Rape Cultures in India: Pratiksha Baxi
December 23, 2012
Delhi has tolerated intolerable forms of
sexual violence on women from all backgrounds in public spaces for
decades. It is a public secret that women are targetted in streets,
neighbourhoods, transport and workplaces routinely. There have been
countless campaigns and appeals to all agencies concerned to think of
safety of women as an issue of governance, planning and prevention.
However, prevention of sexual violence is not something, which features
in the planning and administration of the city. It is not seen as an
issue for governance that extinguishes the social, economic, and
political rights of all women.
It is a public secret that rape of women
in moving vehicles is popularly seen as a sport. The sexualisation of
women’s bodies accompanies the projection of cars as objects of danger
and adventure. Private buses now participate in this sexualisation of
moving vehicles as a site of enacting pornographic violence. In this
sense, safety is not seen as a commodity that can be bought, purchased
or exchanged. Men consume images of a city tolerant of intolerable
violence. City planners enable rapists to execute a rape schedule.
Streetlights do not work. Pavements and hoarding obstruct flight.
Techniques of surveillance and policing target women’s behaviour,
movement, and clothing, rather than policing what men do. The city
belongs to heterosexist men after all.
The brutality of the assault on the 23
year old student who was gangraped and beaten mercilessly with iron rods
when she resisted has anguished all of us—generating affect similar to
the infamous Birla and Ranga murders decades ago. The nature of life
threatening intestinal and genital injury has shockedresulting in angry
protests in the city and elsewhere.Yet most remain unaware that the
brutality accompanying sexual violence such as assault with iron rods,
swordsand other objects; mutilating a woman’s body with acid;stripping
and parading women; and burning them after a brutal gangrape
routinelyscar the pages ofourbloodied law reporters. There is no
political or judicial framework to redress such forms of aggravated
sexual assault.
The judiciary, tall exceptions apart,
construct rape as sex. This perspective from the rapist’s point of view,
does not frame rape as political violence,which posits all women as
sexual objects. Rape is repeatedly constructed as an act of aberrant
lust, pathological sexual desire or isolated sexual deviancy.
Politicians for most part do no better.
The parliamentary discourse on rape, after the brutal attack on the 23
year old woman who is fighting for her life, uses sexual violence as a
resource for doing politics, and therefore re-entrenches rape culture.
By arguing that rape is worse than death and rape should attract death
penalty, rape survivors are relegated the space of the living dead. The
social, political and legal mechanisms of shaming, humiliating, and
boycotting rape survivors are not challenged. Nor are the mechanisms of
converting rape narratives into a source of further titillation and
excitement displaced. Rather most political actors convert rape into a
technique of doing party politics. No one reflects seriously on why
India sports a rape culture—surely the political and social toleration
of intolerable sexual violence in everyday and extraordinary contexts of
violence produces an effect of immunity and impunity to men who enjoy
rape.
The right wing politician who is
exhausting lung power on death penalty for rapists is not concerned with
how a strident Hindu nationalism is built on violated bodies of women.
Nor are such politicians concerned with what may happen to women if rape
is punishable by death—surely there will be more murders and even more
acquittals, since judges prefer to give lower than the mandatory
sentence in rape cases. They have not marked the upsurge of the
phenomena of burning and mutilating women after rape, as reported in the
media, after a spate of such cases in Uttar Pradesh last year. Nor has
any political party even acknowledged or apologised for the sexual
violence during mass scale violence. Surely if chief ministers who get
elected year after year dismiss mass scale sexual violence as a figment
of imagination, this generates, endorses and even celebrates a new
national rape culture.
The men (and even some women in positions
of power) who lead India are successfully able to de-link the
celebratory stories of neoliberalism, militarisation, nationalism,growth
and development from the toleration of sexual violence as a sport, a
commodity, as collateral damage, or a necessary technique to suppress
women’s autonomy. Fact of the matter is that Surekha Bhotmange and her
daughter were stripped, paraded, raped and killed in Khairlanji for
expressing and asserting their autonomy. The men who assaulted and
murdered them were not tried for rape. Does anyone even remember that
Bhanwari Devi’s appeal still languishes in the Rajasthan High Court? A
courageous woman in whose debt all middle class women working in
universities and everywhere else remain for the promulgation of the
Vishaka judgment. We got the guidelines on sexual harassment in the
workplace, but Bhanwari Devi did not get justice. All of us remain in
the debt of BilkeesBano who is perhaps the first survivor of mass scale
sexual violence in Independent India to secure a prosecution in a rape
and riot case but only after the trial was transferred. Manorama’s
gangrape and murder by the army did not result in the withdrawal of
AFSPA, which gives the army the licence to rape as ifto rape is in the
line of duty. Can we de-link these issues from what Delhi protests
today? Surely we must make these connections since we have benefited
from the courageous litigation by women whose lives have been made
absolutely abject.We must then equally resist the politics, which
institutes public amnesia about these voices of suffering.
Alas, the brutality that Delhi witnessed
is the effect of the toleration and celebration of rape cultures in
India. Men and women, alike, from all classes, castes and communities
must adopt a stance of solidarity that will not tolerate politicians,
police officers, planners, judges and lawyers who build their careers on
silencing the voices of raped women. Only a heightened intolerance for
any kind of sexual violence as a social force will begin to chip away at
the monumentalisation of rape cultures in India. Our collective
melancholia must be far more productive.
Pratiksha Baxi is Assistant Professor, Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University
http://kafila.org/2012/12/23/rape-cultures-in-india-pratiksha-baxi/
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