This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

by Barkha Dutt

  At the police station, she was called a whore, even by women constables. The magistrate’s office ordered that a test be done to check her age, the suggestion being that she was too old to be raped (she was thirty-five). There was no female doctor available to conduct a medical test; it would be fifty-two hours before she could get one. Back at the police station, she was asked to strip and leave her ghagra behind as evidence. It was past midnight when she made her way home draped in the thin cloth of her husband’s turban.

  A few months after I met Bhanwari, the local trial court acquitted all five accused and ordered their release. Among the observations made by the judge was one that held that an upper-caste man would not rape someone of a caste he considered ‘untouchable’. Other absurdities used to buttress his argument were that a husband would never passively watch his wife being raped and that a rapist would not assault a woman in the presence of his nephew. The case had to travel to a higher court, journeying through the minefields of intimidation, insinuations and insensitivity.

  At Bhateri village, Bhanwari continued to live an isolated existence, shunned by the village community. No one was willing to buy the clay pots that Mohan made. There were even days when they refused to sell essential commodities like milk to her. She was surviving on the trifling amount she earned from the government-run community programme.

  For me, reporting as a twenty-something on her fight for justice had meant unpacking a vast quantity of ignorance. How could I afford to dismiss the exacerbated impact of caste on gender discrimination, for instance, when I had never known what it was to experience that sort of oppression? The certainty of my college years and my assertions that caste was an irrelevance began to seem naive and—looking at what was happening to Bhanwari—even nonsensical. My feminist preoccupations began to feel more text-bookish than fully thought through. I became acutely aware of how much the class I belonged to had protected me. I was filled with ideological self-doubt as I listened to Bhanwari Devi say, ‘There may be no justice in the courts, but in God’s house, one day, I will get justice’. Though her resolve never weakened, there was a good reason for her cynicism. Her appeal against the court acquittal of her rapists had been slotted by the High Court to be heard ‘in due course’. More than a thousand appeals, pending from the 1980s, had to first be processed by the slow-moving judicial system before it would be her turn. Years would pass before her petition was even heard.

  Ironically, India’s women have her to thank for the fact that we finally have legal cover against sexual harassment. Because Bhanwari Devi had been raped while she was doing her job—anti-child-marriage advocacy—her case gave birth to what came to be known as the ‘Vishaka Guidelines’: court administered norms on how an employer must respond to complaints of sexual violation at the workplace. A dispossessed, poor, ‘lower-caste’ woman’s brave battle had given birth to the first authoritative set of rules in the country to protect working women against sexual intimidation. But while she has waited for decades to see her fight translate into justice, a slew of urban professional women have been able to use the Vishaka code for redress. In recent times, a Nobel Laureate (R. K. Pachauri) and a celebrated editor (Tarun Tejpal) have had to contend with criminal charges, one for harassment, another for rape, because the Vishaka Guidelines exist.

  The Supreme Court framed the Vishaka Guidelines after a collective petition was filed by women’s groups who took the Rajasthan government to court after the Bhanwari Devi gang rape. In August 1997, nearly six years later, India got its first official framework that laid out the process that government offices and private companies alike should follow if a female worker complained of sexual harassment. The onus of providing a working environment that ‘prevents or deters’ abuse was placed on the employer. The court defined sexual harassment to include not only unwelcome physical contact or demand for sexual favours but any unwanted ‘verbal or non-verbal conduct of a sexual nature’. It also asked managers to put a complaint mechanism in place—with at least one external representative—that would provide for time-bound decisions.

  Despite all this, in December 2012, when the country witnessed widespread street protests over the gang rape of a young medical student in the capital—a moment widely seen to be an inflection point for the fight against gender injustice in India—the men who raped Bhanwari Devi had still not been convicted. It had been twenty-two years since she was raped. ‘Time bound resolution’, as mandated in the Vishaka Guidelines and made possible by Bhanwari Devi’s courage, was a cruel joke when it came to her own specific case. Two of the five men charged with the rape were dead; in all this time, her appeal had not even been heard in the High Court. She had been all but forgotten even as an enraged country finally put violence against women at the centre of public attention.

  III

  That sunless winter in December 2012, when the cold bit hard and the skies turned grey with smog, citizens literally took control of the capital’s King’s Way (as the British used to call it); ‘Rajpath’, as it is now known, had become ‘Janpath’ in the metaphorical geography mapped by popular anger.

  This is the grandest part of Delhi. Edwin Lutyens had designed the boulevard for an unobstructed, panoramic view of the city from the British viceroy’s residence, which became Rashtrapati Bhavan when India got independence. Rajpath runs all the way from Rashtrapati Bhavan on Raisina Hill through Vijay Chowk to India Gate and then beyond to the city’s National Stadium. It is on this ceremonial avenue that the Indian republic shows off its might every January during the annual parade. It is here that, every year on Republic Day, camel mounted troops and military bands signal a ceremonial ‘retreat’ from battle as the sun sets and the surrounding buildings are illuminated.

  But that December, what was a historic symbol of India’s nationhood was pressed into service as a stage on which to highlight a moment of national shame. Along the entire stretch of the avenue, right up to the president’s house, where barricades prevented them from going further, was a sea of protesters. In their thousands, young men and women marched along, their fists punching the cold winter air in anger and determination, their placards held high like badges of honour. ‘We are angry’, ‘It’s a dress, not a yes’, ‘Stop telling us what to wear, ask your sons not to rape’, ‘Where I am, at what time, is no excuse for rape’, ‘You raped her, because her clothes provoked you, I should break your face because your stupidity provokes me’.

  School-going teenagers, men and women from Delhi University, middle-aged professionals, homemakers—the protests drew all ages, all classes, all faiths and all types. It was the largest popular mobilization India had seen against sexual violence. The unspeakable horror of what had happened to a young woman in her early twenties, who could just as easily have been you or me or any college-going student in any Indian city, had made it impossible to look away. She had been beaten so badly by her rapists that 95 per cent of her intestines had to be removed. The iron rod used to bludgeon her into submission had also been repeatedly rammed into her abdominal cavity. As the men took turns to violate her, they had wrenched out some of her vital organs with their bare hands.

  The young woman and her male friend had clambered onto a chartered bus as they made their way home from watching Life of Pi at a popular city-mall. They paid the Rs 20 the conductor demanded at the door and settled into the red seats, staring out of the darkened tinted windows with yellow curtains. At first they thought the men in the bus were passengers as well. Later, in her dying declaration, the woman who came to be known by many names—Nirbhaya (the one without fear), Damini (lightning), Braveheart—would ask for her rapists to be ‘burnt alive’. She would recount how one man would take the wheel, while the others would gather at the back of the bus, taking turns to brutalize her body. The bus was driven past several police check posts without a trace of fear. Forty-five minutes later the men pushed her and her companion out onto a deserted street, naked and bleeding. The doctors would find bite marks on the girl’s body and at
least eighteen injuries to her internal organs. A portion of her intestines had been pulled out by her rapists and doctors had to surgically remove the rest because it had become infected and gangrenous. Even then, the twenty-three-year-old fought to live. Unable to speak, she scribbled down brief notes to her parents, enquiring about the health of her friend, and imploring them to help her. ‘Save me, I want to live’, she would tell her brother. Air-lifted to a super-specialty hospital in Singapore a few days later, as the New Year approached, she died.

  Public rage over the rape and murder spilled onto the streets. The government and the police got nervous and made a terrible situation even worse. Cold jets of water slammed into the heads of young students as the cops trained water cannons on them. Lathis were used to clobber the demonstrators as they pushed past security barricades. But they kept moving forward, inching closer to the president’s house and the North and South Block buildings from where India is governed. A smart, empathetic politician—or even president—would have come out to meet them or, at the very least, would have invited a smaller delegation inside for discussions. But instead of an official or unofficial acknowledgement of their agitation, clouds of tear gas began to darken the winter sky over Raisina Hill. Some protesters fell to the ground, others tried to shield their friends from a battering by police lathis. And all the while, thousands more pressed forward through the stinging smoke and water. The protests lasted several days and were misjudged and mishandled from the beginning. Finally, a hapless police force began shutting down metro lines to stop the crowds from reaching the centre of the city.

  Why had this rape—in a country where a woman is raped every twenty-two minutes—moved so many thousands out of their apathy and onto the roads? The monstrous nature of the crime was only one explanation for the mass outpouring of support. There were two other important reasons that marked this moment. The rape of Nirbhaya may have generated headlines globally about how unsafe India was for women but the demonstrations it had sparked were in fact a gigantic moment of hope. The media activism, the sloganeering, the public marches and the candlelight vigils had all captured a freeze frame of change in the country’s gender discourse. India’s younger generation—and it was heartening to see how many men were among the crowds—were no longer willing to treat sexual violence as routine. And the other reason, of course, was that the victim’s own story was, once again, so much about the aspirations and ambitions of an India that was altering. She was the daughter of a baggage handler at the Delhi airport. At a time when infanticide and female foeticide remain blots on the country’s claims of modernity, here was a father who described his daughter as the ‘engine of the family’. He had sold the only piece of land he owned so that he could educate her and finance her dreams to become a physiotherapist.

  In so many ways Nirbhaya’s story had come to be the story of Everywoman in an India that was lost in transition, caught in the flux created by globalization, the creation of a neo-middle class and the competing forces of conservatism and change. In her death, Nirbhaya gave birth to a robust new law to punish sexual crimes. Under acute pressure, the government announced the setting up of a special panel headed by a retired judge of the Supreme Court to re-examine existing legislation on sexual violence. In an ironic coincidence, the judge was Justice J. S. Verma, the same judge who had first delivered the verdict on the Vishaka sexual harassment guidelines after the rape of Bhanwari Devi. In so many ways, though she never got the same public attention (perhaps because she was poor and lived in a village or perhaps because it was much before India had transformed enough to rise up in solidarity), the gang rape of Bhanwari Devi gave rise to the Nirbhaya moment.

  Verma, a soft-spoken jurist respected for his unflinching probity and simplicity—he typed parts of his report himself with one finger as he couldn’t afford to hire staff on his meagre pension—received more than 80,000 suggestions from the general public and from lawyers and activists. In twenty-nine days, his team (which included the trailblazing female jurist Leila Seth) and he drew up a path-breaking blueprint for change. His recommendations included making voyeurism and stalking a criminal offence, a separate set of laws for acid attacks, tougher punishment for gang rapes, the barring of politicians charged with rape from contesting elections, a review of legislative immunity to security forces in conflict zones and the recognition of marital rape as a criminal offence. The Verma panel, however, opposed the death penalty for rapists.

  When the government legislated on the new law it accepted some of the suggestions by the Verma panel and rejected others. Rape was now redefined as the forced penetration of any orifice of the female body not just the vagina, using not just the penis but also fingers, hands, bottles or any other object. (This would be the basis of the rape charge against Tarun Tejpal.) It also allowed for the death penalty to be applied in especially brutal gang rapes. India’s Parliament rejected the proposal to criminalize marital rape and remained silent on the recommendation that politicians facing charges of sexual assault be prohibited from becoming candidates.

  ■

  While the mass protests had forced the political establishment into action it soon became clear that not enough would be done. It also became apparent that although there were a fair number of women in positions of political power, that was not necessarily going to translate into a more empathetic response. While everyone made the right noises, for the most part, women politicians displayed no extra sensitivity or visible identification with the young people out on the streets.

  Women may not have been in a dominant position in the political establishment in December 2012, but enough key positions were occupied by female politicians. Yet, this did not mean much. Sheila Dikshit, the grandmotherly chief minister of Delhi, had already been criticized for her use of the word ‘adventurous’ to describe journalist Soumya Viswanathan who was murdered in 2008 as she drove home late from work. By the time Dikshit made belated attempts to join the protesters, she was heckled and kept out.

  It could be argued that the most powerful woman politician at the time—Congress President Sonia Gandhi—also failed to understand the import of the moment. Ironically, just a year ago, she had shown intuitive political sagacity by joining delirious fans celebrating India’s cricket World Cup victory on the streets of the capital. She had waded into the crowd, waving the national flag, happy to shake hands and pose for photographs. But now, she showed no such spontaneity or willingness to dispense with security protocols. She did emerge from inside her fortified residence to meet with a tiny group of demonstrators, but by the time this happened the moment seemed emotionally aloof and more formal than felt. The defining image on national television was of men and women in their twenties being contained by the police force with tear gas and water cannons. The dissonance—between the seething, genuine sense of outrage in the crowd of protesters and the stiff, formal way in which the country’s leadership, especially its women leaders, responded—was enormous.

  The muted response of women politicians to the outcry was ironical as for two decades now, there has been a battle in Parliament to reserve one-third of the seats in the legislature for women. This has often provoked violent resistance—disruptions, scuffles and documents thrown about. The Lok Sabha is yet to pass the legislation and, given the resistance within, it’s unlikely that this will happen any time soon. I remember after one such scuffle inside Parliament, I waylaid Sharad Yadav, a veteran politician from Bihar and vocal opponent of the proposed law, as he was getting into his car; I jumped in from the other side to take a seat beside him as his car drove out of Parliament. He was stumped to see me there and even more taken aback at my many questions on his opposition to the bill. Later, Yadav dismissed me (and those like me) as an elite ‘par kati mahila’ (woman with short hair) who was out of sync with issues that really mattered to the masses.

  In the aftermath of the Delhi gang rape, the question resurfaced: Would the presence of more women in the political space automatically make governmen
ts more gender-sensitive? Or were women as conditioned as the men by the patriarchal society that India was? And, once in politics, did their compulsions and compromises become identical to those of their male counterparts? Perhaps, just like in other professions dominated by men, women politicians in India spent too much time proving that they too could be tough and ruthless.

  To some degree, India mirrored a universal phenomenon of the push-back women face when they have the guts to jump into politics and public life. In May 2012, when Hillary Clinton was visiting India as the US Secretary of State, and was considered among the most powerful women in the world, she told me, in all seriousness, that the fastest way to get a story about herself on the front page was to change her hairstyle. We were together in West Bengal, a state governed by a feisty and unpredictable woman politician—Mamata Banerjee. Hillary had recently met the ex-defence minister of Finland, Elisabeth Rehn, and they had talked about how when they read about themselves in the media the coverage usually went something like this, ‘It’ll be my name, comma, wearing a spring suit of pastel hues, comma, spoke of—’. Speaking of her own run for president of the United States she freely admitted that it was ‘a pretty hard glass ceiling’ that had not yet been broken. ‘I think we just have to keep persevering and not be deterred from supporting women who have the gumption to get out into the political arena.’

  But in India, the sexism went well beyond prefacing every analysis of female politicians with a fashion critique. This was because in a gender contradiction typical of this country, unlike in the West, many of the women were socially unconventional by the standards of a deeply orthodox country. Several of them were, for instance, single women who had lived openly with mentors or partners or, in some cases, were divorced. In the United States, which has not voted for an unmarried president since 1885, it’s impossible that Hillary could have run for office as a divorced or single woman. In India, Mayawati, Uma Bharti, Vasundhara Raje, Mehbooba Mufti, Mamata Banerjee and Jayalalithaa were among the more prominent politicians who had never bothered to present the picture postcard image of domesticity, marital bliss or motherhood that is expected of women in public life in even the most modern of democracies. Yet, they have won elections in a deeply orthodox country. At the same time, these women have also been mercilessly picked on. In drawing rooms that considered themselves intellectually sophisticated, I had heard the most crass jokes about these ‘frustrated’ women who ‘weren’t getting any’, a gross sexual subtext to their single status. In more than twenty years of reporting on politics I have never heard unmarried male political leaders spoken of in the same terms.