when will they learn, woMen are not their birth right?
Manorama was raped. She was my friend. The palm-leaf fence between our plots never divided our hearts. My mother didn’t say it in so many words, but conveyed it to me in carefully crafted lingo that missed the enormity of the crime. At the innocent age of 13 or 14, we didn’t know what rape was till a college-going dude in the neighbourhood explained. Manorama was one among us, a battalion of village urchins who roamed around doing what normal kids do. The violator, three-four years older to us, was a black sheep, a ruffian, among us.
The crime scene — a dark, thatched hut which till an hour earlier had been an extension of our playground — became a forbidden place, cordoned off by village elders including my parents who paced up and down the soggy front yard figuring out how to handle the tragedy. Manorama’s mother’s wailing was drowned by her siblings’ cries for revenge. The agony and anger lasted only a couple of hours. The sighs, whispers and hum of conversation that had enveloped the house frittered away as people retreated to their own lives. Chickens were back in the bucolic compound scratching in the dirt. Manorama was not taken to hospital. Ramanathan, the violator, was not reported to the police. She became just a sorry decimal in the millions of unreported rape cases in the world. The criminality of societal indifference and the make-believe normalcy angered us. We wanted to bump him off with our catapults.
A few days later, we went in and hugged her, invited her to play hide-and-seek in the tapioca groves. Manorama wasn’t the same old butterfly. The girl full of beans had changed forever. Melancholic and monosyllabic, she wore the demeanour of a child lost in the wilderness. She would soon drop out of our friendship — and school — to scrub, bake and sweep.
Life had since been a procession of similar tragedies, repudiating the right-wing claim that rapes happen in modern India, not classical Bharat. Manorama happened in the early ’70s, Nirbhaya of Delhi a couple of generations later. Rape, the worst and most intimate of crimes, has never been a systemic civilisation crisis. It’s omnipresent. But some names just won’t fade away. One such recent case is Zainab Ansari, who was raped, murdered and dumped on a rubbish heap in Kasur, eastern Pakistan. “What’s the big deal? What’s so special about her?” Insensitive questions are raised every time a tragedy sparks global outrage. It happened when the Nirbhaya incident in 2002 shook the nation. When the common man seizes a cause, the elite who find themselves insignificant in the melee, can dig out different narratives.
“You know why? She’s from an upper caste.”
“You know why? The accused is a slumdog.”
“You know why? The girl’s pretty, with hazel eyes.”
When such polemical narratives spring from respectable minds, they generate disgust.
Take Arundhati Roy’s initial reaction to the Nirbhaya saga. It was not only unbecoming of an activist-writer but an affront to the victim and her parents whose social background wasn’t too different from that of their daughter’s attackers. To quote Roy, “But the real problem is, why is this crime creating such a lot of outrage, is because it plays into the idea of the criminal poor, the vegetable vendor, the gym instructor, the bus driver actually assaulting a middle-class girl. But when rape is used as a means of domination by upper castes, by the army or the police, it’s not even punished.”
There couldn’t be a better counter to Roy than Lakshmi Chaudhry’s scorcher in Firstpost.com: “In turning a horrific act of sexual violence into a tale of class privilege, Roy eliminates the victim from the picture... Roy does not condone the rape of the middle class woman, but she dehumanises her as collateral damage in a class war.”
For the common man who took to the streets in India, Pakistan and the world over, seeking justice for Zainab and Nirbhaya, rape has no classification. They weren’t bothered if Zainab was Shia or Sunni; Nirbhaya Brahmin or Dalit. What made Nirbhaya and Zainab the poster girls of a “global spring” is the scale of abominable cruelty meted out to the hapless victims who had been going about their business. Zainab went missing on January 4 while heading to a nearby home for Quran classes. According to an autopsy report, the eight-year-old was strangled, sodomised and raped. There were torture marks on her face and her tongue was crushed between her teeth.
Nirbhaya, a 23-year-old paramedical student, was gangraped by six men in a moving bus when she and her male friend were returning after watching the film Life of Pi. Graphic descriptions of how one of the accused picked up an iron rod from under the seat and forced it into Nirbhaya to “teach her a lesson” left people seething. Today, Zainab and Nirbhaya are legends. Their deaths have changed the way we look at rape. They have become a movement, rekindling flames of hope.
India and Pakistan are not alone at the top of the chart in sexual violence. In a world where one in three (35 per cent) women experiences physical or sexual violence in her lifetime, who’s next, is anybody’s guess. From New Delhi to New York, Soweto to San Francisco, Cologne to Kerala, rape is everywhere.
In India, a woman is reportedly raped every 15 minutes. Someone is raped every second of every day in South Africa. In the United States, there is a reported rape every 6.2 minutes, or a rape a minute unofficially. No country is insulated from this plague.
Feminism started in the ’60s. The campaign for womens’ empowerment began in earnest in the early ’80s. Still the road to gender equality remains hard and long, with the destination at least 100 years away. In India, laws that were tightened after the Nirbhaya case haven’t deterred crime. A 15-year-old student in Kurukshetra, Haryana, was gangraped and mutilated after she left home for tuition classes on January 9. An 11-year-old girl was raped and murdered allegedly by two neighbours in Panipat on January 13.
What’s wrong with us, the men? Is it the concept of masculinity that we inherited from a patriarchal system? Is it the ideologies of male sexual entitlement that we have learnt from our movies and literature? Is it the weak legal sanctions for sexual violence? Is it the age-old beliefs in family honour and sexual purity? Is it the proliferation of Internet pornography in a conservative society? Is it the social milieu that mass produces criminals? When will we teach our boys to respect women irrespective of what they wear? Forget the nine yards, even a whole hundred yards wouldn’t suffice for women to protect themselves. When will boys learn that women are not their birth right? When will we educate males about female advocacy, equality and human rights? Where have the gentleman boys who rubbed shoulders with agitating girls in Delhi disappeared? Is anybody out there listening? My friend Manorama is waiting for the day of redemption. suresh@khaleejtimes.com
India and Pakistan are not alone at the top of the chart in sexual violence. In a world where one in three (35%) women experiences physical or sexual violence, who’s next, is anybody’s guess