Rape, Protests and Whataboutery

Rape has once again ceased to be a statistic. In our country it happens once in a few years and in its wake brings in a widespread convulsive outrage, which spills on to the streets.

Keyboard warriors call for eye for an eye retribution and as a template cite methods used in Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries, whom they otherwise look down upon. Some end up betraying their latent patriarchy, while others, especially the political class, end up with their foot well entrenched in their mouths.

Last time it was the infamous December, 2012 Delhi gang-rape, often referred to as Nirbhaya case. As the incident happened in the national capital, it instantly caught the eye of national television. Egged on by saturation TV coverage and continuous buzz on social media, the outrage was instantaneous.

Delhi's wintry smog laden streets got filled with protesters and the government of the day had a tough time dealing with them. Footage of policemen using water cannons and canes to control the restive mob became a staple fare of almost all TV channels.

In Delhi even those who had never taken part in a protest in their lives got busy preparing placards and heading to protest venues. All this put the government of the day on back foot.

Newspapers were forced to report every rape case that came their way and that too provide a good display instead of relegating them to 'in brief' sections.

Dinner table conversations started veering over the topic and parents of teenage children had tough time answering queries like 'what is rape?' or how different it was from molestation!

The pontificating anchors pointed out the victim was just like us, called her 'India's daughter' and cautioned us that it could happen to any of us and they whipped up a sentiment of blood lust among the masses. The culprits happened to be from the fringes of society with no political or social clout, the very riff-raff detested by the middle class.

They were put immediately behind bars and going by the standards of Indian judiciary the trials were speedy enough. The government also formed the Justice Verma commission, which recommended many changes in laws related to sexual assaults.

Gradually the outrage died down and the daily rapes retreated to its realm of statistics and police record books.

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The current outrage, in contrast, is a slow-burn one caused by gruesome rapes in Kathua in Jammu and Kashmir and Unnao in Uttar Pradesh, which acquired limelight months after the actual incident. In the interim period they remained on life support on social media through the posts filed by activists fighting the cases.

Both cases were different from the Delhi rape in one aspect - the alleged perpetrators were influential people with political and social clout.

Moreover since both places were located far away from the myopic TV cameras of our news channels they got little attention and the cases dragged on for months with the perpetrators almost succeeding in burying them.

In fact the clout enjoyed by the perpetrators at Kathua was so strong that there were street demonstrations in the district to defend them. They even unfurled the Tricolour and invoked religious symbols to defend the perpetrators. The accused included a temple priest and few police officers.

Even more appalling was the conduct of the lawyers who actively protested the filing of the chargesheet by the crime branch against the accused.

In Unnao rape case the accused happened to be a BJP MLA and hence the matter was in deep freeze from day one. The tipping point was reached when the Unnao rape victim's father died after being in police custody. Around the same time the contents of Kathua case chargesheet was published in a Delhi newspaper.

For national media this was its Rip Van Winkle awakening. TV channels could no longer remain in their cosy self-censored bubbles and ignore the protests breaking out in every corner of the country, mostly orchestrated through social media.

But having been embedded with the establishment for the past four years, they were not exactly comfortable in attacking it. Soon whataboutery crept in, where were these protesters when rapes happened in Assam, where is the money collected through social media campaign going.

One channel began an innuendo campaign against Deepika Singh, the valiant lawyer who has taken up the Kathua case against heavy odds, alleging that she was pocketing the money.

Moreover, the moment Prime Minister broke his silence expressing displeasure over such 'incidents', TV channel displayed the same kind of euphoria that a child shows after he gets back his favourite toy, which he had thought was lost forever.

For them it was a early ghar wapsi after a brief flirtation with anti-establishment hashtags.

Image courtesy: Facebook

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Badaun: Nirbhaya Redux

It is turning out to be Nirbhaya redux with Bharatiya characteristics. When Nirbhaya happened in Delhi there were some who said rape was a city phenomenon, it had to do with displacement of population, loose morals, short skirts and even Chinese food and rural India was an idyll insulated from such crimes. For them the verdant fields, cow dung plastered houses were repositories of all that was good with Bharatiya sanskriti (culture) and it blinded them from all the atrocities happening there. But the recent grisly footages of two Dalit women hung to a mango tree in a village in Uttar Pradesh's Badaun district comes as a chilling reminder.

Most parts of rural India are no strangers to these kinds of ghastly crimes against women, done more out of sense of entitlement or to show someone their place than to satisfy lust. But the exploiter-exploited caste matrix seems to have changed. Earlier the oppressors used to be Thakurs and other upper castes, but now it is increasingly Yadavs, who figure among OBCs, thanks to the upward mobility and political clout acquired over the years. With it has come a sense of entitlement to oppress those in the lower rungs of caste hierarchy.

The flippant patriarchal mindset among our politicians which was on display during Nirbhaya tragedy is very much intact. In post-Nirbhaya days when laws on eve teasing were being tightened, Sharad Yadav wondered how will youths indulge in 'mohabattein'. Recently Mulayam Singh Yadav said boys make 'mistakes' and should not be hanged for crime like rape.

For Akhilesh Yadav under whom the state's crime graph has docked into an orbit unheard of even by UP standards, this is time for cheap retorts, with no room for remorse or sensitivity. His snide remark to a scribe asking whether she faced any danger was reminiscent of 'painted and dented' remarks by Pranab Mukherjee's son and Sanjay Nirupam's 'thumka' remark against Smriti Irani. But being a Chief Minister and responsible for the state's law and order this remark scores much higher in terms of crassness quotient.

For opposition parties, with next election in their minds, Badaun has now become a new 'rape tourism' destination. Long motorcades of red beacon Ambassadors and high-end SUVs on dusty roads, hurriedly constructed helipads and hordes of TV crew, it is indeed a mela time for all except for the bereaved girls' family.

One positive fallout of this incident is that the issue of toilets and sanitation have come to the fore with an added dimension of women's safety, as open defecation leaves them vulnerable to attacks. The issue had somehow tapered off after former minister Jairam Ramesh had triggered a national debate over it.

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Delhi Rape: Random Thoughts II

India's Tahirir Square moment seems to have opened a can of worms - the issue of sexual harassmsent, patriarchal values, sex ratio and many other gender centric issues have now become part of public discourse and also caught many political leaders with foot right inside their mouths.

Talking of unparliamentary remarks, I thought the last word was said when Sanjay Nirupam made the 'thumka' remark about Smriti Irani's TV days and questioned her 'charitr'. How wrong I was! Even after that there was a steady flow of statements on same misogynist lines.

But it was Abhijith Mukherjee's remark that really took the cake. To begin with somehow I had hardly heard about him, though he is the son of President Pranab Mukherjee. His comment that only the painted and 'dented' (can't figure out what he mean't) women go for protests against the Delhi gangrape, showed Dilli Durbar's total disconnect with reality. His remarks even managed to divert the brickbats his father was getting for government's ineptitude in dealing with crimes against women.

Even after the woman's death, we had some BJP leader saying girls should not wear skirts. Once again the onus of upholding morality has fallen on the shoulders of girls. What to do boys will be boys - with libidos akin to water cannons, pumped up on a sumptuous diet of Honey Singh lyrics, Sunny Leone videos and a 'haseena maan jayegi' mindset!

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It is also a protest against a crony capitalism where not only wealth but even policing is cornered by a bunch of oligarchs, who have laid siege on Lutyen's Delhi.

Almost 30 per cent of the police force, probably the smarter and fitter among the lot, is tied up for the well being of these VIPs. Most of these policemen may be doing precious little other than buy vegetables for memsahibs and drop their children to school. This is not just the case with Delhi, but with most state capitals.
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Apart from the brutality of the incident, what probably evoked such a groundswell of protest is a feeling of empathy among the common public. The woman had gone for a movie and then taken a bus along with her male friend (thankfully, having a boyfriend no longer raises eyebrows or has been overlooked for now). The time was around 9:30 pm, not an ungodly hour. Somehow unlike earlier instances of such assaults this time there was no she-asked-for-it ring around it.

This particular case did manage to pierce through the iron curtain of public apathy. And the Delhi-centric national media was more than eager to roll in its OB vans and cameras and milk the issue dry for TRPs. 
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It was indeed a heart warming sight to see the agitators withstand the water cannon in a chilly Delhi winter, when people even loath to take hot water baths. It is indeed ironic that the government came out with so much alacrity to quell the agitation, but did not even utilise half of that zeal in making streets safer for women.

But the agitation was not free from its share of controversies. It took a violent turn when some political goons joined the agitators and provoked the police. A more unfortunate fallout was that some of the women agitators themselves were eve-teased by men, who were drunk, and had come to have some 'fun'. What better place than a crowded protest meet where women have turned up in large numbers!
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Hang them, castrate them ... these nostrums were not just mouthed during angry private conversations, but in Parliament, TV debates and message boards of various websites. We had Mohandas Pai, former Infosys HR chief and revered figure of India Inc, come on TV and say that rapists should be castrated. The message board warriors wanted rapists even stoned to death, bobbitised; and in Facebook we had pictures of men hanged in public for rape in Saudi Arabia with numerous 'likes' and 'shares'. All this must have been sweet music to the Saud dynasty, Mullah Omar, Ayman al-Zawahiri and late Osama bin Laden!

But seriously, it shows the disgust the general public has towards the way our police and legal system functions and the pathetic conviction rates, which makes them advocate such drastic measures. And not because they have now fallen in love with such medieval practices.
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Now the Indian media, be it TV or newspaper seems to be on an overdrive to report sexual assault cases. Suddenly incidents happening even in remote parts, which usually used to get buried in inside pages as 'fillers' or 'killed' for more important stories, are getting prime-time slots.
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Came across a really hard hitting video of Kavita Krishnan, secretary of the All India Progressive Women's Association, which actually covers the whole gamut of the issue. Wish there were English subtitles, so that those who do not understand Hindi could also follow it.

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Delhi Rape: Random Thoughts

While watching the horrific saga of the rape of a girl in a bus in Delhi unfold on various TV channels, the sound bites that a reporter managed to get from the parents of one of the culprits left me shell shocked.

The mother of the accused said that after the incident he came home, had food and slept. He did not reveal them anything about it  nor showed any signs of remorse, uneasiness or even a lack of appetite. He behaved like one of those regular youths who come home after socialising with friends. 
Probably he thought the girl and her friend may not live to tell the tale. Even otherwise they would never be caught or if at all caught, they will be easily let off. The level of cockiness (no pun intended) and dehumanisation exhibited by the person was appalling, to say the least.

The guy's parents said that he slept soundly till 10 am and they  could not sense that their son had committed a crime that had caused national outrage. They came to know only when they had police at their doorsteps.

However, to the parent's credit it must be emphasised that they showed courage and forthrightness to face the camera and concede that the crime was unpardonable and their son ought to be punished, if guilty.

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Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit comes before camera and says the permit of the bus used by the rapist has been cancelled! Big deal. The guy will most probably get it revoked in a couple of months.
Yet another foot-in-mouth remark by her. It comes close on heels of her earlier comment that a family of five members can buy monthly grocery for Rs 600.

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One Delhi girl says on camera that while travelling in buses, it is routine to get groped on breasts and thighs. Then she adds, in a relieved tone, that  compared to what happened to this para-medical student, it is nothing! Now such is the level of expectation (as good a nil) of safety while using public transport.

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A tweet by Arvind Kejriwal reveals that in 2012, 635 cases of rape were registered in Delhi, but nobody has been punished so far! No wonder these incidents happen with such impunity.
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Poor Narendra Modi. No one doubts his victory chances, but may  have to share the limelight with this horrific incident.
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Wonder why the head of the accused is often covered using a dark coloured cloth.  Surely they do not deserve any privacy or anonymity, unlike the victim. Their face should be very much visible for all to see. An exception could be made for juvenile criminals.
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Delhi is in a league of its own, when it comes to crimes against women. Remember the Naina Sahani tandoor case? or for that Geeta and Sanjay Chopra kidnap and murder case? The list is sickeningly long.
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TV actress and BJP MP Smriti Irani revealed that while covering this very rape incident, a woman TV journalist  got nearly molested by  some four-five guys who came in a car! She was saved by her alert camera man. Even in this surcharged atmosphere, for some it was business as usual.

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