Ignoring caste, the unspoken core of India’s rape crisis
A moral blind spot hides attacks from view, writes Amana Fontanella-Khan
WHEN a distressed father is reporting his daughter’s disappearance to a policeman in India, there are some questions he does not want to hear. “What is your caste?” is one of them.
Yet, said Sohan Lal, this was the first thing the police asked him on Tuesday May 27 when he begged them for help. He said that after he revealed his lowcaste background as a Shakya, the officers mocked him and refused to lift a finger.
Hours later, Lal’s daughter, 12, and a female cousin, 14, were found hanging by their scarves from a mango tree in Katra Saadatganj, in the state of Uttar Pradesh. They had been raped.
Lal’s daughter had last been seen alive with a group of brothers from the Yadav caste, the dominant caste in the village.
Our understanding of their deaths will be incomplete until we recognise the role of the caste system in India’s rape crisis. For much of India’s history, the lower castes, especially the Dalits (once known as untouchables), have been routinely raped by the land-
Rape is a weapon to silence the assertions of the community, a way to teach us a lesson
owning upper castes. Better legal protection, urbanisation and social mobility have helped to reduce caste-based discrimination, but not enough.
Dalit women are still the most likely to be victims of gang rapes. An analysis of Uttar Pradesh’s crime statistics for 2007 by the People’s Union for Civil Liberties showed that 90% of rape victims in 2007 were Dalit women.
Since December 2012, when a 23-year-old woman from the Kurmi caste, another low-ranking group, died after being raped and assaulted by five men as they drove around in a bus, India has been searching its soul. Yet the caste system has not been mentioned enough in the debate.
Although attacks against Western tourists and women in urban centres have attracted a great deal of attention, rapes of lower-caste women routinely fail to provoke an outcry.
It is no surprise that the caste system, and the unequal society it produces, leads to moral blind spots that hide rapes from public view. Caste historically determined where you lived, what you did, whom you married, even what you ate. In many villages, those rules are still in place, decades after caste discrimination was banned.
Much of the caste-based sexual violence emerges from a feudal sense of entitlement among some upper-caste men. “You have not really experienced the land until you have experienced the Dalit women” is a popular saying among the land-owning Jats, a politically powerful group that, despite being a relatively low caste, is above the Dalits.
Upper-caste men are rarely imprisoned for raping Dalits, but have a widely accepted defence at their disposal should they ever need one: they would be “polluted” if they touched a lower-caste woman. In a famous 1995 case, a Dalit woman’s allegations of gang rape were dis- missed by a judge who claimed that “an upper-caste man could not have defiled himself by raping a lower-caste woman”.
Caste discrimination is exacerbated by corruption and governance that encourages people to seek political power through caste allegiances. Caste bias seems to have been at work in the Katra Saadatganj case.
One need only look at the names of the accused brothers (Pappu Yadav, Awadhesh Yadav and Urvesh Yadav) and that of the head of the police station (Ram Vilas Yadav) for evidence that they belonged to the same caste. Two more police constables involved are also Yadavs.
When the police and judiciary cannot be relied on to resolve disputes, rape often becomes a means of retribution. This has been apparent in Hindu-Muslim riots as well as in intercaste conflict.
“Rape is a weapon to silence the assertions of the community, a way to teach us a lesson,” said Dalit activist Asha Kowtal. “To show us, including our men, that they are helpless and cannot protect their own women.”
Such thinking seems to have been at work in March, in the neighbouring state of Haryana, when four lower-caste girls were gang-raped and dumped more than 160km from their homes. According to press reports, a land dispute led Jats to declare “a social and economic boycott against the Dalits”, perhaps culminating in the gang rape.
India will never be able to address its rape crisis if it remains blind to the results of caste discrimination. It has taken gruesome cases of violence to ensure coverage of rape. Indeed, perhaps the only reason the Katra Saadatganj case attracted attention was that grisly photographs of the dangling bodies were published in Indian newspapers and circulated on social media.
There is no doubt it was wrong for the police to ask Lal about caste.
But when it comes to understanding India’s rape crisis, not talking about caste is just as bad. — © The New York Times Fontanella-Khan writes on women’s issues and is the author of ‘Pink Sari Revolution’