Blame it on women!

Nasrin Sultana Delhi

On the frozen winter night of January 17, 2007, at around midnight, six abusive men claiming to be CID officials, broke open the door, barged into a girl’s madrassa at Karhenda in Allahabad, picked up two young girls at gun-point and reportedly gangraped them, in a field one kilometre away. Eye witnesses said they were left to the school at around 2 am, “both of them, with torn clothes, in total shock, literally half-dead”.  Later, the station officer of Kareli police station in Allahabad, refused to lodge a FIR complaint and conduct a medical examination of the victims. As of now, the brutal act has rocked the state of UP yet again, now widely dubbed as being effectively controlled by miscellaneous criminals, gangsters, murderers, rapists and serial killers of all varieties.  Anarchy almost stalks the land.

On December 18, 2006, 16-year-old Tapashi Mallick was raped and burnt within the boundary of the land acquired for the controversial Tata Motors' small car unit at Singur. She was in the forefront of the struggle against the project. A CBI inquiry has been instituted following Mamata Banerjee’s hunger strike. But, as yet, her murder remains a mystery, while the Tatas perform holy puja at the controversial site.

These are not random cases. Every girl in the entrenched Indian system of patriarchy is a victim of the ‘male panoptic gaze’ in some form or other. The Manu Sharmas and Santosh Singhs are all among us. They can be anybody — fathers, brothers, uncles, landlords, neighbours, even boyfriends.

For women in India, the struggle for security begins from the womb. Witness the high rate of female foeticide. According to a UNICEF report, because of selective abortion, about 40 to 50 million girls and women are missing from the Indian population since 1901. (In August, 2006, in Patran, Patiala, 50 female foetuses were found in a 10-metre well located behind a private clinic.) India’s female ratio between 0-6 years age group has fallen to 896 females per 1,000 males, the lowest ever in a decade for the world’s second most populous nation. Of the 12 million girls born in India, one million are killed in the womb.

The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), 2005, confirms that Delhi is the most unsafe metropolis for women. Delhi is widely branded as the ‘rape and crime capital’ of the nation. College campuses, classrooms, malls, cinema halls, buses, trains and subways — women, girls and children are vulnerable everywhere. Even three-year-olds are at risk. 

In 2005, Delhi had the highest crime rate against women, 27.6 per cent per lakh population, which is twice the national average of 14.2 per cent. A whopping one-third of rape cases take place in Delhi alone — 562 out of a total of 1,693 cases in India.

As for kidnapping and abductions of women, 900 out of a total of 2,409 cases, about 37.4 per cent, occurred in the capital in 2005. Delhi accounted for 94 dowry deaths of the 492 cases in India. In the same year, Delhi, with 197 cases, was second to Kanpur (227 cases) in sexual harassment cases. In terms of kidnapping and abduction of children below 15, Delhi reported the highest figure in the country, 18.9 per cent in 2005. While the all-India average of Indian Penal Code crimes is 165.3, Delhi recorded a stunningly high figure of 356.1 in 2005.

The NCRB acknowledges that in 1999, the 13.8 per cent of reported crime-rate against women in India should be viewed with caution as "a sizable number of crimes against women go unreported due to social stigma attached to them". The highest incidence was reported in Madhya Pradesh, followed by Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra. A study titled ‘Crime against Women: Bondage and Beyond’ by the Centre for Women's Development Studies, Delhi, analysed that in the years 1998 and 1999, 22 per cent of the cases remained pending and that the highest rate of pending cases was in the categories of kidnapping/abduction of girls and women, rape, dowry death, and cruelty at home.

The police remain essentially patriarchal and stunningly insensitive. The National Commission for Women (NCW) filed several complaints for the missing daughter of Jhabbu Lal in Nithari village in the business hub of Noida. The police made no move even as children kept disappearing.

The women’s helpline in Delhi, said to be easily accessible at 1091, is just another number highlighted in buses and large hoardings. For instance, the women’s helpline outrightly rejected Prerna’s (name changed) complaint. At 5:30 pm, in early November, 2006, a police constable physically assaulted the 22-year-old final year MA student of Delhi University near Khalsa College in the North Campus. Her two male companions could do nothing in the face of the police assault. Later, police officials at the Timarpur police station tried to coax her for a compromise. An FIR was finally lodged at 2 am. The said constable was ‘awarded’ the severe punishment of only one night in custody.

Shreya (name changed), who graduated in 2005 from Delhi University’s Indraprastha College for Women (IP), narrates how she was subjected to physical assault by one of the metro workers, while the metro was under construction near the college premises in 2002-2005. She says, “Every morning we had to encounter the metro workers’ comments and whistling. It was dangerous, as sometimes classes got over very late. We had complained to the metro authorities about it and demanded that the metro workers should carry at least an I-card so that the girls can identify the worker’s name. Though the college helped in getting some security measures, the metro authorities paid no heed.”

Sunita Thakur, counsellor of Jagori, a Delhi-based NGO, talking about the ‘Safe Delhi Campaign’, says, “We do not teach women to attack but how to defend. With intelligence and strategy, 80 to 90 per cent cases of assaults on women can be avoided.”

Jasmine Hussain (name changed), 23, from Manipur, a corporate sector employee in Delhi, says, “Last year, a bus conductor molested me in the bus at 8:30 pm. When I complained, the police constable on duty sent me away saying that girls from the northeast have no ‘character’ and it was my mistake to travel alone in a bus and that too ‘so late’. How do I travel then when my office gets over at 7 pm and I have to go to Maharani Bagh from Connaught Place everyday?”

This realism becomes many times more nightmarish for the marginalised dalits, adivasis and Muslim women. Patriarchy and feudal casteism can be a deadly mix. Estimates suggest that 66 per cent of women agricultural labourers are dalits earning between Rs 8 to 25 per day. The recent rape and murder of a mother and daughter, along with their two brothers, as a public spectacle, in Khairlanji near Nagpur, is a classic case of how backward class women are often the first targets of upper caste wrath. This has been witnessed in a series of massacres of dalits in the rural hinterland of Bihar in the last decade and before whereby women are raped and killed to teach their ‘men’ a lesson.

According to NCRB report, 26, 887 cases of crimes against dalits were recorded in 2004. There were 1,172 cases of rape against dalit women, 669 cases of murder and 258 cases of kidnapping in the same year. Madhya Pradesh with 15.8 per cent, and Rajasthan accounted for 26.5 per cent of the total crimes committed against adivasis in India during 1998, while UP accounted for only 2.6 per cent (its population of adivasis is significantly smaller).

Dalit women have also routinely been victims of custodial rapes. Maheswata Devi exemplifies the trauma in her short story Draupadi in which a dalit woman is raped in the police station. The focus on custodial rape acquired public notice in the mid-1970s by the infamous Mathura rape case which led to massive protests.

In July, 2004, 32-year-old Thangjam Monorama Devi was picked up by the Assam Rifles, raped and killed. Manipur went up in flames; so much so that several mothers of Manipur protested nude outside the Assam Rifles headquarters in Imphal with placards saying: Come Indian Army, Rape us. The draconian Armed Forces Special Powers Act, 1958 (AFSPA), gives impunity to the security forces to shoot and kill ‘insurgents’. There have been widespread angst and anger expressed against this repressive act. The protests following Manorama’s killing shocked the conscience of the nation. Consequently, a committee was instituted by the UPA regime, but nothing has transpired since then. Besides, for the last six years, Irom Sharmila is on a hunger strike seeking a repeal of the act. She is currently being force-fed in Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital in Delhi, and the government has not budged.

In Laxmanpur-Bathe, Bihar, poor women were raped and mutilated before being massacred by the Ranvir Sena in 1997. The Ranvir Sena is a private army of the upper-caste landlords. In Bihar and Tamil Nadu, women have been beaten, arrested, and sometimes tortured during violent search and raid operations on dalit villages in recent years, said a NCRB report. Dalit women have been arrested and raped in custody in Bihar so as to humiliate their male relatives (mostly Naxalites) hiding from the police or have taken up a struggle against upper-caste domination.

However, the Indian judiciary seeks to protect the rights of women; Article 15(3) provides that the State is free to make “any special provision for women and children”. In 2003, the Supreme Court set aside an important provision in the law that prohibited the police from questioning women within the premises of a police station unless women police were present. The recent Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005, which promises imprisonment for a term that may extend to three years or fine for violence against women, is a progressive move. But will it really stop domestic violence in India, most of which goes unreported and unrecorded?

In a distorted civil society and nation-state, where women are eternally treated as second-class citizens, where women’s empowerment is resisted by archetype structures of male domination, and where violence on women is often celebrated as public spectacles, can crime against women be isolated from the prevailing method in the madness? Yes, and while the Mallika Sherawats and Rakhi Sawants, and sundry item girls, can protect themselves in their safe zones of sudden prosperity and influence, what about the working woman, the single woman, the mother and daughter, the little girl child, the construction worker, the woman on the street? How will they protect themselves from this predatory male society?