It’s a man’s world, we’ve heard. The numbers seem to bear this out. Yes, women have the right to vote: a hundred years ago, this wasn’t so. Over the years, the numbers of women in leadership in politics and business has grown steadily: they are now 25 per cent of elected legislators, double that of in 1995, though a long way from gender parity. We have seen gender gaps reduce in school enrolment and literacy. Health outcomes for women have improved steadily worldwide, as has life expectancy. More women than ever before are participating in formal economic activities at home and outside. Legislations and norms are in place to deal with workplace discrimination, improve the status of women and protect them from violence. Still, there are persistent wage gaps—women earn just 77 per cent of what a man earns; 76 per cent of all unpaid care labour is by women, which if computed is actually 10-39 per cent of GDP. Women are less likely than men to have a bank account or a smartphone. And though 30 per cent of women are entrepreneurs, less than 10 per cent have access to credit to improve their businesses.
This broad-brush assessment, when examined more closely, reveals wide gaps across geographies. South Asia, in general, and India in particular, sees many contradictory trends. The rising graph of women entering professions, business, higher education, and breaching male bastions even in scientific research, is outflanked by the spike in the levels of reactive poison in the ‘social body’—as the sheer numbers of women/girls facing serious physical and sexual violence paint a picture of horror.
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Not that other forms of generalised vulnerability have receded. How does one even imagine a ‘human rights violation’ as an exceptional event when it describes a permanent condition? Any crisis like the pandemic and the related lockdown has a hugely differential impact in India in gender terms. It’s always the most vulnerable—women, children, the rural poor—who suffer the most severe stress and dislocation. That becomes especially stark with women involved in traditionally gender-based professions such as health workers, nurses, teachers, sanitation workers, street vendors of food, vegetables, fruits and flowers, anganwadi workers, domestic workers, informal workers in the retail sector…For instance, cleaning staff in municipalities and hospitals, the majority of whom are women, have had no access to PPE kits—doctors and hospital workers were naturally given priority—so these women end up handling seriously hazardous hospital waste with minimal or no protection. The distress of women from migrant families forced to walk back with luggage and small children was highly visible to all. In many states, midday meals ceased as schools were closed: this now shows up in the lower nutritional status of children in a fresh 10-state study. Starvation deaths were reported in remote tribal areas as the lockdown hit food supplies. Women in sex work were also very severely affected at all levels.
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The ordinary levels of violence, thus, are already higher for women. But gender exacts a specially bloodier toll, with a kind of retributive male anger. Women’s helplines reported a three-fold increase in distress calls as the lockdown saw a rise in domestic violence due to the men staying home, shortage of money and food. Rape and murder, especially of socially vulnerable Dalits and Adivasis, were unaffected by lockdown restrictions. States like UP, MP and Rajasthan, traditionally very patriarchal with high levels of gender violence, saw a huge spike in reported cases. Courts were closed and most police stations had deployed staff to Covid duties…only the nightmare stalked streets and homes.
The Counter War
Pent-up anger against gender violence was let loose when, in 2017, Hollywood actress Alyssa Milano tweeted in response to newspaper reports of long-term sexual exploitation of women in exchange for acting contracts by movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. The debate popularised a term first used by Tarana Burke, a Black woman activist in the US in 2006: #MeToo, used to indicate the pervasive nature of sexual harassment. It triggered an avalanche of claims by women against Weinstein and several other powerful men in Hollywood. He and well-known actor Bill Cosby were both convicted and are serving jail terms.
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The wave reached Indian shores in 2018, with Tanushree Dutta alleging that Nana Patekar had sexually harassed her, prompting women in the entertainment and media industries across the country to share their own stories of harassment and survival. There were already well-publicised cases in the Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam film industries, but at long last something that had always been whispered about began to receive the country-wide media attention it deserved. Another “list” set off a storm of exposes all across Indian academia, outing prominent persons as harassers of students. Some of the women who spoke up faced a backlash: editor-turned-politician M.J. Akbar sued senior journalist Priya Ramani (several other women journalists added to a chorus of similar narratives of sexual harassment involving him). The outcome is being keenly watched as Akbar is a member of the BJP and was a cabinet minister when Ramani went public.
The Caste of Rape
This bears endless iteration: rape has less to do with sex, more to do with the exercise of patriarchal power over the female body. In India’s caste-based, hierarchical society, while all women are disadvantaged compared with men, some are more unequal than others. In fact, the ideology of caste is closely linked with the control over—and therefore sexual access to—the woman. In the Chaturvarna system, the power pyramid formally grants males sexual access to women of communities ‘below’ them in the caste hierarchy. A Brahmin male, therefore, is permitted sexual access, as a ‘right’, to women from all castes. The Kshatriya male is permitted access to all women, bar Brahmin women. A Vaishya male can have relations with women of his caste, and those of the Shudra umbrella, actually a grouping of a large number of artisanal castes. Needless to say, women of the casteless outcastes are seen as accessible to all males.
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This unwritten law—deriving from mandated social practice—is what ensures that so few cases of rapes of Dalit women and girls get registered, despite the stringency of specific laws. Tradition confers impunity on the rapists of Dalit women. Even when cases are registered, there is huge pressure on the woman’s family to “compromise”—often silence is sought to be purchased with money or liquor for the men. If this doesn’t work, social and physical threats follow—the criminals have the social power to enforce a total banishment of the victims from their villages. Just compare the outcomes of the Khairlanji case (September 2006) and the Nirbhaya case (December 2012).
Khairlanji requires a retelling: both an original obscurity and an easy social amnesia take away the sharpness of the events. It happened in a Maharashtra village where there were only three Dalit families and the majority comprised a socially dominant, land-owning caste. A Dalit mother and daughter were gang-raped and lynched by a mob, then two sons were killed. The crime was at first suppressed. The story was broken by a foreign student intern with an English newspaper, who was later deported for reporting the story. It garnered wider attention only when Dalit youths blocked the iconic Deccan Queen train to protest the crime and its cover-up. After a two-year trial, a special fast-track trial court ruled it to be the outcome of a land dispute, not a caste-related killing, and denied the occurrence of rape. The common allegation is that evidence of rape was suppressed by delaying investigations and bribing doctors to give postmortem reports favouring the accused.
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The Nirbhaya case needs no retelling—the success of the pseudonym coined by the media is itself a marker of a national-level emotional investment. The case dragged on for seven years but three of the five assailants were executed—one had committed suicide in jail and the minor was detained under the Juvenile Justice Act and released after three years. The JJ Act was itself amended later to exclude this provision of protection from prosecution for juveniles in case of heinous crimes. Both Khairlanji and the Delhi cases were evidence of the limitless sadism and brutality of gender violence, but their legal outcomes were qualitatively different. Despite the aggravated nature of the crime in Khairlanji, including public gang-rape and mob lynching, and the case being heard for four years, the caste nature of the crime was denied, as was the rape: something really hard to swallow for anyone who cares about gender and social justice. The capital punishment awarded to six of the eight accused was later commuted to 25 years’ imprisonment on appeal.
If the reader has difficulty acknowledging how the legal system can itself be skewed in favour of the powerful, there’s Hathras, from just the September of 2020, where four Thakur boys gang-raped and tortured a Dalit girl to within inches of death, a span that was inevitably covered. The world saw on live television basic rights being denied to the victim and her family, as the authorities, including the DM and police, shockingly abused their power every which way, including burning the body without permitting any last rites. The Thakurs were permitted to have a ‘caste panchayat’ near the girl’s house, threatening them and claiming their ‘boys were not rapists’. Media trials proclaimed “there was no rape”, that “the family was part of a conspiracy to defame the government”. It’s just this week that the CBI finally released its report confirming evidence for rape and murder.
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In contrast to the obfuscation and victim-blaming seen in Hathras, the media spotlight was consistently and universally pro-victim in the case of Nirbhaya, who was from an elite caste, albeit lower middle class family. The public mood, orchestrated by media, was supportive of capital punishment to the perpetrators, and it was carried out despite last-ditch efforts by the defence to get a commutation. The differential outcomes of justice to Dalit women and girls even in 21st c India—and the reason why their rapists enjoy impunity—is the ideology of caste and the devaluing of human lives, especially if they are female and Dalit. Human rights, clearly, remain even to be secured in the first place in some cases—our social-juristic universe is still primarily violative, and it needs long, hard work to make that arc bend towards justice.
(Views are personal.)
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Cynthia Stephen is a writer, poet and anti-caste activist, Her work has long focused on gender and development policy analysis
