Prologue
Hues and cries are everywhere… for public executions and
castrations.. Facebook walls filled with gory pictures of rodents eating male
genitals. We are angry. We are out there in streets. We are facing teargases
and lathi charges as never before. Because our `sister’ is there in the
hospital, battling for her life. Our sister…who led a life according to our
rules and under our patriarchal protection, whom we should have protected, but
we couldn’t. So we are going to avenge her.
Part –I : The Sister.
She always has been our sister, mother or wife. May be, even
from start of the times. She ever will be. She has no identity other than
these. Some say a nutcase called Manu has written some law and thus she became
our sister. The cause definitely predates that. The funny thing is that
she always loved to be our sister, mother or wife. And we always hated her to
be anything else. She never became the individual she was, of which, being a
sister, mother or wife was just a part. She was never allowed to.
Part –II : The Rape
Our rape, the Indian Rape is special. It is the rape we see and
we comprehend or we wish to comprehend. Our rape is not sexualized
violence. It is just violent sex. Hence we always seek the reason for rape in
the metrics of the victim’s skirt. And we often come up with a self satisfying
answer. The Indian rape is not a forceful, hateful, misogynist expression
of power over someone by mere brutal oppression and humiliation. It is
just an unfortunate incident happened as the victim violated our sacrosanct
moral regulations. Sometimes she travelled during night after working late.
Sometimes she went to a movie with her boyfriend. She wore the dress she liked.
Sometimes she tried to be free. And most of the times she did nothing. But she
was raped and she was always ther to be blamed for. There is an interesting
question raised by the liberal circles of our country (especially by Arundhathi
Roy for which she is being defamed as always) - Why are we so selective
in our response to rape cases. Many girls from the alienated and
marginalized strata of our rural society (Dalits/Muslims/Nort
Easterners/Tribals) are raped on a day to day basis in front of our blind eye.
That blind eye was there when Police sexually assaulted Soni Sori , a tribal school
teacher and when doctors had to remove stones from her vagina and rectum,
inserted by the watchdogs of our justice. Yet only the urban rape incidents
lead to sudden outbursts of anger, candle light prayers and cries for
castrations while other cases are not even worthy of a single column news. Why?
The answer to this question is also quite simple. The Indian rape, in all its
essence is not even rape. It is actually a theft, a property violation.
Every girl of our country holds a valuable property. It is the
exclusive right of a man upon her sexuality. And interestingly, she gets no
word in the whole dealing other than being the keeper of that property. If she
is single, the property is called virginity and if married, it is chastity. The
Indian rape is the violation of this property. When a rural dalit girl is being
raped, the property of a rural dalit man is violated. But when an urban upper
middle class woman is raped the property of an urban upper middle class man is
violated. And the latter case becomes even more serious when the violator of
the property is a street vendor or a migrant worker. The naked reality is that
no one gives a damn about the victim. The same applies whether she is rich or
poor. The victim better be a martyr in the cause of protecting her virginity
lest we will be undoubtedly branding her as a slut. That’s what we are capable
of. And to all the Arsha Bharathists and traditionalists, I would like to
say: Yes, India is a rare place, one where even a rape has got a caste and
class.
Part III – The Torture
Torture – Psychopath. Two words, we successfully align together
in order to ease our collective guilt. `The torture, the brutal inhuman one as
in the Delhi incident, has nothing to do with anything human’. That was the
first thing that came to my mind when I heard about it. That torture draws a
line between us and the perpetrators, the line between the sane and insane,
human and inhuman, civilized and uncivilized. But as I thought about it
more and more, the torture has everything to do with something
human. The story of this torture can be traced all throughout the story
of man’s urge for power over woman. Man built strong patriarchal societies (if
you don’t know about one, open your eyes, we live in one), commodified woman
and ceased her freedom. But there was always a fear of the feminine in
all these patriarchal societies. Thus torture was born. Any woman who was
a deterrent from her socially imposed servitude incited huge amounts of fear in
masculine social structures. In Europe during the middle ages, this fear
transformed to mass hysteria and led to identification of woman as witches,
burnt them alive or even cut into two pieces hanging upside down. The Delhi
incident reminds me of another torture device of those Dark Ages – The Vaginal
Pear. Our society was also not far behind. According to
Manusmriti (ref: 8/370), “A woman proud of the greatness of her
excellence and violates her duty of servitude, the King shall arrange to have
her thrown to dogs .” The torture was there, sometimes in the form of the
state, the law, sometimes the army, mostly under the protective mask of the
psychopath, but always there. The same violence innate in us is mirrored in our
violent gory orgasmic fantasies to seek vengeance by torturing the rapists.
Death penalty will not bring down incidents of rape. There are a thousand
things to be corrected which make great differences. Like the legal
barricades in lodging a complaint, attitude of the police towards the victims,
way of raising up our children without gender bias and so many. But we stick to
our torture agenda because it is a way of regaining the control over woman’s
sexuality and individuality, the control we lost while not able to protect her
`virginity/chastity.’
Epilogue – The Sexist Society.
We are sexist, otherwise we would never “protect” women only to
violate them and violate them to earn the right of protection upon them.
We are sexist as we don’t care about a change in the system, as we know death
penalties are not going to reduce rapes, but what we should have done is to ask
for a police system which is not misogynist towards rape victims and a suitable
environment where each and every sexual assaults and crimes could be registered
without fear and shame. We are sexist as long we impose a servitude
on our girl children and teach our boys that they are born to and are entitled
to exert their power over women. We are sexist as long as we hold the sanctity
of virginity and deny the fact that a woman is the sole owner of her individuality
and sexuality. We are sexist as long as we can’t consider the equal and
unquestionable right of a woman against any non consensual sexual act
irrespective of her being a middle class paramedical student, a rural dalit
girl, a muslim, a tribal, a north easterner, a drunk girl in the bar, a girl
walking alone in night or a sexual worker doing business. We
shouldn’t light candles to hang someone, but to see the dark in ourselves, to
critically analyze the historical residue of misogyny in us and to cleanse
us. We don’t need to `protect’ our `sisters’, we just have to let the
women to live, find their individuality and remove the shackles we have made.
But, that is a long way ahead, a long long way. Until then we can have the
stones taken out of Soni Sori’s body and keep those as a memento for our
hypocrisy, our selective blindness. And some time from now, when
the hype is over, we forget the Delhi, the bus and the girl and when we go back
to the recluse of our misogyny, dominating , policing, harassing and sexually
violating women, then we can build a commemorative monument in our rape
capital. And on top of that, we can place that iron rod…