There is a specific way in which we react to a gruesome sexual assault in India. From Nirbhaya to the recent Kolkata case, we come out in protest against the victimization of women, and our outrage, anger, and arguments are about justice, crime, and punishment. We want a solution from the State. We want to teach a lesson to someone who “dishonors” a woman’s body. So, a woman’s experience and her body become the grounds upon which we demand justice from the State, and more often than not, we shout ourselves hoarse until the next one comes around.
Every time this happens, I am struck by what we, as a nation, are outraged by. Is sexual assault the only heinous gendered crime that we can be passionate about? Is only the violence that happens to specific Dominant Caste women in the night worthy of reclaiming the night? Where is our rage when similar crimes happen to Dalit women or to women belonging to other religions? Why do we tolerate some kinds of harassment (you should not have dressed this way) and ask for death penalty in others, even though they both abrogate the rights to life and bodily integrity?
To give you some context, let me tell you another story of violence. I have a stalker. A boy, whom I had studied with has been stalking me for the past 10 years. Has been. In the present tense.
I have launched police complaints in two major cities: in Bengaluru where I was studying and in Hyderabad, where I was working. It was indeed a privilege to take this issue to law enforcement. I had the support of my social position and the university where I studied. Despite that, apart from a few perfunctory phone calls, no action has been taken against him as he belongs to another state (Andhra Pradesh). Because complaints were lodged in places where stalking happened, the police asked me to lodge a complaint in my home town where the person lives. So, where should I file a case? At the place where I experience violence or at the place which is convenient for the police?
This experience of unending dailiness of the violence wears me out. Of course, we all know that the governance structures and systems related to crime management in India are messy, complicated, and lack rationality. While the police system tried to figure out the definition and intensity to the violence I have experienced, I was made to re-live the experience multiple times as I struggled to articulate it in a language that is legible enough for the law to act. The final response, as in most of the cases, depended on the intensity of the crime. It appears to me that we wait for a crime to turn particularly violent to act promptly – or even to act. In fact, I find that the laws define violence so narrowly – real or unreal / consensual or non-consensual. And yet, our everyday experiences of violence are so varied, different, and ever-changing.
What I have realized is that my daily experience of vigilance, fear, and worry have no place in the national conversations around gender-based violence. A stalker case is not as intense as or as sensational as a horrific sexual assault, right? We will want death for those who do heinous crimes, but online bullying, emotional and financial abuse, or catcalling do not even register on the heinous scale. Sometimes, especially in our movies, they are even celebrated. This type of violence is also culturally sanctioned. A quick glance at comments in social media shows how particularly vicious the attitudes towards women and other gender minorities are. A simple comment on any subject – no matter how benign – brings out bullying, belittling, and berating online. This happens in front of everyone. But unless, this turns into a particular form of sexual assault, it is not even noticed.
I started to understand how ‘normalized’ our ideas of what is ‘acceptable’ forms of violence (and what is not) through a project called Gender Violence in Public Spaces. I attended a Focus Group Discussion with teenage boys in a village in Telangana. While commenting on gender violence, they all agreed that it is okay to beat a wife if she makes a mistake. Another set of school boys in another village in Narayanpet district expressed that despite being capable, boys are deliberately giving up their opportunities so that women can make use of them. He said women are stealing jobs from them due to the reservations. A Circle Inspector from one of the women police stations said there has been an increase in crime against women because women are spending too much time on phones and are prone to commit extramarital relationships (the word he used was illegal affairs). Another woman Judge who is now in the High Court instructed a group of 100 women on the occasion of Women’s Day (no less) not to injure or provoke a man’s ego. I have examples after examples about these ‘harmless’ normalized opinions across all age groups, across professions, and gender.
Of course, those of us who are protesting and those of us who understand the anguish of violence know that the problem of sexual assault or any form of violence is beyond the lack of laws and infrastructure. It is located very specifically in the power relationships between and amongst the genders. Rape or sexual assaults are not an isolated or momentary incidents. It starts from a small vulgar comment directed at an influencer. It starts from a lyric of a trendy cheesy song. It starts from the social approval of bullying women. It starts from a perception that there is someone out there who is subservient to us and we have power over them. Sexual assault that provokes wide-scale protests are, perhaps, where all of this ends up.
But that is not true either. Sexual assault happens all the time too. Even though it is plagued with the problems of under reporting and misfiling, NCRB (National Crime Records Bureau) 2021 statistics helpfully informs us that 86 cases of sexual assault are reported in India every day, every hour 49 cases of violence are reported against women[1] – and these are just the cases severe enough that the FIR (First Information Report) managed to be filed. The National Commission for Women reports that in 2023, it received 4704 complaints of rape, molestation, and sexual harassment till date[2]. Again, these are the cases that have managed to push past police apathy and resistance, and have gone through the wringer of bureaucratic procedures. This tip of the iceberg can give us, quite easily, the dimension of the mountain of cases that are not reported, not spoken about – and those that are not even considered as ‘crimes.’
But, true to form, every time, there is a particular kind of violence, we want ‘swift justice.’ And what does that justice look like? The convicts in the case of Nirbhaya were hung in 2020[3]. The suspects in Disha’s case in Hyderabad were “encountered” in 2019[4]. If only these instruments had the capacity to change the situation, then the Kolkata case would not have repeated. I see them merely as the instruments to cool down the public rage – a machoistic, paternalistic solution that only looks to the violated body, not as a woman, but as an object to be ‘protected.’ This so-called protection always comes at a price. This protected body now must be monitored, controlled, and must remain innocent.
To understand this, all I have to do is to remember the Mathura case[5] in 1972 where the court denied the very act of sexual assault on the grounds that the girl was promiscuous, the long judicial battles in the cases of Bhanwari Devi[6] in 1992 where the caste was used as a reason to deny charges of sexual assault, and finally the Nirbhaya case[7] in 2011 where the court proactively adjudicated on the matter of sexual assault. All these cases engendered the Criminal Laws to be more sensitive to the matter of sexual assault in the country, but they are still the punitive reaction to after the occurrence of an event. There are a few like the draft on sexual assault law reform in 2000 and Justice Verma Committee constituted in 2012 that gave out a call for large scale legal, electoral, and educational reforms.
We can make any number of demands (and we have been) about a complete rehaul of education curriculum, about responsive administrative procedures, of allocations within gender budgets that actually address the needs of women. But if we are still focused on a woman’s pious body to be violated to take out nation-wide protests, can we really blame only the judiciary for its paternalistic thinking that also requires a woman’s body to be pious for it to get justice? Does it really seem too far-fetched for me to say that the public outrage appears to follow the same tropes, the same rules?
So, what now? I find myself going back to my own feminist learnings – on the need to address and shift structures, on the need to see ‘gender’ in the everyday, on the need to fight every day. I know that for me to just be who I am – an independent woman – the struggle is a daily one.
[1] https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/india-lodged-average-86-rapes-daily-49-offences-against-women-per-hour-in-2021-government-data/article65833488.ece
[2] https://ncwapps.nic.in/frmComp_Stat_Overview.aspx
[3] https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/nirbhaya-case-four-convicts-hanged-to-death-in-tihar-jail/article61960571.ece
[4] https://newsmeter.in/encounter-of-four-accused-in-the-hyderabad-disha-case-police-action-fooled-cm-and-courts/
[5] https://main.sci.gov.in/jonew/judis/4992.pdf
[6] https://indiankanoon.org/doc/1623456/
[7] https://main.sci.gov.in/supremecourt/2020/5529/5529_2020_5_301_20686_Judgement_14-Feb-2020.pdf
