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Reader Discretion Advised: This piece discusses sensitive topics that may evoke strong emotions and includes graphic descriptions.
The Road Always Taken- Continued.
The logical fallacies in these arguments are noticeable to innocent eyes that shot the documentary India’s Daughter. Moral policing of women, as depicted in India’s Daughter, displays a case of cognitive ease and availability heuristic, which functions best when society minimizes its cognitive effort in identifying the agencies of crime and other situational factors in the guise of blaming the offence victims. Such accounts of character-shaming comes also from hindsight bias and a just-world fallacy, ultimately adding up to the grossly chauvinistic fundamental attribution error of determining a false causation. That women are responsible for getting raped is normalized through families that manifest girlish behavior through clothing, division of labor, pedagogy, distribution of resources, and amidst all, a moral code of virginity. The sex is not something to talk about, a prudent guardian might tell an Indian daughter. “She should not be put on the street just like food. The lady, in other words we can say the woman, the girl, is more precious than the gem, the diamond. It is up to you how you want to keep the diamond in your hand. If you put your diamond on the street, certainly the dog will take it out. You can’t stop it.” (India’s Daughter, 15:58)
Attraction I Date: 1896 Artist: Edvard Munch (Norwegian, 1863-1944)
Art Institute of Chicago
What the well-intended guardian does not know, or perhaps would never tell is that woman’s sex belongs to the Other. “A woman means I immediately put the sex in his eyes. We have the best culture. In our culture there is no place for a woman” This ideology of censorship serves a standard of compliance indoctrinating women into self-regulation (as Foucault would elaborate through The Care of the Self).
Production of docile bodies by normalizing an economy of “sexualizing” fear among women is a manifestation of moral policing which at one hand fosters responsibility among women for upholding patriarchal moral codes, while on the other, absolves men of accountability, both legal and sociopolitical, thus nourishing the vitriolic character of patriarchy. Echoing the samaritanism of the good angels, the rape convict admitted that though he could not explain why the crime occurred, but (his eyes blush with a slant of honor) “mainly to teach them a lesson.” Such lessons may be dismissed as anecdotal, something extreme, the rarest of the rare cases and yet somehow, more than 6 crore women go missing in India (India: 63 million women ‘missing,’ 21 million unwanted). Pivoting around the necessity of such lessons lies the concern of regulating feminine prospects, “creating a woman”, lies her benefits. She should subscribe for it, acknowledge it, submit to it, the moral police soon adds: “When being raped, she shouldn’t fight back”. (India’s Daughter, 22:47)
The sermons of surveillance are for your good, a judicial officer might want to interject. After all, you are the gem, the diamond that one is protecting from the dogs. The question the judicial officer or the rape convict or the saint or an ordinary man might skip answering is: why are the dogs against the diamonds in the first place? India’s daughters are apprehensive of the indisputable fact the “dogs” are deprived of food, making them a fearing-feared beast whose hunger, whose libido, whose confused desire-production serves as a trigger to the self-propelling metaphysical dance of capital that runs the show, provides the key to real-life developments and catastrophes. Therein resides the fundamental systemic violence of capitalism, much more uncanny than any direct pre-capitalist socio-ideological violence: this violence is no longer attributable to concrete individuals and their “evil” intentions, but is purely “objective,” systemic, anonymous. (Violence, Slavoj Zizek pp 12)
The Sponsorship of Gender Disparity
An analysis of the warp and weft of gender violence may expose the institutional and informal means of policing the behavior of Indian women. Revered as the essence of the Universe (Devi Sukta, Rigveda), the deity of knowledge, wealth, and power among other important celestial magisteria. This is the compliance mechanism, assigning an idealism towards which the woman in India is subjugated to the primal diktats of Manu smriti or Brihadaranyaka Upanishad for example. The malicious division of labor within the society dissecting the social positioning of women in ancient texts seem to have lost no vigor, as a Pew research indicates.
The iterations of moral policing through State actions often contributes to the magnificence of such prescriptive gender violences. The way in which power organizes and governs populations through institutions, discourses, and norms, offers another lens to understand gendered control. There are judicial precedents (Lata Singh v. State of U.P. AIR 2006 SC; Shafin Jahan v. Asokan K.M. AIR 2018 SC) where the Honorable Supreme Court condemned honor-based violence against women, thereby acknowledging its recurrence. But why point out law enforcement agencies when we have softer targets that have wider reach and amplified media apparatus?
Consider cinema, where a stalker is glorified as the archetype of passionate lover, or a girl who wears short dress is appropriated with libertine indulgences, making cloth or alcohol an indicator of sexual practices. In recent years, cinema, journalism, social media discourses attempt to categorize women, classifying them either into pure, serene icons of subliminal divinity or into liberated (read corrupted) acceptable submissive hedonist sex dolls. An actor is judged and admired by his performance, the actress by her sensual charms. As it happens that almost all the item songs showcase women as “items”, endowed with a capacity to produce an effect on men so devilish that such “loose women” ought to be taught a lesson. The rape convicts might never come to know but their actions were motivated by popular discourses. The defense counsel for rapists could have reflected upon the situation of Eichmann in Jerusulum to submit that the post mortem description of the rape victim far surpassed the Nazi crimes and further that the rape convicts were following some sociopolitical abstraction and thus were literally not involved in the offense. The Magistrate might not have admitted this absurd connection but Hannah Arendt’s observations on systematic violence and later on human condition stay relevant in the discursive fractions of gender debates.
Discourse and the artifice of dissent
The ban on India’s Daughter was on the pretext of protecting the Indian image in International media, an obvious application of Foucaultian predictions about the functioning of power through controlled narratives. By imposing a series of protests boycotts and bans on issues that matter for women, including sexuality (Lipstick Under My Burkha), religion (Kaali) etc., the State represents the ideals of civil society which revises moral codes designed to protect unfounded honor over women’s safety, consent, and above all, her liberty. In the famous Hadiya case, the Court acknowledgeda woman’s right to choose her partner, rejecting the state’s interference in personal liberty. And yet the modern implementation of Uniform Civil Code in some states mandates the citizens to inform about their live-in partners. In State of Punjab v. Gurmit Singh (1996), the Supreme Court criticized courts for questioning rape survivors’ character but also acknowledged that many still place undue emphasis on a woman’s past behavior. We need not avoid the fact that one of the popular defenses adopted by the defense counsels in such cases is tarnishing the moral (read sexual) character of the rape victims. There are instances where rapists, when found guilty by village panchayat, are punished to marry the rape victim. In the landmark Bhanwari Devi rape case, one of the accused was acquitted on the grounds that no man can rape a woman in front of his elders ( his father was a co-accused). There are cases where rape charges are dismissed because the victim did not protest enough. So to say, the defense and justifications of the rape offenders run parallel to law enforcement agencies, meeting at the asymptotic penumbra of patriarchy.
The Cleveland Museum of Art
Such paradoxes surface across almost all employment sectors, where women struggle to bridge the appalling gender gaps, or educational institutes which restrict the movement of women outside the “curfew time”, openly admitting the lack of security beyond a certain threshold of darkness. The darkness is as literal as figurative: discrimination against women who are dark, sized, or just opinionated, all forms of objective and symbolic violences attempt to reimagine womanhood as it ought to have been in the dark arrays of history. In the wake of rising gender crimes in India, the punishment for rape threat is no less than the actual crime itself. Such “precautions” appear to protect women, and in situ, reinforce the prevalent notion that woman’s freedom is contingent upon male approval.
Short-Circuit: Governmentality and Civil Action
Interestingly, India’s Daughter showed snippets of civil society action, the public outrage that Justice Khetrapal referred to in her judgement that took to the streets in their quest for justice. Such was the character of the outrage that it served several political and administrative purposes at the backdrop of an anti-incumbency of 2012 where the ruling government struggled to justify its credibility. Even to this day, when there is a mass protest against a high-profile or horror-inflicting rape case, the modus operandi of the protesting enthusiasts refract the glimpses of Nirbhaya rape protests. It is important to dwell upon such representation of protests, and the emergence of protest culture to examine the missing links in the gender violence that perpetuate in the micro-moments of every individual regardless of her distinction, her uniqueness, her class/caste/social positions, thus making her gender as an inalienable and equally enforceable maxim of her existence in what Foucault would call, the biopolitics. Interpellated as a subject by ideology, her individuality is no longer hers. Her expressions need be shadowed upon, her progress monitored, her transgressions cured, her location described within the axiomatic stereotypes of the second-sex, subservient to a manhood that multiplies within the discrete intervals of the gender violence.
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.
