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Reader Discretion Advised: This piece discusses sensitive topics that may evoke strong emotions and includes graphic descriptions.
“In an epoch when sexual assaults and ravishments are the order of day, when young men (and even old ones) revel in public declaration of their promiscuous pursuits, when not only the streets but schools, colleges and work-places are approached by the vulnerable with trepidation and even the judge has to be sensitized to gender issues, the rape of a young girl hardly out of her teens, would have gone unnoticed as scores of other violations of infants, girls and women, but for fact that a public outraged at the manner in which the entrails of the ravished were culled out of her body, leaving her to die, stripped of all human dignity, completely unattired, in the darkness of a wintry night, on a thoroughfare, took to the streets in their quest for justice.” *Source
Years after Justice Reva Khetrapal pronounced the court’s verdict in State Through Reference vs Ram Singh & Ors (2014)*, the talks on gender sensitization have gained momentum. With the waking consciousness of the civil society at large in what the media then hyped as Nirbhaya Rape Case, Indian jurisprudence implemented several statutory and administrative methods to combat the crimes against the half of our country’s population. Whether it be the amendment of the CRPC (now BNSS) in 2015, the addition of definite provisions in the Indian Penal Code (now Bhartiya Nyaya Sanhita) that specified stringent punitive measures to provide justice to victims, it should then appear that the State concords with the aspirations of providing a safe, inclusive, and equity-driven opportunity to women. It should then follow that the crimes against women as individuals and as imagined communities should have witnessed a decline, whether sharp or not.
In contrast, the media reports and findings of NCRB show that in 2022, there were 51 cases of crime against women every hour, in which states like Delhi, Haryana, Telangana made their unsettling presence felt on the top. The report highlights the crimes against women under categories like
- cruelty by the husband or his relatives (31.4%)
- kidnapping and abduction (19.2%)
- assault with intent to outrage modesty (18.7%), and
- rape (7.1%)
Sleep (Jean-René Carrière), from L’Album d’estampes originales de la Galerie Vollard 1897 printer Auguste Clot (French, 1858–1936)
The Cleveland Museum of Art
Making it clear that violence against women is most manifested in the safe contours of family and other social avenues. We already know from our post-liberalization experience (in particular, the Bhanwari Devi rape case) that Vishakha guidelines found its daunting way in regulating gender safety at workspace, thus paving the way forward for inclusive and gender-neutral work environment and yet, when Tarun Tejpal was accused of molesting a younger woman, the truth lay bare. Recent outbursts of #MeToo movements are rampant with such complaints, over which adversarial social media trials skew their discourse to ad hominem instead of discovering the truth.
Likewise, despite the well-intended anti-dowry provisions including the IPC section 498A (now section 85, BNS), the trend shows substantial rise in dowry cases, as much as 25% in 2021, as per NCRB reports. As if that were not enough, recent cases of some groom struggling with divorce proceeds committing suicide further complicate the feminist discourse, with an effect to circumscribe the vacuum in which violence against women goes unheard, unnoticed.The message is clear: the statutory provisions fail in addressing the issue at core, let alone resolving it for good.
India’s Daughter!
Gender inequality in India is pervasive through the rhizomatic structures of social, political and legal frameworks. By restricting autonomy or by regulating the action (whether by coercion or compliance), the Indian situation is strikingly appalling. At one end, we observe a brutal gangrape in 2012 that shook the conscience of the nation, and at the other, we are surrounded by verbal cues that propagate the patriarchal ideologies of male-dominance. In this context, the Nirbhaya rape case stood at the statistical median of sociological inquiries about women safety, dissecting both consent and dissent over women’s rights, circumlocating sympathy and (simultaneously) corrections around the rape victims, celebrating judicial diligence and patriarchal aspirations at the same time. Nirbhaya rape case realized its potentials of becoming, as a scholar puts it, “a watershed moment in India’s discourse on gender-based violence and legal reforms.”
But as we saw from NCRB reports, rapes and other sexual crimes against women appear at the bottom of crimes against women. They, among other non-sexual offences against women may be called the subjective violence, the form of violence visible in the sense that we know the perpetrator and the victim a priori the trial has begun. The problem arises when the demarcation seems blurred, or even invisible. In describing the problem, BBC’s India’s Daughter offers an insightful case study. The documentary chronicles the Nirbhaya rape trials and interviews key stakeholders including the accused, the family and friends of the rape victim, jurists, legal counsels, investigating agencies, and public by and large. While the makers of the documentary do not spell out their lessons, they seem to spark debates on feminism, women’s rights and the modularities of Indian social fabric. For the uninitiated, this documentary is potent in identifying the patterns of patriarchal torque that manifests violence against women. Despite being banned in India, the documentary can be credited for asking the right questions.
In his seminal text Discipline and Punish (1977), Foucault tried to show that power operations cannot be confined to institutional or legal agencies alone but need be traced in the exercise of diffuse societal mechanisms that regulate behavior and produce docile bodies. While watching India’s Daughter, we get a glimpse into the sequence of moral policing, clouded with patriarchal control and societal scrutiny, all entwined to reproduce a series of disciplinary commandments that ultimately aspire to attain gendered norms that offer little threat to the status quo of our body politics.
Contextualizing Gender Violence in India’s Daughter
Indian society, like all societies of the world, has a perennial history of gender discrimination. Scholars may want to trace its origins with the inception of civilization. Be it a religious text, or an economic treatise, women in India have historically assigned a lower, less-profiting socio-political role. The Constitution of India begins its chapter on Fundamental Rights (Articles 14, 15 and 16) with a guarantee to provide equality and forbid gender-based discrimination. Suffice to understand that the Constitution makers were aware of the sorry state womanhood in general faced in our country, especially during the colonial experience and wanted to stand firm against the patriarchal biases of the society.
Picture Credits: Wiki Sinaloa
My essay began with the first sentence of Justice Reva Khetrapal, and I wanted to emphasize upon the honorable court’s observation of the Indian situation for a reason. The observation is the perfect assessment of a judicial officer who is duty-bound to provide justice to the victim, knowing the facts of the case of which, a former Chief Justice and a member of the Rape Review Committee, Leila Seth was aghast to understand the psyche of the perpetrators (India’s Daughter 20:37). As commentators of the general law and order situation in the country, Justice Khetrapal perhaps also made the remark to address the regressive, patriarchal mindset of men in the country who disrobes a woman’s individual and professional dignity on the pretext that she “left the home with a boy who was neither her husband nor her brother” (India’s Daughter, 06:07) and assigns her sex “as a woman”; or when men tend to treat a woman like a flower and a man as a thorn, indicating that women always need a man to protect her. But protect her from who?
India’s Daughter does not explicitly answer the question, but instead, shakes the viewers to confront the reality, to witness the grief-struck parents of the deceased rape victim, remoarseless rapists, the cynical hyperbola of defence counsels, and the inherent violence propagated through discourse. Instead, the documentary ends with a statistical account of gender violence across the globe, and then a silence, like Zizek sincerely in his celebrated book Violence (Violence, Slavoj Zizek 2008 Profile Books Ltd., pp.8), persuading the viewer that “we need to learn, learn, learn what caused this violence”
Moral Policing as the meeting ground of politics
India’s Daughter documents how patriarchal attitudes, particularly those of the perpetrators and their lawyers, justify sexual violence. One of the convicted rapists, Mukesh Singh, infamously stated that “a girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy,” reinforcing the victim-blaming narrative . Defense lawyers in the case also expressed regressive views, equating women to delicate objects requiring male protection. Such attitudes are not anomalies but reflections of entrenched societal beliefs that regulate women’s behavior under the guise of morality.
The documentary is presented as a series of interviews, primarily chronicling the experiences and opinions of the parents of the deceased and one of the rape convicts (then accused). The rape victim, the parents recall, was the star of their eyes who spread happiness beyond horizons. A meritorious student of medicine, she was caring, socially responsible, and an aspiring independent woman of India. In contrast, the rapist (the one interviewed in India’s Daughter) was a barely educated driver who showed little remorse, guilt or shame for the crimes he was accused of. For the record, the charges pressed against the rapists were:
Art Institute of Chicago
- Criminal conspiracy
- Rape, unnatural sex
- Kidnapping with an intent to wrongfully confine a person
- Dacoity with murder
- Murder
- Causing disappearance of evidence of offence
Recall that Foucault conceptualized the modern power as decentralized operation through disciplinary mechanisms instead of overt coercisions. From common expas enforcements from family, peer-groups, educational/employment institutes, public gazes etc., thereby correcting the “woman” within them, facilitating a construction that renders women as docile bodies, submitted to domestic corridors where they appear distanced from patriarchal modes of control.
India’s Daughter explores the suppression logic by examining the stance of the rape convicts and their defense counsels. The judgement of the case records the prequel to the rape when the accused persons started misbehaving with the complainant asking him why he was with the girl : “Tu itni raat ko ladki lekar kahan ghoom raha hai”. Thereupon, an altercation took place and the three of the accused persons then started to slap and beat up the complainant, who retaliated.
(State Through Reference vs Ram Singh & Ors. on 13 March, 2014, Del https://indiankanoon.org/doc/57145403/ )
The documentary records that one of the interviewed rape convicts unabashedly believed that “It takes two hands to clap, a decent girl won’t roam around at 9’o clock at night. A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy.” (India’s Daughter, 05:50). The self-appointed moral police stimulating the rapist would later open up with his skewed division of labor theories, adding that “Boys and girls are not equal. Women should confine themselves to housework and housekeeping, not roaming at discos and bars at night… (India’s Daughter, 07:27). Syncing with his sentiments, one of the defense counsels confesses the general mindset of an Indian family: “in our society, we never allow a girl to come out from the house after 6:30 or 7:30 or 8:30 in the evening with an unknown person”. (India’s Daughter, 14:27 ) The defendant might claim that a prima facie case is thus established against the rape victim who could possibly have avoided the consequences, had she stayed in her limits.
The Road Always Taken
Analogous to William Ryan’s Blaming the Victim (Ryan, William (1971). Blaming the Victim. Pantheon Books.), sexual offenders are often defended (in corollary, justified) for their acts because it was ultimately the victim’s fault to show up at the wrong place, and they shout the claim so loud that the assertion almost reaches astronomical quanta, making the message sound holy, divine, mandated by the wisdom of the crowd. Such arguments may be dismissed by a trying Magistrate, but that does not reduce its popularity. Whether it is the infamous Jessica Lal murder case, or Asaram rape case, it is often the women whose (sexual) character is questioned, discussed, tarnished, and thence described as the abettor of the offence.
As Zizek puts it, with an air of dry humor, “an old joke about a husband who returns home earlier than usual from work and finds his wife in bed with another man. The surprised wife exclaims: “Why have you come back early?” The husband furiously snaps back: “What are you doing in bed with another man?” The wife calmly replies: “I asked you a question first-don’t try to squeeze it out by changing the topic!’l! The same goes for violence: the task is precisely to change the topic, to move from the desperate humanitarian SOS call to stop violence to the analysis of that other SOS, the complex interaction of the three modes of violence: subjective, objective, and symbolic. The lesson is thus that one should resist the fascination of subjective violence, of violence enacted by social agents, evil individuals, disciplined repressive apparatuses, fanatical crowds: subjective violence is just the most visible of the three.”
One is reminded of Lynn Bennet’s Sacred Sisters, Dangerous Wives where the learned author documents an upper-class Hindu community in Nepal to distinguish the moral commandments women are traditionally exposed to, so that sisters get relaxed instructions while the wives act in full capacity as ritualistic slaves to their respective groom’s side.At the risk of oversimplification, the moral police would require that women have limited mobility and definite behavior, confined both by space and time, to avoid legal and social punishments. One cannot fail to draw a semblance with Foucault’s notion of the panopticon where individuals are subjected to internalized surveillance and motivated to perform normative conformism. Foucault notes: “The body is directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs.” (Foucault, Discipline and Punish)
… Continued in Part II
Guest Author:Nivedita Kumari
Nivedita Kumari is a Gender Studies student at Banaras Hindu University. A Humanities and Social Sciences graduate from the University of Delhi, she has previously worked in the education and political sectors before pursuing a full-time academic career in Gender Studies. An ecofeminist, her interests include gender, cinema, environment, and law.
