by NAILA KABEER
Protestors in central New Delhi. PHOTO/Demotix/Jiti Chadha
There is uproar in India at the brutal gang rape of a 23 year old student on her way home from the cinema. Can we harness the international attention to this case to demand that the world’s leaders commit themselves to a policy of zero tolerance of violence against women in the post-Millennium Development Goals agenda?
When the international community came together in 2000 to agree the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDG) that it would prioritize over the next 15 years, it did not include the issue of violence against women. Perhaps the problem did not appear sufficiently important or perhaps it was hoped that progress on the gender-related goals and targets that were adopted – education, labour market opportunities and political representation – would take care of the problem.
The horrific gang rape of a 23 year old para-medic student in Delhi on 16th December 2012 suggests that such hope is misplaced. Yes, the gender gap in education in India is closing. Yes, many more women are now in the labour force than ever before. And yes, political quotas and reservations have increased the percentage of women in elected office. But blocking the transformative potential of this evidence of progress is an age-old patriarchal system which regards women as inferior to men and its toxic interaction with the new global culture of consumerism and its relentless sexualisation of women’s bodies.
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So the first reason why what is happening in India right now is important for all of us in South Asia is that, in a region where women’s movements have been fighting almost on their own on the issue of violence against women for so many decades, the sheer scale of the public response to the gang rape of Nirbhaya has been astonishing, moving and inspiring. If it can lead to lasting change in India, then perhaps it will lead to change in the rest of the region. But at the very least, it has seared the issue into the public consciousness and put it onto the public agenda. Certainly there have been vigils and demonstrations in solidarity with Nirbhaya in Nepal, Bangladesh and Pakistan.
The second reason is the very visible presence of men. One of the most discouraging aspects of women’s struggles for justice, not just in South Asia, but across the world, has been how few and far between have been the men prepared to stand up and be counted. Not this time. Men, mostly but not only young men, are speaking out in the press and taking their place alongside women on the streets. Such male support is critical. Without it, the question of sexual violence will remain ghettoized as a women’s issue and efforts to eradicate it remain ineffective.
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The six men in question came from one of the squalid slum neighbourhoods of Delhi and there is little question that, had this or something like this not happened, they would spend their lives in the same or similar slums. The youngest of them has been living on the streets since the age of 13. They fit the face of the image of the rapist ‘monster’ in the public imagination in a way that rapists in the police force, the army and the upper castes do not. According to this theory, the scale of the response we are seeing is a manifestation of class outrage. The rage that her rapists enacted on the body of Nirbhaya is being met by an answering rage in those who now call for the death penalty or chemical castration of the rapists.
But this does not suffice to explain the demographics of the protestors, the way that the protest appears to have broken through class and gender barriers. I think there are different elements to such an explanation. One element is captured by the sentiment expressed in different words by many of the protestors: ‘That girl could have been any one of us’. What happened to Nirbhaya could have happened to any of the thousands of young women currently attending university. They do not necessarily come from privileged backgrounds. Many, like Nirbhaya, come from humble backgrounds and have had to struggle to find a place in what the new India has to offer. Many, like Nirbhaya, are the first generation of women in their family to make it into college. In Nirbhaya’s case, her father had to sell what little land he had in order to make this possible. In that sense, she was ‘everywoman’ for this generation of university students. Her very anonymity, what one writer has called her status as ‘the unknown citizen’, has allowed each person to see their own story in her life and death.
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While well-known Bollywood figures have joined the national protests, questions are being raised about the role of the film industry in promoting the sexualisation of culture. While kissing on screen is still rare, recent articles point out that there is a long tradition of heroes stalking, harassing and pressing their unwanted attentions on heroines but ending up getting the girl anyway. Rape scenes too have been part of the staple diet of Indian cinema, but becoming increasingly explicit over the years. And where once it was the lone ‘vamp’ in the film that flaunted her sexuality while the heroine exuded virtue, the vamp figure has all but vanished in today’s films since it is now the scantily clad heroine who gyrates provocatively to the approval of leering crowds of men. In a society that remains highly segregated by gender, where sexual mores remain highly repressed, what messages do these images communicate to men about women and what they want?
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(Thanks to Robin Khundkar)