Happy Birthday!

On Rape Culture (and the Peddling of Convenient Theories by Armchair Critics)

As I settled down to write yet another nauseating article on the repeated rapes being reported across India, I decided to dig into some news items about rapes—I can’t vouch for the veracity or wisdom of news published in the Indian media; nevertheless I went ahead, considering that even in the worst-case scenario, the most lop-sided commentary or reporting would betray a kind of leitmotif in this narrative of rape.

To be sure, there have been many commentators before me. They’re all acclaimed public figures, with better access to information and the power corridors, and perhaps better command over the data they’ve tried to interpret and draw conclusions from.

Arundhati Roy, my favourite poster girl, has spoken out about the horrific gang-rape of a 23-year old girl in Delhi in deliciously ambiguous tones. Of course no one would question her condemnation of an act of rape as brutal as that—the youngest of the accused, apparently gouged out the girl’s intestines with his bare hands—but what Roy saw in the rape and the subsequent public protests was a classic rendition of India’s ingrained class inequalities.

“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—whereas when rape is used as a means of domination by upper castes, by the army or the police, it’s not even punished.”

Perhaps she has not gotten over the execution of Afzal Guru, for there’s nothing on her blog yet about the recent rape and brutalization of a 5-year old girl from a poor family in (yes, again) Delhi.

Sample another celebrated public figure—Ruchira Gupta—on the rape and murder of the 23-year old.

In an absurd parody of Roy’s position, Gupta claims that the four accused—and she names them, leaving out the crucial fifth—belong to the upper castes. And thence she constructs a psychological map of the economically backward, but upper caste macho men possibly trying to play out their “sense of traditional entitlement based on their caste” by raping a woman.

Both the articles are linked to well-known national dailies. Both the articles completely gloss over the fifth accused—the one that raped the girl twice and tore out her intestines. Both the articles also fail to mention that he also belongs to a minority community—an inconvenient fact that would upset their premise of argument.

I tried to dig up information about the fifth accused, who is also a juvenile—and even though I searched every link that came up till the fourth page of Google search results—I did not find a single instance of his name splashed across with the others. It is reported, however, that the said juvenile does not have an official birth certificate with a government seal—and the document presented in court is based on the date of birth recorded by his school headmaster at the time of admission. And apparently, even his mother isn’t sure about his age! There was some talk of an ossification test to be conducted to ascertain the correct age of the accused—which was first rejected by the Juvenile Justice board—and when carried out, revealed the age of the accused to be around nineteen years.

Of course, rape cases drag on for years—some even extending beyond the 14 years meant for a normal life sentence, and often resulting in commuted sentences.

However, the bright side of things is that India seems to really care about its young people. After all, the country has managed to protect the rights of the juvenile accused in spite of the thousands baying for his blood. The love narrative for its young meets an unfortunate turn though in the case of back-to-back reports of the rape and mutilation of a 4-year old girl in Madhya Pradesh and a 5-year old girl in Delhi. Note that the honourable Home Minister Mr. Shinde explains it away saying “Such incidents happen all over India”.

One doesn’t need to be a Home Minister to know that rapes happen all over the country, though rubbing that in creates an altogether different effect.

I wonder what commentators seek to achieve by interpreting class anxieties in a criminal act. They would perhaps blithely jump to their defence—in seeking to first identify and ameliorate the inequities and problems that riddle India’s social structure.

However, I find little meaning in the range and absurdity of the fictional re-constructions that these theories smack of.

What I find more believable though is something that is so close—right under the nose so to say—that many would prefer to leave the matter alone. I see the rape narrative as part of the complex web that forms the rest of India’s establishment narrative.

Rape is a tool of violence—and it is a legacy of much of what we pride ourselves on. Homer describes the fall of Troy and the subsequent killing, raping, and enslavement of women with unapologetic opulence.

The exploits and philosophy of Islamic invaders have been also documented in numerous Persian texts written in the same grand, unapologetic style.

What we somehow fail to accept is that as a country ruled by foreign powers for centuries, we have perhaps inured ourselves to the bestiality of rape—to the point where we grope in the dark about the rapists’ motivations and the victims’ supposed provocations.

The Manu Samhita—one of those seminal texts that define the Hindu social hierarchies—denounces rape as a beastly act “pis’acha” in describing “The form in which the bride, when alone, asleep, senseless, intoxicated, or delirious with wine, is ravished by the bridegroom, is called Pis’acha, the eighth and the most sinful form of marriage.”

To me, it is not the clothes; or the consequence of a night-out in a bar; or for that matter an effect of sexual arousal owing to drinking—as some people may want to believe. To me, it’s a case of an externally administered stupour, magnified by the lack of education, that furthers the interests of anyone but the people of the country.

They say a country of sheep will beget a government of wolves. And nowhere is it better displayed than in the pervasiveness of the rape culture. As a cruel afterthought, I wonder if such brutality will ultimately do us some good by shaking up our moral foundations to the point where the comfortably-clucking middle classes boil over in protest after protest against this collective pusillanimity in punishing the criminals.

Love of the Land

“It will come to you, this love of the land. There’s no gettin’ away from it if you’re Irish.” – Gerald O’Hara in Gone with the Wind

My friends and I went out to watch Kamal Haasan’s Vishwaroopam yesterday. While a political circus raged in different states of India about the disparaging depiction of Muslims in the movie, I came back home each day to yet another Arnab Goswami’s high-decibel let’s-settle-the-issue-tonight Newshour debate. My daily dose of this grotesque parody of democracy—where ill-educated, non-articulate supposed leaders of political parties and interest groups raise a perfect storm—was working its predictable course. My curiosity was piqued to the extent that I started spending nights studying about Islam. Obviously, I had to watch the movie.

As we made our way inside the fast-filling theatre, one of my friends remarked that we were too early. “I don’t want to sing the national anthem“, she said and walked off.

Reeling with shock and rage, I settled down. “It could be me in her shoes any of these days”, I told myself, as I stood up straight and made myself form the words of the national anthem in my mouth as it played in the theatre.

The singing of the national anthem is an exhilarating and emotional experience. When I was a child, it thrilled me to sing it out loud. It thrilled me to hear it being sung outside other schools and on TV. I almost always stood up straight whenever I happened to hear it being sung or played. And truth be told, I don’t agree to having to air it in movie theatres over last-minute calls for pop corn and loo.

I’m not sure what the airing of the national anthem in plush movie theatres seeks to achieve.  If the objective is to spur national awakening and loyalty, then I think it would be done better by giving citizens more reasons to sing for the country than we have at present. Because if you have one proud young woman refuse to sing the national anthem despite all the reasons why she should be singing it, you have a serious problem.

Can I even attempt to try and discuss the problem? An honest attempt would require me to state the problem; then follow it up by investigating what causes the problem, and then seek methods to eliminate the causes that create the problem while suggesting ways of resolving it. It would also require me to cite facts and evidences at each step, and define the supposed payoff at the end of this process.

Unfortunately, I have reasons to believe that I cannot do any of it without risking whatever goes by way of freedom of speech. And my reasons are real; not hypothetical.

On the morning of August 26, 2012, I decided to type out a long-pending post in this blog. It was a Sunday; I was alone at home; my dogs had eaten and I had made up my mind to spend the day writing and lazing. To my dismay, I discovered that wordpress.com wouldn’t load on my machine. I was also simultaneously logged in to Facebook and Gmail—all of which worked fine—giving me the impression that wordpress was down because of some error or maintenance work.

To check if there wasn’t something wrong at my end, I dashed off a status on Facebook and tagged a few friends—asking them to check if wordpress was loading on their machines. It was, and they advised me to check my firewall settings.

However, in the context of the Azad Maidan riots and the exodus of people of the north-eastern states from every city owing to their threat perception—something made me wary. I started digging into the real-time news updates. After some searching, I came upon a short piece in which an angry Minister of Communications and IT decreed that certain communally sensitive materials on the Internet would be blocked in India. Apparently, there was a Pakistan hand in spreading communal disharmony in India, which may necessitate more surveillance and censure from the government, the minister added.

What the minister did not divulge and the newspaper did not report is that certain Internet Service Providers (ISPs) were instructed to block entire domains (such as wordpress) temporarily in a bid to prevent people from spreading rumours—a phenomenon that showed signs of snowballing into a political Frankenstein for the ruling polity. I have come to know of this from numerous commentators in the online newspapers I was reading.

The ease with which a centralized power structure can mobilize and manipulate public opinion is well-known and documented. While governments across the world have resorted to a certain level of manipulation and data-doctoring—whether for military or ideological reasons—our problem is not as much as the disempowerment resulting from it as the active consent in it from a section of society who hold us at ransom.

In my Facebook conversations with a friend that morning, I asked if he agrees that the nation owes an apology from anyone responsible for directly or indirectly instigating fear, causing violence, and damaging public or private property. I opined that anyone who doesn’t agree to this has something other than the nation’s interest as priority. I was referring to the Azad Maidan riots—and to me the most bizarre of all the riots that ever happened in India (for various reasons that can’t be discussed here owing to the length of this post).

My friend, who’s a senior journalist, saw no echoes of the Emergency in the sudden suspension of a fundamental right. And at the mention of Azad Maidan, he donned his victim garb and declared me to be a “Sanghi”—a diminutive for a Sangh Parivar supporter,  which to him probably means a right-wing Hindu troll who questions every Muslim’s patriotism—before he retired hurt. Obviously, the spurious saga of Indian victimhood came in the way of an honest conversation.

While I congratulate myself for having such an interesting posse of friends, it’s worthwhile to counterpoint the two described here. Why would she refuse to stand up for a harmless, less than a minute’s worth duty to the nation? Why would he duck a question that is difficult to answer, but also equally difficult to ask?

As I walked back from the movie this Saturday, I tried to remind myself of all the things that this nation has given me and I should be grateful for—all that which was denied to my ancestors, such as a cheerful Sunday to spend in friendly chatter and no work, a lovely Saturday evening out to the movies—where you can wear what you want, eat your fill, and do not have to fear the person in the next seat—money to spend on movies and pets, an education to earn that money, equitable taxation, financial institutions to save money in, an environment in which a girl may go out of her home to earn a living, an environment in which a girl may not be dragged by the hair and executed or sold in the nearest slave market, the fact that I’ve never had to go through the ravages of war, famine and epidemic in my entire life, the right to marry whom I want—within my caste and religion or outside of it, the right to pray to whoever I wish, the right to not pray at all, the right to birth control, the right to vote, the right to question those who govern us, the right to justice, and most importantly, the right to disagree. I think these are very good reasons to sing paeans to one’s nation, despite everything else.

Should we try and teach ourselves about what went on before we had these rights—as a way of respecting what we have achieved so far? I don’t know. Nevertheless, let us not practice pusillanimity in the name of democracy. Let us not force each other to prevaricate when it comes to asking and answering difficult questions. Let us break our hearts, once and for all, and be honest with ourselves: Exactly how patriotic are we? What does this “love of the land” mean to us Indians?

And they lived fearlessly ever after…

Reblogged from Olio talk by Suchitra Kaushiva:

 

So then, what is it about this 23 year-old girl who raised the conscience of India on December 16, 2012?

Was it the barbaric way in which she met her end?

Was she the last straw that broke the back of an overladen camel?

Was it her young age, her thwarted ambitions and aspirations, or her
parents’ unfulfilled hopes, dreams and expectations?

Read more… 905 more words

These might as well be my words...

Why So Many Rapes?

Why So Many Rapes?

India treats its women like crap. Click the above link to see why I’m saying this. If you want to differ, you may well want to explain or justify these comments by our elected representatives, and some of them by women!

The prevailing sentiment is that there are wild animals out on the streets, therefore girls beware. Don’t be a ninny if you get raped; what else did you expect?

So what can we do to change this?