by Barkha Dutt
It is true, of course, that many of these women have their eccentricities and quirks, just like everyone else, but because they are women their idiosyncrasies are scrutinized to a degree that male politicians do not have to deal with. The word ‘hysterical’ was the most commonly heard adjective if a woman flared up in public. I had never heard it used for a man in public life. The humorous, politically incorrect asides of Lalu Prasad Yadav who often gave interviews dressed only in a ‘banian’ and pyjamas while milking one of his cows were treated indulgently as eccentricities (both the job and the rustic garb). If a man showed tears in public—the present prime minister, for instance, has choked up twice—he was rightfully applauded for being modern enough to wear his emotions on his sleeve. But for fear of being considered too female, a woman politician would not be able to cry in public. In short, despite their ability to win elections, women in Indian politics are most definitely victims of misogyny. But in a perplexing paradox, as their response to the Nirbhaya protests showed, they are also guilty of behaving in ways that are worthy of criticism.
Several female politicians are autocratic one-woman armies; men in their parties are terrified of them. They have imbibed the more unsavoury characteristics of male-dominated politics, the display of punitive authority and a hierarchical embrace of power, among them. For instance, it may have been her way of asserting her hold over the party, but when Jayalalithaa—the ‘Amma’ (mother) of Tamil Nadu politics—encouraged the practice of party members prostrating themselves before her or carrying pictures of her in the front pocket of white shirts so transparent that her face would shine right through, it was also anti-democratic and the antithesis of the transformative politics that feminists had hoped would accompany the entry of more women into politics.
Worse, administrations headed by women have shown no special sensitivity when it comes to handling incidents of sexual abuse and violence. The chief minister of West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee, for example, walked into a minefield for suggesting that a woman raped at gunpoint on Kolkata’s Park Street in February 2012, had ‘cooked up’ the entire incident at the behest of Opposition parties. She even transferred the police officer who had successfully investigated the case. Later, she argued that her statements had been distorted by the media, but her actions were evidence of the fact that increasing the representation of women in politics would not by itself herald dramatic change.
Political responses after the Delhi gang rape could at best be called lacklustre and at worst, ignorant. The Delhi chief minister, who had won three consecutive elections, possibly lost the fourth time she ran because of her seeming indifference to the protests that followed.
Even women who wielded great power were bound by the political ecosystem they operated within. After the rape of Nirbhaya, I reached out to Sonia Gandhi’s office and asked whether she might want to give an interview. Sonia was infamously camera-shy but I thought she might want to speak out on this particular issue. I was given an appointment to meet her at her residence. She explained to me why she was unwilling to speak on the record. She said she did not want to contradict any statements that might have been made by the Manmohan Singh government in public and be accused of undermining its authority—an allegation that had often been made about her.
She believed Delhi’s police commissioner, Neeraj Kumar, should have been replaced or removed after the police used force against protesting students. The home minister—the constable turned politician Sushil Kumar Shinde—differed with his party president and backed the commissioner’s continuing in office. Sonia didn’t push the matter. I didn’t know what to make of this. The awkward duality of power-sharing between the Manmohan Singh-led UPA government and Sonia Gandhi, the Congress party president, made it impossible to locate direct accountability as the party and the government would often lapse into blaming each other in times of trouble. But this wouldn’t have been the first time that the Congress president disagreed with the government. It was unfathomable to me that as the most prominent woman politician in the country when the rape, and the subsequent agitation, took place, she was unwilling to take a more public and direct position on the events that had unfolded.
She asked me what I thought. I said that I thought it was imperative that she speak out. I also said that young politicians, men and women, including her son Rahul, should be out there, meeting students in universities and on college campuses, openly discussing issues of women’s safety and equality. None of it ever happened.
Women politicians, from any party, also refused to directly address the issue of the grave charges of sexual violence against fellow parliamentarians and legislators. Days after the gang rape, the Association for Democratic Reforms, a not-for-profit advocacy group, released statistics that underpinned this hypocrisy. In the past five years, it said, 260 candidates facing varied charges of crimes against women, including rape, assault and what Indian law old-fashionedly calls ‘outraging the modesty’ of a woman (an ambiguous phrase in the penal code that covers everything from stalking to molestation) had contested assembly elections. Prominent among the parties who gave these candidates election tickets, were the Congress and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), both helmed by women presidents. Even with the opportunity to change this on the law books, Parliament ignored the specific recommendation of the Justice Verma Committee. Men were still free to pursue electoral power even if charged with rape. The irony was that the same political establishment which debated the new rape laws had two sitting MPs and six MLAs facing rape charges.
Forgotten in the frenzy of rage against the Delhi gang rape were women for whom no one had ever marched. Bhanwari Devi had faded from the headlines, others who lived in the dusty districts of the hinterland struggled even to have their stories told. In the media we were certainly guilty of class bias. Not that the Delhi rape was not a turning point; it certainly was. But it was true that sexual assaults just as horrific, away from the cities or centres of power, never got similar air time in the media or the attention of the wider public.
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Banda, in Uttar Pradesh, is among the 250 most backward districts in India, and was one of those first targeted by the government’s massive rural employment programme. Located in the arid, underdeveloped area of Bundelkhand in Uttar Pradesh, it has been a cesspool of feudalism, caste bias, bigotry and oppression of women. With an estimated 20 per cent of its 1.6 million people belonging to the so-called lower castes, it is women who bear the brunt of institutionalized and caste-driven discrimination. The district is home to the ‘Gulabi Gang’, a glamorous, pink-sari-draped group of women vigilantes who beat up men who are violent, abusive or alcoholic. Led by the full-blooded Sampat Pal Devi, a mother of five who gave birth to her first child when she was just thirteen, the ‘gang’ has even inspired the movie star Madhuri Dixit to enact their exploits on film.
In the winter of 2012, I met Sheelu Nishad, a young girl from this very district who had come to Delhi. There were no movie stars or sari-clad avengers rallying around her; she sat by herself in a frayed beige jacket buttoned to the neck to ward off the cold. In hesitant, soft-spoken words, she told me the story of her battle to get justice. She was still a minor when she was kidnapped and raped by the local legislator Purushottam Naresh Dwivedi, a representative of the BSP. Once again her story could only be understood at the intersection of caste, class and gender prejudices. Dwivedi, a Brahmin, had kept Sheelu, who was from the backward caste of boatmen, captive in his house for four days. He repeatedly raped her until she somehow managed to escape. She was rescued from under a small bridge in the village, where she had been lying semi-conscious for two days. The legislator then accused her of theft and trespassing, and put pressure on her family to withdraw the rape charge. ‘We have to find the strength to fight our own battles so that other women gain confidence from us. A number of women get scared and withdraw their complaint for some money or simply from fear. This is completely wrong. It is our failure,’ she said on the TV show I had invited her
to participate in. Her words were met with a roar of applause from the audience of young men and women. ‘If I do not get justice, I will turn into a bandit and seek revenge.’ These words from Sheelu may have sounded hyperbolic at first but there was a historic precedent for them. Phoolan Devi, who came to be known as India’s ‘Bandit Queen’, was born into the same ‘Nishad’ caste as Sheelu; like her, Phoolan was gang-raped and humiliated repeatedly over several days by upper-caste men—the land-owning Thakurs. She was then paraded naked around the village. After escaping, Phoolan’s life was fuelled by revenge and retribution, for the indignities heaped on her, and for the murder of her lover Vikram Mallah. In India’s collective memory her definitive image came to be that of a woman in khaki trousers with her hair pulled back in a bandanna, a Sten gun slung across her shoulder, a flaming red shawl adding authority and awe to her otherwise diminutive five-foot-tall frame. She rose from poverty, abuse and sexual violence to infamy and near-mythical status on Valentine’s Day in 1981 when she rounded up twenty-two upper-caste men and shot them all dead. Two years later she negotiated her own surrender, spent eleven years in Gwalior jail without trial, until all the criminal charges against her were dropped in 1994 by Mulayam Singh Yadav, the then chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. In 1996, the former outlaw was elected to the Lok Sabha; I remember being naively captivated by her personal history and voting for her party that year when she made her debut as a politician.
I asked Sheelu whether she had ever considered telling her story from behind the protective cover of anonymity. ‘Why should I hide my face or name?’ she snapped back. ‘If they play with our honour, should we be ashamed or should they?’ But women like Sheelu were still the exception not the rule. It called for extraordinary mettle and gumption and the readiness to have your integrity relentlessly questioned but it was heartening to see that the outrage over Nirbhaya’s rape and murder had bolstered the resolve of a few women to fight their oppressors and the society that had victimized them.
After Sheelu left, my thoughts drifted to Bhanwari Devi from all those years ago, hunched over her husband’s potter’s wheel, determined to keep making clay pots that no one in the village was ready to buy. Not once had she opted for namelessness or facelessness, not even when the men who raped her walked free from jail, with an I-told-you-so dare in their eyes. Almost seventeen years after I reported on her rape as a rookie journalist, I met another woman from whom the same exceptional courage emanated.
With her cropped hair, no-fuss jacket-and-jeans ensemble and pocket-sized frame, Sunitha Krishnan’s pluck was inversely proportional to her four-foot-six-inch frame. Raped by eight men when she was just fifteen, Sunitha had evolved from survivor to saviour—she had committed her entire life to rescuing women and children from the multi-billion dollar industry of sexual trafficking (valued at an approximate $9 billion; according to a UN report, trafficking in persons is estimated to be the fastest growing enterprise of the twenty-first century). According to the Ministry of Home Affairs, there were nearly 5,000 reported victims of sexual trafficking in India in 2013 alone.
‘I refused to believe that I was spoilt or that I had been destroyed or that my soul could be broken by the eight men who gang-raped me,’ she told me, explaining why she didn’t need dimmed lights or the cover of a scarf while going on camera to talk about how she had been violated as a teenager. It had been more than two decades since the rape, but she still woke up every single morning gripped by a rage that hadn’t diminished with the passage of time. ‘The anger of exclusion, the anger at being questioned for your pain, for being blamed for something you have never done and society conspiring to make you feel cheap and ashamed...’ she said, as she tried to explain how being angry had helped her shrug off victimhood. ‘It bothered many people that I didn’t cry,’ she laughed, throwing her head back, ‘they called me arrogant for not weeping. Look at her, they taunted, so much has happened to her and she is walking freely and lightly. They blamed my parents for giving me too much freedom. The worst was the attempt by society to make me feel ashamed of myself.’ Sunitha had become something of a heroic figure, inspiring other women to be stronger, rescuing little girls sold into the sex trade by their own relatives, providing shelter for children infected with HIV as a result of rape and sexual violence. She had freed 8,000 girls from sexual slavery; she personified strength. Yet the valour never took away her essential vulnerability.
‘What people never understand is that I am brave in the daytime, but at night I have to deal with myself,’ she said, her eyes welling up behind the glasses that covered most of her tiny face. ‘You have to deal with your nightmares, you have to deal with the memory of the sixteen hands that groped you, you have to deal with the pain and shame and loneliness that you are going through, because you can’t talk to anyone. If you tell anyone they will always say you asked for it. I don’t feel my face needs to be blurred: I think the men who did this to me should hide their faces. But what bothers me is from the time this happened to me twenty-four years ago till this moment, the attitude of our society has not changed.’ Ironically, for all her pluck, her rapists never got punished; she said there was just too much pressure on her from her family to not pursue the case. And she wasn’t confident of identifying them. ‘I definitely felt guilt and shame for dropping the case. But what I want to ask today is whether we will ever act (together) as a people?’
Sunitha was prescient in her understanding that the appearance of fundamental change in the aftermath of the Delhi gang rape was illusory. ‘Today this is a lovely story,’ she said mocking the media’s notorious fickleness, ‘tomorrow this will go away and everything will be forgotten. Then a bigger gang rape has to happen, maybe a few more rods have to be thrust into a woman for us to feel outraged. We get outraged about Delhi; we don’t get outraged about Kozhikode or Palakkad or Uttar Pradesh, do we?’
The country had a new rape law, but one that failed to recognize that for many women in India, the enemy was firmly inside the circle of trust. Neighbours, uncles, cousins, old family friends, even husbands were often the perpetrators; the familial connections pushed the women deeper and deeper into awkward silence. One survey said that one in every five Indian men admitted that they had forced their wives into having sex with them. Yet, Parliament ignored the Justice Verma Committee’s recommendation to legally acknowledge marital rape as a criminal offence. First, the government justified leaving it out of the law, describing it as a ‘difficult issue that needed more consultations’. Then, an all-party parliamentary forum, which had several women as its members, backed the government on this decision. ‘The committee agrees with the government that we should not disrupt the family system,’ said Venkaiah Naidu, the chairman of the panel; he would later become a senior minister in the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government. The panel admitted that ‘consent in marriage cannot be consent forever’, but went on to argue that bringing marital rape within the purview of the law could ‘destroy the institution of marriage’ and family life. The refusal to acknowledge the reality of marital rape went against the international trend; the United States began criminalizing rape within marriage in the 1970s; most European countries had amended their laws by the 1990s. More recently even countries such as Turkey and Malaysia, both regarded as more socially conservative than India, changed their laws, in 2005 and 2007 respectively.
The remarks of India’s parliamentarians betrayed an archaic, conservative notion that women are the ‘property’ of their husbands and that sex is a guaranteed male entitlement of marriage, irrespective of whether the woman wants it or not. In law, the marital rape exemption can be traced back to Matthew Hale, the Chief Justice of England, who wrote in the mid-seventeenth century that the ‘husband cannot be guilty of a rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife, for by their mutual consent and contract, the wife hath given up herself in this kind unto her husband which she cannot retract.’ The United Kingdom finally changed its law in 1991, but in India the only p
rotection against marital rape is for child-brides who are under the age of fifteen.
When Naidu announced the decision to keep marital rape off the law books he was supported by parties across the spectrum, including those, like the Congress, which were headed by women. The resistance to change reflected the enormous premium placed on the continuation of marriage at all costs—the harsh truth of a society that saw women primarily as wives (or mothers) and denied them the sexual agency to make their own choices. Over the next few months I would meet scores of women who had been sexually abused, or beaten by their husbands.
In Mumbai, there was Anjum, her head swathed in a black veil, who looked down at her feet and spoke quietly about how her husband wanted her to replicate the pornographic positions he downloaded on his mobile phone. Every time she refused, he would thrash her into submission till she fell to the floor, bleeding from the mouth and nose. When she turned to her parents for help they told her that what happened within her marriage was her problem; she would have to find a way of dealing with it. Illiterate and disempowered, she was not permitted to step out of the house alone. She had often contemplated going to the police, but told me she had no idea how to even begin the process. Her movement outside the house was restricted to visiting her parents and returning home. When she fought with her in-laws to let her leave, they forcibly held her down. Finally, distraught, exhausted and helpless, she tried to kill herself by swallowing poison. ‘I thought it was better to die than to live like this. My own parents dismissed my pain and told me I could not turn against my husband. I had no one to talk to,’ she told me in tears.