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INDIA’S National Crime Records Bureau says a crime is committed against a Dalit by a non-Dalit every 16 minutes. It says every day upper-caste men rape more than four Dalit women; every week, 13 Dalits are murdered and six Dalits are kidnapped. In 2012 alone, the year of the Delhi gang rape and murder, 1,574 Dalit women were raped. The rule of thumb is that an inordinately low percentage of rapes is reported or gets registered.
A new documentary on the Delhi tragedy has led to much din among India’s thinking elite. Do these elitist discussions offer succour to Dalits struggling in the throes of agrarian fascism? What does Leslee Udwin’s otherwise well-made documentary do for the victims of rape in the communal orgies in Gujarat or Muzaffarnagar? How does the current debate affect the victims of rape in Kashmir or Manipur where the army enjoys immunity from civilian scrutiny into crimes, including rape?
Factors Udwin doesn’t discuss though they worsen the lot of women in India are resurgent nationalism and rapid ascendency of religion. Victims of rape in communal strife are really victims of religion spliced with pseudo-nationalist fervour. The religious guru-cum-politician who reportedly called for the rape of women killed by his followers was stirring a potent brew. The men who raped the young woman in Delhi were products of a misogynistic society. The women that are raped in the name of religion or nationalism are victims of that patriarchal society’s search for ideological oxygen.
It was International Women’s Day the other day. A kindly Brahmin gentleman who runs an NGO to build public toilets, decided to use the occasion to express solidarity with Hindu widows. A few of the women were escorted from Varanasi, where they traditionally lead a life in prayers, to Vrindavan, where Lord Krishna played with the gopis. The widows in their traditional white dhotis watched the Holi revelry but there was another treat on offer. They were taken to see the Taj Mahal, a monument to a grieving king’s love for his wife. The widows must have loved the break from the prayers.
Most Indians, or Pakistanis for that matter, don’t really need a convicted rapist to convince them that it is always the woman’s fault.
In case you missed the moral of the story, consider watching Deepa Mehta’s film Water, which deals with the abandoned widows of Varanasi. The Vajpayee government banned the film. Its shooting in the holy city of the Ganges was disrupted by Hindu extremists. Mehta was forced to shoot the remaining film in Sri Lanka.
When you give alms to the poor, they call you a saint. When you ask why the poor are poor, they look at you with suspicion usually reserved for communists. The good Brahmin was being nice to the widows in his own way. Mehta was asking disturbing questions about the forced seclusion of widowed women, though not the men.
B.R. Ambedkar’s main argument with Gandhi was that India’s caste system and its concomitant inbuilt apartheid were abhorrent. The system would produce a regressive nation-state, Ambedkar argued, critiquing Hinduism’s entrenched discrimination against women. Political reform should be predicated on social reform, the Dalit leader pleaded. The Congress, even before the advent of Gandhi, had derided such a view.
“Are we not fit,” thundered W.C. Bonnerjee at the 1892 Congress, “because our widows remain unmarried and our girls are given in marriage earlier than in other countries? … because our wives and daughters do not drive about with us visiting friends? ... because we do not send our daughters to Oxford and Cambridge?” (Cheers from the audience.) Saudi Arabia didn’t exist to approve.
Bonnerjee might as well have been reacting to Deepa Mehta’s critique of India’s social structures that have thrived for centuries, structures abusive of its women. The Brahmin’s outburst at the Congress session might equally be deemed a reaction to Udwin’s film about the rape in a Delhi bus. Much has been made of a condemned rapist who she interviewed in prison. The man blamed the girl for her gang rape, and also her subsequent torture and murder at the hands of his drunken associates. All of this happened as the bus drove through some of Delhi’s posh districts.
Most Indians, or Pakistanis for that matter, don’t really need a convicted rapist to convince them that it is always the woman’s fault. It is in their hallowed tradition to blame the woman. After all, it is her family in most instances that carries out the woman’s so-called honour killing. This is the lot of women in large swathes of India, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Udwin’s far more chilling focus, however, gazed at the two defence lawyers, both high-caste Hindus, who had pleaded the case on behalf of the rapist-killers of December 2012. Like the interviewed convict, the lawyers were certain that women should not step out of their homes, that they should not dress to attract male attention. One of the lawyers, in fact, says he would burn the girl alive if it was his daughter that was seen with another man. This is a widely shared emotion about women in Indian homes.
Should the Modi government have banned India’s Daughters? Udwin says it was her tribute to the collective rage against the rape of the Delhi student. I haven’t seen a more passionate debate on TV for some time.
Ambedkar would probably have argued for free speech and not regarded Udwin’s film as a conspiracy to defame India. He would, however, have his own views of Udwin and Mehta alike.
For him the cure for India’s misogynistic patriarchy lies in the annihilation of the caste. That’s an issue neither Udwin nor Mehta have cared to touch. Ambedkar, in keeping with India’s predominantly upper caste narrative, was completely airbrushed from Richard Attenborough’s tribute to Gandhi. There is Jinnah but no Ambedkar. Like Mehta and Udwin, Attenborough was happy to package himself for India’s carefully choreographed upper-caste TV debates.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
Published in Dawn March 10th , 2015
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