Events & Issues

New Delhi, 14 April 2014

Women’s Rights

NO MORE THAN A SLOGAN

By Hemal Shringla

There are BJP hoardings all over the place which read – Chalo naari ka maan badhayen, and then adjacent ones which read Chalo mehengaai ka bojh ghatayen. Are they twin hoardings or are they next to each other accidentally? According to Freud, however, an accident is not always just an accident.

So what is at stake for women in this election? Are their problems being given the maan (honor) they deserve or will they have to remain content with just being part of a rhyme scheme? And what is this ‘chalo chalo’ business? Let’s not forget it took a brutal gang rape and public outrage too widespread to ignore for the government to pass the new Anti-Rape Law. So exhortation, whether rhetorical or otherwise, will not work.

It’s been two and a half years since Nirbhaya’s death and we have placed her on a pedestal. Our society likes placing women on pedestals, making them into devis.  And giving them lots of maan. But the word women prefer is haq (right). It’s real, not rhetorical. What about the word Nirbhaya? Is it a tad too heroic? Does it not deny the victim her humanity and the terror she must have felt that night, the terror that every girl being raped must feel. A name like any other, less grand, less glorious, might have been better.  It would drive home the point that in India  rape is banal and takes place once every twenty minutes. But then we don’t want that statistic to come too disturbingly alive, do we.

Nirbhaya’s rapists have been sentenced to death. So have the rapists of the young photojournalist and telephone operator in Mumbai. The latter trial was a test case, it was said, for the new Anti-Rape Bill under which repeat offenders are liable for the death penalty.  On April 4^th, after the death sentence was pronounced on the Shakti Mills rapists, Special Public prosecutor, Ujjwal Nikam, spoke to the press at length outside the courtroom. He spoke movingly and with compassion.

Suddenly the faceless ‘victim’ became a real person, a young girl, at the start of her career who was brutalized and subjected to torture and indignities of the worst sort.  She begged and begged the men to let her go, he said. And they laughed at her fear. She was no braveheart then. Bravery comes later for rape victims. When they go to the police and report their shame so that their perpetrators stand trial. And when, engulfed in the shock and anger of what happened to them, they struggle to go through their day.

Women’s rights activists have criticized the judgement.  The death sentence has been wrongly applied, they say. The fact that the men raped a telephone reporter a month before the photojournalist does not make them repeat offenders. He needs to have been tried and penalized for the first offence which is not the case here. Secondly, they say, the death penalty will make rape even more invisible than it already is. Rapists will simply kill their victims to hide evidence of their crime. There is no quick fix to the issue of rape. Especially not in India where the roots of misogyny go very deep.

The rapists of Nirbhaya and the photojournalists have been labeled monsters. ‘How can anyone do such a thing,” we ask. We don’t like to see ourselves in them. We don’t like to think of them as human. But they are. In a country like India, human does not mean having a morality based on reason. We are a very backward country where ignorance and prejudice rule.

There are so many in India who subscribe to the creed of might is right, you can’t even hope to count them. And since we can’t punish all our psychopaths, we settle for those who can’t fight back. Like the men in the Nirbhaya and Shakti Mills cases who are dirt poor, faceless and nameless inhabitants of squalid urban slums. The urban poor are a desperate breed. Families are often shattered by alcoholism, drugs and violence and in the absence of a community network or a state-provided one, children grow up as they can. No one deserves a life like this, not even the rapists.

The Muzaffarnagar Jats, on the other hand, are sticking up for the rapists among them at all costs. The Jats constitute a solid votebank too. Is it a coincidence then that no one has even talked about the rapes which took place during the riots except perhaps Outlook and Hard News? These were gang rapes and mass rapes of unimaginable brutality in numbers exceeding anyone’s estimates -  in one particularly macabre case, women were raped to the beat of dhols and Bollywood tunes blaring from loudspeakers.

Somebody should have told Madhuri Dixit about this, and to Salman Khan too. Reminded them that there were women in camps not faraway who had seen their 12 and 15 year old daughters raped and were then repeatedly raped themselves, that their sons and husbands were beaten black and blue and cut to pieces in front of their eyes and that the Samajwadi Party had cruelly ignored them.  They should also have been told that two women had been forced to dance naked in a village mosque and that Akhilesh Yadav had not thought it fit to go and meet them. Maybe then they would not have danced for him. Or maybe they would have. God knows. And the rapists? Those naughty, naughty boys. Has Mulayam Singh so much as wagged a finger at them or taken them across his knees and given them a good spanking? No. He’s promised them immunity from the anti-rape law in exchange for their vote.

And what was Abu Azmi thinking of when he put in his two bits, saying the rape victim should be hanged along with the rapist? He also wants to criminalize pre-marital consensual sex. But so does half the country …

There is really nothing for women in this election. The only politician who seems to take women’s rights seriously is Rahul Gandhi. He’s been ridiculed no end over his interview to Arnab Goswami. It’s true he kept repeating the same things over and over but one of them was women’s empowerment. And in this country it takes courage and sensitivity for a male politician to say that women’s empowerment is a priority for him.  Women should be grateful for this single straw they can clutch at but they’re laughing at him too. Don’t they know how vulnerable they are as women? We should forget corruption, forget development, forget even this election, there’s nothing in it for us. We should march out in anger and outrage against the Muzaffarnagar rapes instead, just like we did for Nirbhaya.---INFA

(Copyright, India News and Feature Alliance)