Rape as National Crisis in India

Our Crisis, Ourselves: Hailing a National Public. Photo courtesy Pinky Hota

On December 16, 2012, a 23-year old woman boarded a bus to return home in New Delhi, India. It was late at night and she was with a male friend; in light of the infrequent public transportation available at that hour, the pair decided to board a private bus. On board, five men began to verbally harass her. When she and her friend protested, these men attacked them. He was beaten with a steel rod; she was gang raped and disemboweled as a result of the rod being repeatedly pushed inside of her. The attackers threw them off the bus and attempted to run over them. The two lay by the side of the road pleading for help while people passed them by. When police finally turned up at the scene, several hours were spent deciding under whose jurisdiction the case fell. So “sullied” was the young woman’s body that local police refused to touch her; it was, in fact, the young woman’s companion who placed her in the back of the ambulance. Amid growing protests and a scrutiny of the current government’s ability to guarantee safety for women in urban India and its failure to secure law and order, the Indian government airlifted her to Singapore for medical treatment. Thirteen days after she had boarded that late night bus, the young woman died in this hospital, far from home. As the issue gained national and international attention, it became clear that this young woman’s rap

e was a site where India had to confront itself as unmodern and deficient as well as answer to an international community that had, only months ago, admiringly and even enviously hailed its economic boom and technological advancement. Less than a week after this young woman’s death, I spotted a billboard on the busy Delhi- Gurgaon Highway that called on India to “wake up”—a call to the nation to rouse itself from a stupor to acknowledge the contours of rape-as-national crisis.

Gender

Gender, obviously, was the starting point of the crisis. While Indian women have gained acceptance, even recognition, as workers in the nation’s neoliberal market economy, women fear for their safety in the urban centers where they provide labor and are trained to remain hyper vigilant about their own safety. Jyoti Singh Pandey’s vulnerability in the urban public sphere and the needless explanations issued about her male companion and their late night outing revealed the partial occupation of India’s public sphere by its women and the inevitable moralizing discourse that accompanies it. Moreover, it emphasized the extent to which women remain less than fully formed political citizens and are still identified as reservoirs of familial and even national honor. The young woman, later identified as Jyoti Singh Pandey, was never referred to by name in the media. Instead, she was variously referred to by a series of euphemistic monikers such as Nirbhaya (Fearless) or Amaanat (a “thing” to be kept secure or protected). Even as her father revealed her name in an effort to break the silence and social shame around rape in India, the state and Indian media outlets insisted that releasing her identity would have long-term consequences for the victim and her family, reinscribing stigma as well as invoking patronizing language to depict women as wards of either the state or their families.

As much as this was a crisis for women, the event also presented a crisis of masculinity in which Indian men were told by their female colleagues, male peers and the media, both national and international, that their masculinity was, in fact, deficient. Publications such as the Times of India ran campaigns that emphatically accused male readers via statements such as “If you do not respect a woman, you are only half a man.” Few would deny that these conversations around masculinity were needed and in fact, ought to be constantly revisited. However, these critical discussions also provided a platform for international commentators to indict Indian culture as problematic and not yet fully modern. Few drew attention to the perils of making rape appear to be a solely Indian problem. Much in the same way that colonial powers had once identified brown women as needing to be saved from brown men, to paraphrase Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak’s famous formulation, the rape of Jyoti Singh Pandey seemed to alert international civil society to the continued need for human rights debates around the maltreatment of women in India and the limits to cultural frameworks over universal rights and protections.

Political Economy of Violence towards Women

When rapes are reported in settings such as the US, they are cast within highly individualized narratives of exceptional circumstances or as products of circumscribed subcultures of hypermasculinity. Jyoti Singh Pandey’s rape, however, reflected the extent to which violence towards women in the Global South almost always raises questions about the larger political economy of developing nations, where violence towards women quickly becomes entangled with debates about countries’ enactments of neoliberal success. The rapists were identified as poor migrants to New Delhi, alienated from the economic success of neoliberal India and contaminating Indian cities with their coarse, barbaric masculinity. Unsurprisingly, these discussions stopped short of laying out how the Indian state had created the urbanrural disparities in development and failed to address the needs of such migrants. Instead, they allowed city dwellers to displace the problem onto the so- called uncivilized rural masses. Seemingly disrupting the nation state’s widely promulgated narratives of progress, the incident then laid bare the struggle between “two Indias” in the nation’s tryst with neoliberal developmenta growing urban sector as a self-congratulatory recipient of the fruits of the economic boom and a marginalized rural populace that bears the brunt of such neoliberal development. Unable to sustain agrarian lifestyles, rural citizens turn to cities to partake of the new Indian dream, where not only do they remain poorly integrated into circuits of capital but are also cast as containers of disavowed savagery and violence that impede India’s realization of liberal modernity.

Politics and Protest Publics

Urvashi Butalia, a prominent Indian feminist, emphasized the importance of the role of political protests soon after the incident, reiterating the ways in which political consciousness was being awakened and consolidated through protests that were making “people feel like they were a part of change”. These protests then birthed specific kinds of protest publicsas anthropologists such as Francis Cody have suggested—political collectives that came to know themselves and their political agency through the consumption of mass-mediated publicity.

In the highly fragmented, plural and stratified context of India, Indian feminists and political commentators agreed that it was indeed hopeful that these new protest publics seemed to cut across class, gender and caste profiles. These national protest publics also sought to make connections to larger supranational publics, such as in the case of the One Billion Rising campaign. These connections were crucial in reminding international civil society that violence against women is not just a South Asian problem, but one with patterns in common the world over. These protest publics also appeared to have the potential to speak back to democratic practice and legislative change through altered voting practices, sparking hope that for the first time in India, women’s issues could form an active part of the electoral vote. And it was these publics that exerted enough pressure that led the Indian government to create the Justice Verma Committee, which sought to eke out a list of legislative reforms, including widening definitions of rape and assault as well as changes in police and legal process that would improve the documentation and prosecution of sexual assaults.

Yet, as much as these protest publics seemed pregnant with possibilities, a perceived crisis of political action soon became manifest. It was clear that these publics relied perhaps too heavily on the mediations of public affect through highly charged images, advertising and political oratory. Even as protests led people to experience unification around a political cause, the limits of such highly mediated forms of politics were revealed in the ebb and flow of political action. Activists such as Ruchira Gupta underscored the positive ripple effect that these protests had across other domains of women’s rights in which reforms were being sought, such as prostitution and sex trafficking. Yet Indian citizens, including some vociferous participants in protests, began to engage in political self-doubt, questioning the efficacy of such highly mediated modes of political action and prematurely diagnose themselves as politically impotent. Affect-laden protest then appeared to them as an untenable form of politics, one whose power was ephemeral and ultimately unable to secure trenchant political change.

This incident of rape was not unique, though several puzzled over why it had come to invite such fervor, going as far as to suggest that Jyoti Singh Pandey was somehow perversely lucky to have become “immortal” in a context where so many cases of violence went unnoticed and unprotested. Merely four months later, in April 2013, a five year old was raped and succumbed to her injuries. Protests broke out, this time enfeebled and truncated. The Indian public spoke of these protests as “going nowhere” and bemoaned their “fatigue of feeling”, unable to experience the horror of this child’s death, much less engage in political protest. Jyoti Singh Pandey’s rape then became a moment at which India came to understand how much further it had to walk towards the ideal of liberal modernity, but also perhaps, it came to realize that it was too fatigued to make that journey.

Pinky Hota is assistant professor of anthropology at Smith College. Her manuscript examines how the Indian state’s constitutional mandates for affirmative action and religious conversion laws open up hostilities between ethno-religious minority groups. She recently organized a Five College panel on violence against women and political change in South Asia.

via Anthropology-News http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/06/04/rape-as-national-crisis-in-india/