Looks like a pandemic of rape is sweeping across the country. No female in any age group, caste or class seems to be safe. Doctors, nurses and medical students are raped in hospitals, women in schools and college premises, farm workers on the roads and in fields, even women in the army or the air force all have reportedly been subjected to gruesome rapes and gang rapes.
We have plenty of laws amended many times, but not enough justice. Why?
Going through the debates on rape, from the gruesome 2012 Nirbhaya rape to the equally horrific rape-murder of the young doctor in Kolkata, one thing becomes clear. Gender is a social system that divides socio-political power in India and men have the sole, clearly articulated agency for change and decision making.
And once male politicians enter the debate, women in opposition-ruled territory are turned into abstractions, as symbols of a morally and administratively weak and useless government that must be dismissed and replaced with a new one (preferably theirs).
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.
Ultimately, if the state manages to sack its political opponents and impose governor’s rule, it will go on to proclaim itself as a stout defender of the rights of the nation’s mothers, sisters and daughters, all of whom remain faceless abstractions.
A generation of politically savvy activists in the ‘70s had worked to highlight several solid issues. One was that rapes are only a by-product of issues like the non-recognition or dismissal in police stations of charges of sexual harassment at the workplace on grounds of the gender, political muscle or social status of the accused, leading to delays in registering the crime, if at all it was registered.
Another point was that several cases of marital rape were being summarily dismissed by lower courts citing the traditional marital duties of the Indian wife.
A third point that has been raised more recently is the dramatic increase in gang rapes and the mass circulation online of child sexual abuse material and violent rape within school premises.
How has the nation addressed these points raised by women witnesses themselves, which the Verma Committee amendments emerged from?
Yes, reporting and registering FIRs on rape cases are increasing now, but follow-up action remains weak. Cases still drag on for years. Once jailed, proven sexual offenders can still be suddenly released for “good behaviour” and be greeted by their admirers. And a few like Ram Rahim get frequent bail, helped by legal loopholes and kind-hearted jailors obliged with party tickets.
So one must conclude that the victories have been partial victories.
Women want rapists apprehended and punished. But on issues of their serving less time, getting the death penalty, or having a right to a mercy petition or chemical castration, the jury is still out.
One can thank the Verma Committee for having tweaked the older rape laws so that courts have begun accepting a supposed distinction between sex and gender. But when one reads many actual judgments, the matter of female sexuality is still being argued and adjudicated upon often as it was before. Victims are simply not seen, especially in lower courts, as having an agency of their own as men do.
Back to the Kolkata doctor’s rape and the inexcusable delays at various points, we realise that even now, a dual view complicates the question when adjudicating on rape and sex: Is the dead girl to be evaluated as per the secular constitution, a social creature on par with men? Or as a sum total of her gender, caste, community and being a native of a certain state?
Do politicians see her as an abstraction to be used to settle political scores, as Bengal ki beti? Is her personal tragedy being discussed only vis-a-vis family honour tarnished in Mamata’s Bengal? Even the dead girl’s colleagues protesting on the streets are dragging their feet over meeting the chief minister to articulate their own demands. Above everything, they demand the live streaming of their talks nationwide.
Compare this to the news of the plight of assetless manual labourers who were invited to Israel to replace lost Palestinian workers and found themselves cheated. The male labourers rightly claimed their skills and labour as something exclusively their own and complained about having that taken away. Great embarrassment followed and they are being told they are acceptable as they are.
But this is something women both as homebodies and workers have been denied when their rights over their bodies are violated. The police and many in the legal fraternity still do not see women’s bodies as ‘their’ own, unlike the migrant men who effectively articulate their rage about being called unskilled and denied parity with local workers.
In neither our thanas nor our district courts do male co-workers help a woman articulate her story as she experienced it or record her rage.
So deep are the gendered perceptions about a woman’s body that one home minister in Telangana, I recall, asked incredulously why a rape victim – a veterinarian who was similarly butchered – chose to call her sister for help when she could have called the police and saved herself.
Vinesh Phogat’s tormentor facing a trial for molestation asks that if she is a medal-winning wrestler, why did she not slap him if he had really tried to molest her? Why did she not fight back?
The blunt realisation that all the world over men control power and popular perception, and that men’s control over women is ultimately rooted in both her sex and gender, hit one between the eyes as one heard Vinesh and five other girls testifying against the boss man.
From the time of the Greeks, it is men, not women, who have made and passed laws in parliaments and also supervised their enforcement. The entire legal process thus remained based solely on a male understanding and experience of societal relationships and the needs of both men and women.
“Political revolutions aim to change political institutions in ways”, wrote Thomas Kuhn, “in ways that these institutions themselves prohibit.”
Liberal legalism notwithstanding, a coercive, legitimated male viewpoint is the sole viewpoint available to the operative state machinery on the ground. This has blinkered society. In most women’s experience, our laws for the freedom of speech protect male stalkers and paid-up trolls in cyberspace who make unmentionable threats and offers to women who dare to criticise the system or fight back against bullies.
The fact is, if sexuality is central to a woman’s definition in India and forced sex is central to the average Indian’s idea of sexuality, then rape remains indigenous to and not exceptional in most women’s lives, especially if they are poor and mobile.
To block rapes is to first ensure genuine gender equality. It needs solid steps on the ground, not politicians and the judiciary genuflecting together before tradition, religion or civil society marching in streets with candles and placards.
Saakhi is a Sunday column from Mrinal Pande, in which she writes of what she sees and also participates in. That has been her burden to bear ever since she embarked on a life as a journalist, writer, editor, author and as chairperson of Prasar Bharti. Her journey of being a witness-participant continues.
