Subject: [SocialistWorker.org] In the streets against rape
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Analysis: Tithi Bhattacharya
======== IN THE STREETS AGAINST RAPE =========================================
Tithi Bhattacharya, recently returned from India, reports on protests against
rape and sexism that are shaking the country--and why the left should welcome
them.
January 10, 2013
IN A crime that sparked sustained and angry protests [1] in several cities in
India and around the world, a 23-year-old student was gang raped and beaten
in Delhi, India, on December 16. She died from her injuries 13 days later.
The outrage caused by the case has helped to spark a larger discussion about
rape, sexism and women's rights--in India and elsewhere.
Even how to refer to the slain woman has become a subject of vigorous debate.
Since the media, under Indian law, cannot reveal the name of a rape victim,
she has been given a variety of pseudonyms--including "Jagruti" (Awakening),
"Amanat" (Entrusted), "Nirbhaya" (Fearless) and "Damini" (Lightning)--by the
media and protesters alike. People have come out in the thousands to rally in
her defense and against sexual assault [2] more broadly.
Recently, for the first time, the victim's family released the young woman's
real name to the public. In an interview with a British newspaper, her father
defiantly asserted that he was "proud" of his deceased daughter and that
"[r]evealing her name will give courage to other women who have survived
these attacks."
"They" he said, "will find strength from my daughter."
These are powerful and important words to start any discussion of this
terrible event. After all, rapes are not uncommon in India. In 2010 alone,
there were 22,000 cases of rape recorded nationally. In Delhi, the national
capital, 660 cases were reported in 2012. It is also widely acknowledged that
the ratio of the actual number of rapes to reported cases is at least 5 to 1
and probably often higher, thus making the above figures far more alarming.
So did the recent protests erupt because this was an unusually violent case
of rape? Were the demonstrations, as some leading activists, including
Arundhati Roy, have claimed, largely composed of middle-class men and women
who had come out to rally for one of their own? Lastly, as some Western
journalists argued, is this brutal sexual violence an indication of the
particular backwardness of India as a country?
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
*Sexual violence in India*
"In India, there is a woman raped every 20 minutes," a young female student
at Delhi University told me at the massive protest near India Gate in New
Delhi on New Year's Day.
"This was the last straw," said Kavita Krishnan, the secretary of All India
Progressive Women's Association, who has been leading various sections of the
protests in the weeks following the attack. "We must understand that there
has been a long build up to this moment."
According to Krishnan, women from Adivasi (indigenous people) and Dalit
(lower caste) communities, women working in non-unionized workplaces, sex
workers and transgendered people have been particular targets of such
violence.
Rape in such cases is used as a terrifying method of social control, and the
authorities frequently turn a blind eye to it. In 2006, for instance, a Dalit
mother and her daughter were brutally raped and then lynched to death over a
land dispute in Kherlanji--a village in the state of Maharashtra. The rapists
were powerful local men from a socially dominant caste. The police, in league
with the rapists, denied any incidence of rape, and the men were never tried.
Similarly in 2010, Delhi police refused to respond to a phone call from an
eyewitness who saw her friend being kidnapped and gang raped on their way
back from their night jobs at the local call center in Dhaula Kuan.
The rot goes deeper than the police. It is a long tradition of the Indian
ruling class to both support rapists and use rape as a disciplinary tool
against politically vulnerable communities.
In 2009, Indian army personnel in Shopian, Kashmir, allegedly raped and
murdered two Muslim women, Neelofar and Asiya. While this particular case
became well known mainly due to what many believe to be a cover-up by the
Indian state, Neelofar and Asiya remain two among several women who have been
raped and killed by the Indian army in Kashmir.
In these matters, British colonial history has proved to be a great teacher
for the postcolonial Indian ruling class. Draconian laws that the British
crafted to target freedom fighters have now been revamped to attack
dissidents. One such law, the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (1958), modeled
after an old British law, allows non-commissioned army officers to search and
arrest citizens without a warrant and even shoot to kill.
In 2004, in one of the worst cases of extrajudicial killings, army officers
stationed in the North Eastern state of Manipur raped and killed the
32-year-old Thangjam Manorama Devi for her alleged involvement with the
Peoples Liberation Army. Her killers remain free since the law gives the
armed forces virtual impunity.
Riots and pogroms against minorities serve as virtual laboratories of
misogyny. In the now-infamous anti-Muslim pogrom by Hindu nationalists in
Gujrat in 2002, rape and sexual violence were routinely used against Muslim
women as a way to "dishonor" the community. Further, in a sickening
institutionalization of rape culture by the state, several men who have rape
charges pending against them remain important public figures and leaders of
right-wing parties, while some even serve in the Indian parliament.
While these horrors of recent memory may serve as the immediate background
from which these most recent protests sprang, the global context is just as
important. People who gathered in various Indian cities to protest over the
past several weeks could not but be influenced by the rise in gender violence
on an international scale. From the defense of rape by Republican senators in
the U.S. to the attack on reproductive rights by the Tory government in
Britain, women's bodies are increasingly becoming a global battlefield.
It is precisely the international scale of these attacks that explains the
international scope of these protests--from Delhi to Dhaka and from Chennai
to Chicago.**
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
*The origin of the protests*
One only needs to look at some of the contours of neoliberal India to
understand the deep structural connection between the crisis of capitalism
and the assault on women's rights. Rape apologists in India have repeatedly
blamed women for being out "late at night," claiming that they deserved their
violent fate.
In court, a defense attorney for three of the five men accused in the case of
the women raped and beaten on December 16 stated that "respectable" women are
not raped. "I have not seen a single incident or example of rape with a
respected lady," Manohar Lal Sharma told the court, instead blaming the
victim for being out at night with a male friend to whom she was not married.
The woman attacked in Dhaula Kuan and the woman attacked on December 16 both
worked at call centers providing cheap labor for Western outsourcing firms.
The integrated nature of the market meant that the women's working hours had
to keep pace with business hours in the West, thus imposing a regimen of very
late night shifts for them and forcing them to navigate nighttime streets and
cafes with minimal support from their employer or the government. To then
blame them for being out late is viciously hypocritical from a system that
provides so little support for women.
At the other end of the spectrum, the opening up of the Indian market for
global capitalism has meant a glutting of public imagination by the worst
kinds of sexist representations of women from leading capitalist brand names,
where female sexuality is used to sell everything from saris to cell phones.
Hence, when we look for the origin of the recent protests, we need to look
wider than just within India.
While it is true that we have not seen protests of such ferocity and scope in
recent times in India, it would be wrong to call them entirely new and
without any legacy. That would be discounting several decades of political
activism by Indian women's groups and the Indian left.
Protests led by women have a long and proud history in the subcontinent.
According Kunal Chattopadhyay, a leading historian and activist from Kolkata,
the massive public protests led by women's groups in the 1970s against the
case of custodial rape of a 16-year-old girl named Mathura by two police
officers inspired and "heightened" for the first time "the political
consciousness of many of us male activists."
The sheer size of the protests in the Mathura rape case forced the Indian
Supreme Court to overturn its initial decision that found the police not
guilty and instead convict them. Since then, there have been similar examples
of robust organizing by women's groups for demands such as changes in rape
laws, against dowry deaths and for more representation in local and national
government, to name a few.
The recent protests are tied to the wave of fightbacks against the system on
an international scale. The women and men who have been filling the streets
of various Indian cities have seen, in the last few years, dictators fall and
public spaces be occupied. We need to see these protests as not just standing
in the tradition of past women's movements in India, but also as echoes of
Tahrir, Tunisia and Zuccotti Park--and inspiring, in their turn, a new cycle
of protests for women's rights.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
*Is India backward?*
Despite the tremendous display of solidarity and strength by Indian women and
men in these protests, the tragedy of December 16 has created a disgusting
response from the mainstream Western press.
A /New York Times/ editorial singled out India as a country that "must work
on changing a culture in which women are routinely devalued." Similarly,
/London Times/ columnist Libby Purves [3] demanded that India change itself
forthwith if it wanted to be "allowed to hold its head up in the civilized
world."
It is particularly ironic that such imperial dictums are coming from the U.S.
and Britain, two countries that, despite their vast material resources, have
an abysmal record of gender injustices and victim-blaming within their own
national borders.
This racist rhetoric, thinly cloaked in the discourse of "women's rights,"
has not gone unchallenged. In a letter published in the /London Times/ [4],
several academics and activists called Purves' essay an exercise in
"chauvinist finger-wagging" that presented "the West as an advanced culture
in relation to a backward and savage India."
Such selective feminism of the global ruling class--which allows them to bomb
Afghanistan for the "sake" of Afghan women or institute Islamophobic laws in
France in the name of "freedom" for Muslim women--should be resisted in all
its forms.
Any real change in gender justice in India can only come from a strong
popular movement from below. For that movement to be able to sustain itself
long enough to withstand state repression and wrest change will require
intense international solidarity, not racist moralism.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
*Who is protesting?*
For the above reasons, it should be clear that the protests in India against
rape and sexism are about rejecting the culture of misogyny and moralism
imposed by the Indian state and the global free market alike. They are not
about the narrow interests of any particular class of women.
It would be wrong to condemn these protests as "middle class." Unfortunately,
that is what Indian author and radical activist Arundhuti Roy recently did,
stating that the outrage and protests in India were a result, in large part,
because the victim in the December 16 case belonged to the affluent "middle
class." [5]
First, Roy is factually wrong about the victim who, according to a recent
report in the /Wall Street Journal/, was** the daughter of an airport worker
on a monthly salary of 7,000 rupees (about $130). She was also "the first
from her family, which hails from a caste of agricultural workers, to have a
professional career. She was on the cusp of achieving it. She had enrolled in
a year-long physiotherapy course in a city in the foothills of the Himalayas.
To afford it, she worked nights at an outsourcing firm, helping Canadians
with their mortgage issues."
Roy would be wrong, however, even if the woman did come from an affluent
family. Mass movements need to be seen in their full course of development,
in which numerous factors come together to produce confidence and
mobilization. It is not a matter of checking whether these protesters were
there to stand in support of Neelofar, Manorama or any other individual rape
victim, but to see how these past cases were part of a slow build-up of anger
that finally came to a head in the aftermath of December 16 in Delhi.
According to Kavita Krishnan, women at the protests were very open to
arguments about the state and army in holding up structures of violence.
"People here are not just talking about the rights of middle-class women,"
said Krishnan. Indeed, she said that "loads of young women spoke to me about
the complicity of the police in cases of rape of Dalit and Muslim women."
Some activists have been horrified by the efforts of the Hindu right to
co-opt the protests, others by the demands for death penalty made by some
protesters. As with any movement rooted in largely spontaneous mobilizations,
there will be different views on these and other questions, such as whether
different laws would benefit the victims of sexual assault. While it is
important to debate these issues within the struggle, we cannot afford to
stand aside from it.
Soma Marik, a historian and long-time activist in the women's movement in
Kolkata, put it excellently:
>[The term] "middle class" and its association with "Westernized,"
>dress-code-violating, "permissive" women has been part of the stock imagery
>used by right-wing forces in their attempt to trivialize and dilute rape
>cases. There is no reason for anyone on the left to join that chorus. What
>has been significant is the scale of protests, and their persistence.
>Lacking, in many cases, political experience, anger and emotion has led to
>demands for hanging...That has to be discussed, but only by participating in
>the struggles.
>
This is why it is an urgent task for the left to actively intervene and try
to shape the movement--and the broader struggles for a future society free of
rape and women's oppression.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
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[1] http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/29/protests-organized-across-india-over-death-of-gang-rape-victim/
[2] http://www.ibtimes.com/delhi-gang-rape-protests-how-long-will-indias-latest-arab-spring-last-1002804
[3] http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/gang-rape-shame-could-drag-india-into-21st-century/story-fnb64oi6-1226545829569
[4] http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/letters/article3649371.ece
[5] http://www.channel4.com/news/arundhati-roy-speaks-out-against-indian-rape-culture
