Gender violence and patriarchal fears
The recent brutal gangrape and murder of a 23-year-old student in New Delhi sent shock waves throughout the nation. Commentators such as Arundhati Roy have suggested that this case is no more or less shocking than the sexual violence routinely experienced by Indian women nationally, and has captured the national imagination because it was perpetrated on an urban young woman, rather than a working-class, minority or a dalit woman. Whatever the reason, the anger and protests that this case has sparked against sexual violence that women face have been remarkable, if not unprecedented. At this point it may be timely to remind ourselves of the women’s movement in the early 1980s around the gangrape of a tribal girl, Mathura, by two policemen in a police station and the role and complicity of the judiciary in condoning it, and the protests against sexual violence against Muslim women in the 2002 Gujarat riots. The current movement appears to be different from the earlier ones because of its scale, and perhaps that it’s not restricted to radical, left-wing feminist organisations and individuals, but is wider, though perhaps more chaotic and less organised.
For someone who frequently experienced sexual harassment while travelling by public transport in Delhi in the 1990s, reading about this case and the street protests whilst located in another country far away is both heartening and disturbing. Heartening because of the scale of public anger against the state and police apathy and the endemic, daily sexual harassment and trivialisation of these experiences. It is disturbing because of the gruesome nature of the violence suffered by this young woman; the fact that she was stripped and thrown out of a moving bus; the fact that sexual violence continues to escalate in both urban and rural India; and, finally because the public response to this horrific crime can, in the main, be described as vigilante.
Public response has been complex and hybrid. On the one hand, there have been spontaneous vigils against sexual violence by university students in Delhi and elsewhere, where young women are demanding their right to the public space, free from the fear of sexual violence. Young women are claiming their right to dress as they wish, and the public space as their own. This can only be a positive sign.
On the other hand, the case has led to MPs, police officials and others voicing misogynist views. For instance, Congress MP Abhijit Mukherjee dismissed protesters against the gangrape as “dented and painted women.” Similarly, increased sexual violence against women has been linked by MPs such as Shivanand Tiwari to commodification of women in Bollywood cinema. Samajwadi Party leader Abu Azmi and RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat believe that rapes are mostly an urban phenomenon, linked to Westernisation and women wearing “less clothes”, and that urban women need to protect themselves by staying at home, and venture out of the home only when chaperoned by male relatives. These views have been endlessly dissected and debated on TV shows and on social networking sites, but what needs to be taken into account is that these views reflect patriarchal fears and anxieties about the female body.
Statistics on rape are notoriously unreliable, but there appears little evidence to support the view that most incidents of sexual violence are linked exclusively to Westernisation and urbanisation, or indeed are restricted to the public sphere. Sexual violence against women in India is endemic, across social class, caste and region, and is rarely restricted to middle class, Westernised and urban women — though such women may be in a better position to protest against it than working class, minority or dalit women. Further, the views above focus on “stranger danger”, that is rapes by strangers in the public sphere, rather than within the home, and seek to use women’s and societal fear of rape as a way to control women and prevent them from full and free participation in public life. The home is constructed as a safe place, and women are enjoined to leave the home only at specific times, escorted by relatives, even though rape and sexual assault is not confined to the public domain, and marital rape and sexual violence perpetrated by fathers, brothers and other male members is common in India.
These discourses stigmatise women who venture out at night alone, and feed into popular perceptions that such women “deserve” to be raped or, worse, “they are asking for it.” Such views are also amply reflected in legal judgments on rape, where it is evident that a woman is more likely to be believed if she is a “woman of honour” — a respectable, married woman, or a virginal daughter, preferably middle class or upper caste.
The rage expressed by young urban women in India poses important challenges to these patriarchal constructions of women’s sexuality. However, the real challenge will be if this anger is also directed at all forms of sexual violence against women, be it the rape of a dalit woman by an upper-caste landlord, the rape of a Muslim woman in a communal riot, the rape of a married woman by her husband or the rape of a prostitute by a client.