Devil In Short Sleeves

Our men ravaged some more last week. Uniformed men this time, soldiers of the Border Security Force's Battalion 58 brutalised a seventeen-year-old till she was reduced to a writhing, vomiting heap in a pool of blood. Then they raped her, many of them. A violent orgy that the girl's family and neighbours, villagers of Pahalgam's Kullar gaon, were forced to watch at gunpoint. Later, sobbing before news reporters, the victim's sister recounted: "They tore her clothes, raped her in front of me. She was crying as they, one after another, dropped their guns and took turns...I tried to close my eyes but then I could hear her cries."

In faraway Jaipur, fourteen-year-old Shakun still shuts her eyes tight as her sister Munni's whimpers ring in her ears. Munni's agonised groans, mingled with her father's heavy grunting as he raped her night after night, echo routinely in Shakun's nightmares. She'd been petrified witness to these incestuous assaults for six endless months: "Munni didi and I shared a bed in our Ajmer home. Father would come to our bed, take off her salwar, her underwear, and force himself into her and slap hard if she protested." So the sisters suffered silently like they'd seen their mother, Shanti Devi, suffer. Shanti was always being thrashed, kicked around until finally she was thrown out of their home by the father. On one of their mother's rare visits a year ago, the girls blurted out their pain. A guilt-ridden Shanti now weeps: "I didn't believe the girls initially. I still can't, how can a father rape his own daughter?"

Yes, they are our fathers, husbands, brothers, our men. The very same who kill infant girls because they prefer sons, sexually abuse children, turn stalkers, rapists, wife-beaters, bride-burners, vicious aggressors when tempted by ugly opportunities and uglier urges. Gratifying their darkest impulses, pandering to their grisly masculinity, they default on the civilisational contract they have made with women. A contract etched over ages, the pact to be partner, provider, even protector to her. They flout these crucial clauses ruthlessly, with alarming intensity—harassing, humiliating women in spaces private and public. Failing civilisation itself, almost each critical time it is put to test vis-a-vis the sensitive relationship that has been forged between man and woman. Butchering centuries of nuanced evolution, of good faith between genders, with a primordial, predatory ruthlessness, they keep the Male Marauder in them alive and kicking...

And if the Male Marauder lives on all over the world, he thrives here, in India. His unbridled chauvinism, his animal machismo fed and nurtured from birth. Imbibing notions of a vile virility through the skewed gender equations he sees within his family, in school, at play in the media. He is groomed to claim the lion's share in life, over food, education, property, sex, care and affection. Primed into being a hunter, to conquer, tame, repress women. Lurid lessons that he learns through boyhood, critical to attaining manhood, in becoming a mard. By the time he is a Man, he can rip through the most sophisticated surroundings, spit ridicule at the new rules of emancipation, always on the lookout for his prey.

He sniffs her out in the chicest urbane settings at times. As Manu Sharma sighted Jessica Lall at a posh celebrity do in the capital two years ago. She a model and bartender for the party, he a man she refused to serve a drink because the bar had closed. With 97 of Delhi's scotch-sipping beautiful people watching, an infuriated Sharma shot Jessica in the head point blank.

But it's not always spot and shoot, not always innate male aggression gone berserk. There are men who stalk 'their' women, waiting to move in for the kill. Like 23-year-old Santosh Singh, who shadowed his law faculty classmate Priyadarshini Mattoo around Delhi for two years. Accosting her at traffic signals, lonely places, breaking into her flat, dogging her into panic situations. Till she cried hoarse for help, lodging no less than five complaints with the faculty, various thanas, even with the police commissioner. She was even assigned a special police officer for protection. But that only seemed to add to the challenge of the hunt. On a cold day in '96, Priyadarshini was raped and killed by Santosh in her apartment.

Experts say a complex and destructive nexus between biology, psychology and socio-cultural influences engenders such horrendous male violence against women. The most cited reasons on what propels men into perpetrating these atrocities are: the powerful male hormone testosterone that primes the brain and muscles for aggression; huge responsibilities that are traditionally perceived as a man's burden and the consequent frustrations he feels when he fails to take them on, frustrations that find vicious outlets with women.

"There are motivators to male violence peculiar to each society," offers Ahmedabad-based psychiatrist Vishwamohan Thakur, "...the Indian male is brought up to be aggressive with women." A keen researcher of linkages between violence and children, Thakur says our boys grow up encouraged to be aggressive, using swear words, seeing their fathers ill-treat, even beating their mothers. And their mothers, in turn, subscribing to the 'Swami Theory': "Worshipping her husband as 'swami,' her owner; notches above her in a relationship that should be equal." Also, it doesn't help that we have a largely gender-segregated society, where friendships with the opposite sex and physical intimacy are almost inaccessible to boys, even men, further fuelling frustrations that are powder kegs to erupting male violence.

Does this then mean a different upbringing would render our men less aggressive towards women? Perhaps. Jawaharlal Nehru University's T.K. Oommen's study on 'Physical, Verbal and Indirect aggression among Hindu, Muslim and Sikh adolescents in India' suggests so. Community and conditioning, the study proposes, do make people more or less violent. It investigates the use of various aggressive strategies in interpersonal conflicts among a sample size of 677 adolescents of three age groups from different religious backgrounds in Delhi and Uttar Pradesh. The results reveal clear variations due to religious background. Sikh boys score higher on aggression than their Hindu counterparts in all age groups, and higher than Muslims at age 11. Significantly though, the boys, irrespective of religion, score higher than girls on all three measures of aggression investigated in the study: physical, verbal and indirect.

Images of male aggression that abound in the media aggravates these tendencies. Thakur's research claims an average child watches 12,000 violent acts on TV annually, mainly murder and rape. Larger-than-life Bollywood movies amplify the cause for carnage, routinely using slapping, kidnapping, molesting as means the virile hero uses to "win over" the heroine.

"There is no apparent or sustained disharmony, no dynamic stress or strain between the male aggressor and the media," says Akhila Sivadas of the Centre for Advocacy and Research, a Delhi-based public interest research outfit. The media builds its own mystique around the successful male marauder. Constructive aggressors, competitive risk-takers with dare-devil attitudes, they are the heroes of today's soaps. She regrets "there is no effort at building an alternative male, neither in entertainment, nor in the news format".

Providing free legal aid to inmates at the Tihar jail for the past seven years, activist Elizabeth Vatsyayan has rubbed shoulders with many a hardcore male criminal. Murderers, child molesters, rapists, she's known them all up close. And it is this notion, mardpan (manliness), she says, that runs as a common thread among most: "They feel an itch, there's a girl, what's to think."

Naturally then, the numbers of atrocities perpetrated against women zoom every time inventories are taken. The violence begins even before the birth of a girl child: census 2001 has revealed that foeticide on gender lines is increasingly rampant with the sex ratio in the age group 0-6 declining sharply from 945 females for every 1,000 males in the past decade to 927 now. The latest crime statistics show 13,06,180 crimes were committed against women in 1999 alone, ranging from rape, kidnapping, sexual harassment to dowry deaths. It would hardly be pessimistic to assume this number has only grown in the past two years, despite the fact that very few women still report the crimes committed against them.

Statistics would spiral if women started calling on the police each time they found themselves at the receiving end of a push, shove, slap at home. Countrywide surveys by the International Council for Research on Women (icrw) estimate that up to 60 per cent women, regardless of caste, class and education, experience violence at home. An International Institute of Population Studies survey has revealed attitudes (among women) that justify, if not condone, wife-beating. Of the 100,000 married women interviewed, 56 per cent thought it okay for men to beat their wives under certain circumstances. These being unfaithfulness, natal family not giving expected money, going out without informing the husband, neglecting house/children, and not cooking food properly.

So, king of his home, the Indian husband remains largely unaccountable even as he unleashes terror. When Farzana Ali Akhbar Shaikh, 40, came to the Sancheta Community Centre in Ahmedabad for help she had already been married for 24 harrowing years. She had broken teeth, fingers, stitches on her scalp, a fresh cut near her left eye and bitten lips. "He claims I am weak, I throw tantrums...I have been given 25 shock treatments, he stuffs me with high doses of medicines every day," she said. "I am forced to have sex with him, sometimes in front of the children. I have never understood as to why all this happened to me."

Jyoti Dhawan, though, had realised that the lack of adequate dowry would be her undoing. What she didn't expect was the harshness of her punishment. Locked two years in a room by her husband, she just about survived amidst urine, excreta and hopelessness. Till last year, prodded by Jyoti's family, the police finally rescued her, a mass of bones weighing no more than 20 kg.

If only the police had acted earlier. But then here's the most worrying part—the perpetrators, witnesses, police, even judges are all male. Nine years after Roop Kanwar was burnt alive on her husband's funeral pyre in Rajasthan's Deorala village in the name of an obsolete tradition called sati, all 39 accused in the case were acquitted. There were no witnesses to the murder. Yet another infamous verdict in '95 saw the acquittal of five "high-caste" men who had raped village social worker Bhanwari Devi. "High-caste men," the verdict declared, don't rape "low-caste women". "Rape is usually committed by teenagers. The alleged rapists here are middle-aged and therefore, respectable citizens."

The findings of a report 'Gender and Judges: A Judicial Point of View' by the ngo Sakshi some five years ago showed that chauvinism is rife in our courtrooms. A whopping 74 per cent of the judges surveyed said the family's preservation should be a woman's primary concern even if there is violence within the marriage, 64 per cent believed women must share blame for the violence perpetrated, 68 per cent felt provocative clothes are an invitation to sexual assault.

"Over the ages, men have conveniently made the woman the repository of community honour. They have tamed her sexuality, externalised it and then targeted it whenever they have wanted to get at each other," avers Imtiaz Ahmed, professor of sociology at jnu. It only follows, he says, that fanatics will insist on veiling their women and communal riots will see these same veils shorn to bits by fanatics of rival communities.

The emergence of the new emancipated woman challenges this patriarchal assumption, says Delhi University psychology professor Ashum Gupta, but this has also resulted in pushing men into further frenzied rage. "The Hindustani male, the pati parmeshwar feels threatened by today's assertive woman. He wants to retain the control and authority that he has always enjoyed. So when she denies him a drink like Jesicca Lall did, he shoots her. If she answers him back, he hits her."

"It does seem as though violence is an entitlement of masculinity," says sociologist Radhika Chopra, a writer-researcher on gender issues. "Yet one should not homogenise violence." Man's relationship with violence is varied, she points out, neither continuous, nor coherent. He could be the offender within his family and at the receiving end once he steps out, and each of these contexts affects his behaviour in the other. After all, when five men raped Bhanwari, her husband was forced to witness the horrendous assault. And the case's ruling unhinged him some more: "It isn't possible in Indian culture that a man who has taken a vow to protect his wife in front of holy fire, just stands and watches his wife being raped." It isn't indeed. But the male marauder often feminises good men, making victims of them too.