The Law's A Beast

Days after a Mumbai police constable raped a 17-year-old college girl inside a police chowki on Mumbai's Marine Drive, people who walked the promenade or drove the stretch made it a point to stop, hurl the choicest of abuses at constables posted along the four-kilometre stretch before moving on. The men in khaki fought hard to keep their cool, grimacing at the dishonour brought on by one of their own, Sunil Atmaram More, on the afternoon of April 21. It looked like Marine Drive, the symbol of the city that's Mumbai, won't be able to wash off that ignominy for quite awhile.

The Marine Drive Rape, as it's now called, is by no means the only one that happened that particular day, but it marks a new low in crimes against women. Never before has a police constable ordered a young girl inside a chowki, slapped and raped her at least thrice according to initial medial reports; never before has such an incident been reported from the most public of public places in the city, that too at 4.30 pm in the afternoon. "My first reaction was of shock and disbelief, complete disbelief," police commissioner A.N. Roy told Outlook. Mumbai reacted in much the same manner, but with also a fair share of aggression.

Impromptu protests at the spot, chowki stormings, midnight rasta rokos, demonstrations by women's groups, free slander and abuse of policemen across the city, banners that demanded dismantling of the force itself and a public hanging for More. These were all strong reminders that civil society chooses to make itself heard now and then.

More, drunk while on duty, was summarily dismissed from service under the stringent Section 311 of the Constitution, his immediate seniors transferred to backroom duties. He had been reprimanded several times before for the same offence. Still, the administrative action didn't assuage public anger. The unsuspecting girl from suburban Chembur was just out walking along the promenade with her friends, after making inquiries of an academic course in a downtown institution. The threesome was summoned to the chowki, her two friends told to wait outside while More went about the dastardly act. "This isn't my Mumbai at all," said a young housewife who lives on Marine Drive and often walks alone there at deserted hours. "This is a story from, say, Delhi." Invariably, it begs the question: is Mumbai, the quintessential gender-sensitive city "where women could walk unescorted at 2 am", safe for the feminine gender any longer?

It's not so much that ground realities have inexorably altered after that April afternoon, or women have stopped using public places or public transport, or women look over their shoulder more often, especially if it's a cop. Rape is, of course, an extreme and perverse act of aggression but Mumbai women have put up with milder forms of that mindset, like molestation and eve-teasing, for many years now. They have even devised novel ways to deal with it too. An average of about 200 rape cases have been registered every year for the last many years, it's the same trend so far this year too.

Perceptions, however, have changed. For the accused in this case is a policeman. Beat constables routinely guard women's compartments in suburban trains, often there are just a handful of women with two constables on duty. Policemen, rather than policewomen, usually deal with complaints from women who summon up the courage to walk into the neighbourhood station for succour. Policemen man the public places that women frequent. Policemen, indeed, are the face of law and order. As Nirmala Samant-Prabhvalkar, chairperson of the State Women's Commission, puts it, "It's not as if we didn't know they were corrupt or that some of them were debased and given to drinking on duty. The face of the police that More showed at Marine Drive confirmed our worst fears of what these men can do. ... The perception now is that we women are not safe even with the police, which is a very tragic but true conclusion."

She isn't alone. Others have spoken of the humiliation and insults they or their acquaintances have had to bear at police stations, which is why they say the Marine Drive incident isn't an aberration. "It's a routine thing women go through with cops. They treat women, particularly from the lower classes or those they think of as "loose", in a very humiliating, lecherous manner," says lawyer-activist Flavia Agnes. An anachronism for Mumbai but that's how it is. And it's perceptions that eventually matter, that go into the making of the city. In this rape case too, it's perceptions that have taken the hardest blow. Commissioner Roy is aware of this, but doesn't buy the whole line. "The perception of Mumbai is still of a place where women are confident and secure alone, at any time. It doesn't change so much. A day after the incident, there was a crowd at Chowpatty at 1 am," he says, "but may be the image of the police has taken a beating. One man of mine has shamed us all." A further beating after the Telgi scam involvements, custodial death of a prime accused and so on that has wracked the image and morale of the force from 2003.

With so much going on, it's hardly a surprise that the Shiv Sena, typically, gave its own twist in the din. Three days after, as Mumbai struggled to come to terms with the heinous crime, the Sena mouthpiece Saamna drew a simplistic and highly offensive correlation between "falling cultural standards" and rape. The unsigned piece lambasted today's young girls for "competing to show undergarments in the name of 'below-waist' fashion", took Page 3 culture to task, reprimanded parents for "allowing girls to wear skimpy clothes and giving boys uncontrolled freedom" and most insulting of all, asked: "Those who argue there is no connection between women and girls wearing skimpy clothes and rape should keep the social structure in mind.... It's the evil eye of men provoked by the skimpy clothes culture that's harmful. Why encourage these perverse tendencies?.... If an innocent girl falls victim to that, who is to blame, the boy's perversity or society?"

The piece neatly shifted the focus and laid the blame on women for "inviting" rape. It's an old bogey. Not much has changed from the (in)famous Mathura rape case of 1972 where two policeman in Chandrapur district of Maharashtra raped a 16-year-old tribal girl inside the police station compound while her relatives waited outside believing they were recording her statement. The men were acquitted by a sessions court and later by the Supreme Court, Mathura was deemed "a shocking liar and habituated to sexual intercourse". It's the mindset that senior Sena leader Pramod Navalkar, Mumbai's "cultural cop", reveals in his broadside: "In the good ol' days, girls from Chembur never ventured to Chowpatty and Marine Drive." Warped patriarchal mindsets obviously don't keep pace with the times. Thankfully, the Sena verdict on rape in general has little support outside its own constituency, with some consternation within the party too (see interview box).

However, there's some angle to be drawn with the moral or cultural policing that's under way in the city and the audacity of men in uniform. A policing of what constitutes "obscene", who can occupy public places at what time, what activities are culturally kosher and so on. Interestingly, three days after the rape, thousands of young Maharashtrian men shortlisted for the posts of constables were asked to write an essay on the "ban on dance bars" as part of their exam. No marks for guessing what most of them wrote. Many factors foster a culture where a man, particularly in uniform, believes he is indeed the law, his authority the final one.

The Mumbai police have attempted to dent such mindsets with some gender-sensitisation camps, special cells at many police stations and so on but it's an arduous task. And, one drunk, power-hungry constable like More can render the effort meaningless in minutes. A posse of officers, including then commissioner R.S. Sharma, had proved the depths of corruption men in khaki can plumb to with the Telgi scam. A constable has now shown the extent of brutality men in khaki are capable of. It really doesn't get any worse than this.