forgotten.

The very fact that marital rape, which the Justice Verma Report emphatically considered a crime, is still being debated would indicate this.

Over the years, sensationalised, gender-skewed coverage accorded to cases such as the gang rape of a veterinarian in Hyderabad by four men who were later shot dead while in police custody (2019), or the gang rape by upper caste youth of a Dalit woman in Hathras (2020), is evidence that very little has changed in our police stations and newsrooms.

One of the rare attempts to take up this concern was a research and capacity-building media project conducted by UNESCO and Bournemouth University in 2021. The report, titled ‘Sexual violence and the news media: issues, challenges, and guidelines for journalists in India’, was authored by media academicians Chindu Sreedharan and Einar Thorsen.

They had conducted extensive workshops in India (some of which I had participated in) and made several important recommendations, including the need to establish a national charter for news reporting on rape and sexual violence with the involvement of journalism associations and news industry leaders.

Among the specific recommendations for news organisations were that good practices on covering these crimes need to be operationalised in newsrooms to inform daily editorial decision making, as well as routines for fact-checking and the verifying of FIR reports. This is especially important for Indian journalists who publish police hand-outs without scrutiny.

In the Hathras crime, which had deep caste embedding and had strong political ramifications in Adityanath’s Uttar Pradesh, most of the metropolitan news entities who ran the story were satisfied with quotes from the upper caste villagers of Boolgarhi village from whose ranks the rapists came.

The victim with her mother had gone to collect grass from fields owned by Thakurs. She was found bleeding. Not only were efforts made to suppress the assaulted woman’s testimony, given before she died, that local Thakur youth were involved in her gang rape, the police even cremated her body late at night without informing her family in order to destroy all evidence.

It was a rare organisation like the Bundelkhand-based women-run Khabar Lahariya which made the effort to speak with the Dalit families of Bhoolgarhi and could capture their helplessness and voicelessness. It is because stories of sexual violence are multi-layered that they demand journalists accessing multiple and diverse sources, as advocated by Sreedharan and Thorsen.

It may sound unthinkable for those of us who were around when the Delhi gang rape story broke in those wintery days of December 2012, but today a new generation of journalists have entered the country’s newsroom who may not have even heard of that incident or indeed of the Justice Verma Committee report.

This requires the continued retelling of that story and the lessons from it that the national media have learnt – or forgotten.

Ghai would have agreed on this need to retell the story continuously in all its dimensions. She once told me, “I teach a class of 46 students and I try to bring in not just the text but my experiential world [as a disabled person].”

For journalists, too, the experiential world is vital in telling the story.

Also read: Women’s Liberation Will Require Cross Group Solidarity

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Reviewing the judiciary

Over the last five weeks, the judiciary as an institution has been very much in the news. Three important developments have marked this interregnum.

First we had an unprecedented media scrutiny of the legacy of Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud, who demitted office in November. One of the major tropes of the op-eds, editorials and magazine cover stories which marked that exit was the creeping convergence of judicial decision-making and majoritarian sentiment in some of his judgements and public stances.

The Babri Masjid verdict, which awarded the disputed site to the Hindu party, was delivered in 2019 by a five-member bench of which Justice Chandrachud was a part, and it is believed that he was its principal author as well. Later, he allowed the Hindu party in the case involving the Gyanvapi mosque to conduct a survey of the mosque to discern its supposed temple antecedents, saying in open court to the counsel arguing the mosque’s case that “what is frivolous to you is faith for the other side”.

That verdict led to a disturbing situation which retired Supreme Court Justice Rohinton Nariman vividly described in a lecture of December 6: “We find today, like hydra heads popping up all over the country, there is suit after suit filed all over the place … Now not only concerning mosques but also dargahs.”

Second, as if to confirm that worrying trend, we had two sitting judges of the Allahabad high court – contrary to the oath they took on the Indian constitution – attend a day-long event on judicial reforms organised on December 8 by the Vishva Hindu Parishad. One of them inaugurated it, the other passed several communally charged remarks in a speech delivered on the occasion.

What was not so widely reported was that there were, besides these two honourable men, no less than 30 former judges in attendance!

The third development that completes this triptych was that semi-colon, rather than full stop, placed on this frenetic effort to discover temples under mosques with judicial sanction. The Supreme Court on December 12 ruled that until it pronounces on the Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act, 1991, no further suits of this nature will be entertained by any court in the land, although suits may still be filed.

How things will play out in the new year can only be a matter of conjecture, but all this only proves how prescient was that lecture delivered by G. Mohan Gopal, a former vice-chancellor of the National Law School of India, Bengaluru, in February 2023, when he pointed to the changing nature of judicial pronouncements.

They indicated, he said, that a larger project of ushering in a Hindu raj was in the offing, not by the overthrowing of the constitution per se but through the appointment of theocratic judges who base their verdicts on religious rather than constitutional sources.

Also read: Hindutva Jurisprudence and a Gauntlet Thrown Down at Chief Justice Khanna

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Media and MGNREGA

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) has been described as the world’s largest lifeline for some of the world’s poorest people. Today that lifeline is fraying and in danger of snapping.

For a long time now, MGNREGA workers have been staging protests pointing out how average wages under the programme have not kept pace with market wages. Earlier this month, the NREGA Sangharsh Morcha addressed the media and revealed how the Modi government is slowly strangulating this invaluable programme which was begun by the UPA in 2005. This is being done through various stratagems, from cuts in budgetary outlays to the deletion of job cards.

In fact, they pointed out, financial cuts and the systematic whittling down of the workforce are two sides of the same coin designed to rob them of their right to employment.

The national media has thus far shown a conspicuous lack of interest in highlighting this story, something that is hardly surprising given their almost complete indifference to rural India, coverage of which has been whittled down to irrelevance. In fact, right from the days when the MGNREGA, which guaranteed 100 days of work to rural households, came into force in 2006, a lot of media space has been expended in pouring scorn on the programme.

Widely exaggerated figures on the likely costs of the project were promoted through reportage and commentary and the argument was made incessantly that India just cannot afford such an expensive scheme. The findings of the first Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) report on the programme – ‘Audit of Implementation of National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005’, which came out in December 2006 – was widely misrepresented and the charge was made that the intended beneficiaries were not benefitting from it.

The media attack was doubly ironic because the very same media at that very same time seemed to have found nothing wrong with commercial banks reporting gross non-performing assets having escalated by Rs 6,139 crore (figure for 2008).

As noted economist Jayati Ghosh pointed out at that time, the CAG report had merely highlighted the fact that

“the programme so far has not done what it was supposed to do to the full extent, mainly because of the shortage of administrative and technical staff. What it stresses therefore is the urgent need to ensure more administrative assistance for the programme at all levels, which really means both resources and personnel devoted to the actual implementation, monitoring and financial management of the programme.”

In the years since, the hostile media narrative has remained largely unchanged. While in opposition the BJP was a strong critic of the programme, it changed its tune in the early days of coming in power, possibly realising the programme’s popularity among the rural poor.

The first Modi term saw allocations almost double. However, in 2019, after the party returned with an even bigger majority in the general election that year, it began to taper off spending. The 2019 budgetary outlay for the job programme was frozen at Rs 60,000 crore despite a rising demand for MGNREGA work. The media, unsurprisingly, found nothing amiss with this.

Freezing funds was the first step to restricting a scheme that had at least 129 million active workers enrolled. Other measures followed, including the requirement that those who seek work under the MGNREGA must first link their bank accounts and job cards with their Aadhaar numbers and connect it with the National Payments Corporation of India.

This move, taken to ostensibly address corruption, left innumerable workers out in the cold, either because they were not technologically capable, or because banking and internet systems in their villages were inadequate, or because their biometric details did not match those in the government database.

The end result was that several crore job cards were declared ineffectual. While reports of the wide distress this caused did make it to social media, Big Media resolutely turned its back on these stories.

Today, MGNREGA workers have been forced to take their realities to the people of the country by staging dharnas in the national capital.  But this in no way has made mainstream media any more sympathetic to their plight.

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Readers write in…

Edits required

Mail received from Wasim Khan, producer, Open Air films and co-producer, Tees…

“I read the Wire piece. ‘Dibakar Bannerjee’s Unreleased Film Tees Explores the Stories of Three Generations of Kashmiris’ (November 13). I’m the co-producer of the film along with Dibakar Banerjee. First, the whole team would like to extend our sincere thanks to writer for her lovely article and to The Wire for publishing it. It only encourages us to make more films about stories that we believe in and want to share with the world.

“However, since as you are aware the film is yet to be released and we are trying our best to bring it to a world of enthusiastic audiences like yourselves. This job is yet to be done. While we really enjoyed reading what is written, we also felt that the plot of the film is revealed in a way that will either come in the way of viewers who we hope will watch it in the near future, or form opinions that are too early and can become detrimental to the cause of the film. 

“We would, therefore, like you to edit the crucial plot points and story beats from the write up so that when we finally release the film more people are in a position to be moved by it, just as you were. I hope that you and the team at Wire will take prompt action on this. Such a move will be greatly appreciated. In case you want to get in touch with us regarding this please feel free to write back.

PS: There is a typo in Dibakar’s spelling. He spells Banerjee with a single ‘n’. Request you to rectify that as well.

End note: ADR has some interesting nuggets of information: Among the candidates who won in Maharashtra during the recent state elections, ten have declared cases related to crimes against women. Out of these ten, one winning candidate has a declared charge related to rape (IPC Section-376) against him.

Write to ombudsperson@thewire.in.

Note: The Wire has corrected the aforementioned typo in Dibakar Banerjee’s name as pointed out by Wasim Khan. We are grateful to our vigilant readers for writing in with corrections and opinions.