Let’s talk about rape

Why?

A friend asked me that question when I told her I’d be curating @genderlogindia for what, Nilanjana Roy tells me, is its last week before it goes into hibernation.

Her question was not ‘Why are you doing this?’ but a more fundamental ‘Why?’

Why have such a site, such a feed – what does it do, what does it solve? Why discuss and debate? What good has all this discussion and debate done since we started “paying attention” in the aftermath of the Delhi gang rape of December last year?

She is not the only one among people I know who, once active participants in the conversations that sprung up around Delhi, have retreated into silence.

I see their point. But.

The Times (London) once published this letter, signed ‘respectfully’ by ‘An Earnest Englishwoman’:

 Sir, Whether women are the equal of men has been endlessly debated; whether they have souls has been a moot point; but can it be too much to ask for a definitive acknowledgment that at least they are animals?

 

Many Honorable Members may object to the proposed Bill enacting that, in statutes respecting the suffrage, ‘wherever words occur which import the masculine gender they shall be held to include women’ – but could any object to the insertion of a clause in another Act that ‘whenever the word “animal” occurs, it shall be held to include women?’

 

Suffer me, through your columns, to appeal to our 650 (parliamentary) representatives and ask – Is there not one among you then who will introduce such a motion? There would then at least be an equal interdict on wanton barbarity to cat, dog and woman…”

 

Historian, professor and author Joanna Burke, who quotes this letter in the preface to her book What It Means To Be Human: Historical Reflections from the 1800s To The Present, provides context for this letter:

The Earnest Englishwoman was angry because animals had more rights in law than women did. In fact, the status of women was much worse than that of the rest of the animal kingdom. Regulations prohibiting cruelty against dogs, horses and cattle were significantly more punitive than laws against cruelty towards women. …. Her heartfelt cry, therefore, was for women to be allowed to ‘become animal’, in order to reap the benefits that they were being denied on the grounds that they were not part of ‘mankind’.

 

That letter, asking for women to be granted equal status with animals, was written in April 1872.

We have come a long way, baby. Maybe.

THEN AGAIN, maybe not – did you happen to read the story of the husband who over a period of nearly a dozen years prostituted his wife for sexual abuse and rape, in order to win a small promotion, a small apartment, a small plot of land?

Did you read this other story of a woman who offered her 13 year old daughter’s virginity to the highest bidder?

How about the story of a father who began raping his daughter when she was about 15, because he was told it would bring him prosperity? Of how the girl’s younger brother joined in, and of how the mother stood by passive, accepting of the serial assaults on her own daughter? Of how the rape continued for the better part of nine years before the victim finally spoke out?

Did you read of how Rahim Mollah, 23, recently celebrated his purchase of a new bike?

Did you hear of the wannabe godman who raped a university student because god told him to?

Did you read of the child, six years old, raped by a 40 year old man? Of how the village elders in their wisdom decided that the abused child should be married to the rapist’s eight year old son as palliative? And of how, while these ‘negotiations’ were going on, the man raped the child again?

Did you read of the policewoman who was accompanying the slain body of her brother in law when she was waylaid, robbed, raped?

Does the word ‘chattel’ come to mind? How different is any of this, fundamentally, from the situation the anguished ‘Earnest Englishwoman’ was writing of?

WHILE researching her seminal book Against Our Will, journalist Susan Brownmiller spent a year reading, and researching, coverage of rape in the popular media.

In the immediate aftermath of Delhi, I tried a similar thought experiment: A Google search for ‘rape’, and an email alert to deliver compilations on a daily basis. (The stories I linked to above are from that daily feed). Try it for a spell; see if you have the stomach to sift through the day’s collection of stories of man’s inhumanity to one half of ‘mankind’. (Or simply spend a random hour going through this feed).

After even the briefest period of immersion, it will begin to feel like there has been a vast escalation in the incidence of rape and abuse. Newspaper reports of how, in this city or that state, more cases have been reported in the first six months of this year than in all of the previous year lend some superficial credence to the trope that rape and abuse – in both frequency and brutality – has increased in the aftermath of Delhi.

But what if the real increase is in the number of reported instances? What if the real change post-Delhi is that the media has begun to focus more, devote more newspaper real estate to these cases? And what if this ramped-up coverage has begun to liberate more victims to come forward, to protest their abuse and to stand up to their abusers?

The most horrific story you come across today? It has happened before, in our own immediate circle. The daughter abused and raped by father and son (in the case I am thinking of, father and three brothers) while the mother looked on? I knew that girl, back in 1975. The girl raped in school by her teacher? It happened, to my knowledge, some four years prior to the above. The neighbor who abused a child he was ‘baby-sitting’? It happened in our colony back in 1984.

These stories now coming to light are our stories; we’ve known of them and lived through them in an earlier age, when suffering in silence was preferable to enduring the ‘social stigma’ attached to going public. The difference is that then, we spoke of them in hushed whispers, if we spoke of them at all.

SUNLIGHT, United States Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis once said, is the best disinfectant. He was speaking of public policy, but the thought is equally applicable to rape, to abuse.

He has a point – Delhi, thanks to the location of the crime, its unimaginably horrific nature, its larger story of the systemic breakdown of the policing systems designed to protect us, was perhaps that first shaft of disinfectant. (I exaggerate? Romanticize? Okay, how many of you truly remember any or all of the cases – many of them as horrific or more so than Delhi – that I mentioned in this earlier blog post?)

Writing in FirstPost of the need to broaden and deepen the conversation, Jay Mazoomdar said:

“Every assault that goes unpunished anywhere is an encouragement to rapists everywhere. It is really all or nothing — no woman will ever really feel safe if another does not.”

True — and the first step to punishment is that the crime be acknowledged, and brought to light, in the first place.

Much of the media coverage has an underlying (and in some cases, even overt) edge of prurience. Some of the coverage has been downright insensitive to, and disrespectful of, the survivors.

But the stepped-up coverage, basic and even insensitive as it is, has had some beneficial effects. It has encouraged more people to speak out against their abusers; it has to at least a limited extent empowered survivors – Suzette Jordan is just one example — to step into the sunlight, to reclaim their identities, and to reach out a helping hand to those similarly affected.

And that perhaps is the best answer I can give my friend, who asked me ‘Why?’

The question is not why sites like Genderlog and feeds like this exist, and speak of what they do.

The real question is, can we afford not to have such conversations. Can we afford to blot out even these admittedly random shafts of sunlight?

PS: As it turns out, this is the last week of @genderlogindia before a hibernation enforced by external factors. Over the next six days, at our request, friends of Genderlog have volunteered their time and their energies to writing of the various issues that surround the subject of abuse, of rape, of violence against women.

Look out for their contributions, on @genderlogindia , beginning tomorrow.

For now, for those who believe – enjoy Ganesh Chathurthi. And be safe.

24 Hours (and an announcement)

As on June 20, 2013, New Delhi alone has recorded 860 cases of rape. (Note: Those are only the documented cases.)

That is a little over twice the incidence of the first six months of last year. And this doubling of the rate of rape comes against the backdrop of the horrific gang-rape of late December; the enormous public outcry and protests triggered by that incident; the sweeping recommendations of an inquiry committee expressly set up to explore how to reduce the incidence of rape; and the oft-expressed intent of both police and polity to make the world — or at least, Delhi —  safe for women.

Guess what? Nothing has changed — unless you call ‘getting worse’ change. Here is the excellent Nisha Susan (@chasingiamb) on what it feels like to be a woman, what it feels like to know that rape is not a question of ‘whether’ but only ‘when’:

That moment sneaks up on you. The moment passes and you go back to unconsciously arranging your life around avoiding this one crime. Every time you hear footsteps behind you, every time you open your front door, every time you walk through a basement parking lot, every time you turn into a dark street, you wonder – Is this the one? Is this how it’s going to happen? As comedian Ever Mainard says, “The problem is that every woman has that one moment when you think, here’s my rape! This is it. OK, 11:47 pm, how old am I? 25? All right, here’s my rape! It’s like we wait for it, like, what took you so long?”

For some of us – for at least 24,923 documented Indian women in 2012 alone – there has come that other unfortunate, jolting moment when you have been raped.

Three out of four times, you are likely to have been raped by someone familiar, someone familial: your uncle comes to drop off a tiffin box and stays to chase you round the house, breaking everything you try to hide behind, pulling the landline wire out of the wall. Your brother-in-law tries to rape you when you are five months pregnant. Your former husband decides that divorce isn’t quite enough. Thesarpanch of your village. Your nephew. Your brother’s friend. Your brother. Your father.

Here is your rape. It has come. And here comes that epiphany. The realization that you have been warned about this moment your whole life but still don’t know what you are supposed to do afterwards.

So what are you supposed to do? What can you do? What must you do?

In a timeless piece designed for Everywoman, Nisha Susan provides answers. Read — and do circulate, because this really, really, needs to be part of every woman’s knowledge-base.

Which brings me to the announcement promised in the parenthesis. Starting today, the team of Nisha Susan and Gaurav Jain will on behalf of Yahoo India commission, edit, illustrate and publish one medium-to-longform article, on a topic of contemporary interest, at the rate of one on each of the five working days of the week.

Got ideas, tips, suggestions, comments? Contact:

Nisha Susan: @chasingiamb

Gaurav Jain: @mau_mauing

Truth is sadder than fiction

“Na tho sachchayi ke liye ladnewala rahega, na insaaf maangnewala. Reh jayega tho sirf tareeq!“

Remember the classic Sunny Deol rant from Damini?

January 3, 2013: Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Altamis Kabir declares that the Kerala High Court will hear afresh the Suryanelli rape case of 1996. Hearings will begin in three weeks, he says.

A little over three weeks later: Justice TR Ramachandran Nair of the Kerala High Court, heading a special bench constituted to hear cases relating to crimes against women, recuses himself from fresh hearings of the Suryanelli rape case on the grounds that he had earlier appeared as defense counsel for one of the accused. He could have recused himself the same day the SC order was passed. Or the next. Or the next. By the expedient of waiting for the day of the hearing to declare his recusal, the system buys three weeks.

February 25, 2013 (A little over three more weeks later): A new bench comprising Justices KT Shankaran and ML Joseph Francis are scheduled to begin hearing bail pleas filed by 9 of the 35 accused. The judges say the appeals filed by the accused, and related paperwork, has not yet arrived from the Supreme Court. The hearing is postponed to March 4.

March 4, 2013 (One week later): The bench comprising Justices KT Shankaran and ML Joseph Francis say the appeals filed by the accused, and related paperwork, has not yet arrived from the Supreme Court. The hearing is now postponed to March 15.

Seriously? In this age of instant communications, this gives ‘snail-mail’ a whole other meaning. (And do note that all this pertains only to the hearing of bail pleas of 9 of the 35 accused. There will be pleas from the others, the snail mail syndrome will strike again, dates will be announced — and we haven’t even gotten down to hearing the rape case itself).

William Gladstone’s ‘Justice delayed is justice denied’ is often used in such contexts, but a far more nuanced statement on the responsibilities of the legal system is that of former Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court Warren Burger:

“A sense of confidence in the courts is essential to maintain the fabric of ordered liberty for a free people and three things could destroy that confidence and do incalculable damage to society:

that people come to believe that inefficiency and delay will drain even a just judgment of its value;

that people who have long been exploited in the smaller transactions of daily life come to believe that courts cannot vindicate their legal rights from fraud and over-reaching;

that people come to believe the law – in the larger sense – cannot fulfill its primary function to protect them and their families in their homes, at their work, and on the public streets.”

Cui Bono?

From the time of Cicero, advocates have been asking this question, whenever justice miscarries:

Cui bono? To whose benefit?

The second and third weeks of February showed an unusual amount of activity on the margins of the Suryanelli case. Congress spokesperson PC Chacko made a statement in Kerala that the “party will decide on the demand for Kurien’s dismissal”. Less than a day later, another Congress spokesperson, Sandip Dikshit, made an ‘official statement’ that what Chacko, his fellow spokesperson, had said was ‘his personal opinion’.

On February 14, PJ Kurien met with Sonia Gandhi and with Rajya Sabha chairman Hamid Ansari, among others, to plead his innocence. He then wrote a letter addressed to the members of the Upper House, exonerating himself. On February 26, Minister for Parliamentary Affairs Kamal Nath, no less, took it on himself and his government to defend PJ Kurien in the Rajya Sabha.

Elsewhere, the demonization of the victim began. Judge Basant, one of two High Court judges (the other, Ghafoor, is now dead) who overturned the Special Court judgment and dismissed charges against all but one accused, said the Suryanelli rape victim was a child prostitute, and hence ‘rape’ did not apply. (Taking his strictures about the then 16 year old at face value, forcible sex with even a prostitute is rape, or did they change the laws on that? Apparently the judge believes that if you are a ‘prostitute’, even by external determination and not necessarily because of your own actions, then the question of consent is moot — a mindset that flies in the face of all established canons of law.)

Congress Member of Parliament from Kannur K Sudhakaran went one better, dropping the ‘child’ and stating flat out that the girl was a prostitute. Period.

By way of aside, “Read our judgment”, Basant kept repeating. You (the media) haven’t read the judgment, and are simply making comments, he alleged.

Okay. Here’s the judgment, in full. (And yes, some of us do read.)

Here is what the Supreme Court — which, as even Basant will have to concede, did read his judgment — had to say about it while asking for the case to be heard again.

And here is what a practicing Supreme Court attorney, who read both the judgment and the SC comment, had to say:

“On the issue of consent, this is where this egregious judgment went most wrong: they took one sessions case, found consent, then imputed that consent to the other 35 accused in the case. The SC is pretty clear on this and it is the basis on which they sent it back to the HC.”

Turns out the judgment is not as Kevlar-coated as Basant would have us believe.

So, as I was saying before I interrupted myself, the first half of February saw a flurry of activity: On the part of Kurien, who defended himself against anyone who would listen and many who would not; on the part of the Congress at both state and central levels, who pushed back against any suggestion that Kurien’s actions merited some investigation; on the part of individuals and collectives who launched attacks on the victim.

And it didn’t end with statements. We had the Kerala government telling the court that the victim’s complaint against PJ Kurien is ‘legally unsustainable’ (Isn’t the legality of a case a matter for courts to determine?). How did the government know? It sought “legal opinion” — from who, is left unsaid.

On March 2 (two days before announcing the latest postponement), the court took the government’s advice to heart and ruled that there was no basis to reinvestigate the case against Kurien. Why? Because The Director General of Prosecution T Asif Ali said so in a report. Where did the matters set out in the report come from? From the government. Where did the government get it from? From “legal opinion” it “solicited”. From who? Wouldn’t you like to know?!

So why this sudden flurry of activity on the part of all concerned? What was the trigger?

This: early in the second week of February Dharmarajan, main accused in the Suryanelli case, ‘surfaced’. And told a TV channel that he had personally driven PJ Kurien to the guest house where the victim was lodged at the time.

And lo — a sandstorm of activity erupts.

Hark back a moment: how was Kurien’s name first implicated in the rape? Back in 1996, when the story broke and the police began investigating, the victim noticed a photograph in a local newspaper, and identified the central figure in that photograph as one of the many who had raped her.

She did not “drag” Kurien into the case to settle some political vendetta. She picked out his image, of her own volition, because she recognized him, and gave the police the date, and the venue. The police at the time “deemed” that there was no sufficient evidence to even investigate Kurien’s possible role in the serial rape. Kurien himself stated that he had not been to that guest house, and had never met the victim.

And so to Dharmarajan, who states otherwise. (Within days the Kerala police, who till then had shown little interest in the absconder, manage to “nab” him and bring him back to the state).

An accusation that has been often levied is that there was, back in the early 2000s, a concerted effort to make the Suryanelli case go away, because politically connected people were involved. Everyone, up to and including Judge Basant, has vociferously denied the charge. So — a quick recap:

In September 2000, a Special Court set up in Kerala handed down prison terms to 35 accused in the Suryanelli case. The main accused, Dharmarajan, was absconding at the time. He was subsequently arrested; in 2002, he was sentenced to life in prison.

Just two weeks later, the High Court let all of the accused out on bail, while reducing Dharmarajan’s sentence from life to five years (plus fine of Rs 50,000). Dharmarajan appealed even this reduced sentence. This man — who, remember, was earlier absconding when the case in chief was being tried and would thus, by elementary logic, qualify as a flight risk — accepted the court’s munificence  and jumped bail again. He has been ‘absconding’ for all of 12 years with nary a yip from anyone. And thus the prime source of information about who was involved and who was not went into the deep freeze.

He has now re-emerged, for reasons best known to him. Spoken his piece. Promptly gotten “nabbed”. And is now in captivity — which among other things guarantees that he won’t go shooting his mouth off on any more TV channels.

Meanwhile: The Kerala government says there is ‘no fresh evidence’. Kamal Nath says there is no ‘fresh evidence’. The DG of Prosecution says there is no fresh evidence. The court says there is no fresh evidence. Oh, and Kurien says, wait for this, there is no evidence at all, fresh or stale.

Really?

The victim identified him out from a photograph and provided details of date, time, and venue. Now, the accused in chief comes forward and corroborates the victim’s statement.

Sounds to me like there is prima facie reason to investigate — how does it strike you?

But the Kerala government, having “sought legal opinion”, believes there is no reason to investigate. The Kerala police believes there is no reason to investigate. The Kerala High Court believes there is nothing to investigate. And Kurien — against whom there is “nothing to investigate” — continues to plead his innocence from charges that don’t officially exist.

Cui bono?

It is not my contention that the man is guilty. But surely the victim deserves — and it is sad that we have to say this sixteen years after the crime — a proper, thorough investigation against all whom she accused?

What was it Warren Burger said?

that people come to believe the law – in the larger sense – cannot fulfill its primary function to protect them and their families in their homes, at their work, and on the public streets

Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn!

Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn:

#Not for the likes of Kailash Vijayvargiya who displayed appalling misogyny and a corresponding lack of knowledge of the epic he was citing when he talked of women having to live within a notional Lakshman Rekha.

#Or an Abhijit Mukherjee who seems to have a thing for ‘dented and painted’ — and beautiful — women.

#Or a Raj Thackeray who believes that if a fence could be built around Bihar and that state could be isolated from the rest of the country, rapes wouldn’t happen.

#Or a Mohan Bhagwat who in the face of all quantified evidence holds that rape is a phenomenon peculiar to the ‘westernized’ cities of ‘India’, and absent from the villages and forests (forests?!) of ‘Bharat’.

#Or for Chhattisgarh minister Nanki Ram Kanwar who suggested that the fault lay with the alignment of the stars and the planets.

#Or for the countless others of both sexes and all party affiliations who, over the past few days, have vitiated the atmosphere with comments that are risible when they are not downright reprehensible.

I don’t give a damn for the Jamaat-i-Islami Hind, which suggests that in order to stop rapes and make women safe, all sex outside the marital bed should be made punishable offenses and co-education should be banned;

#Nor for Rajasthan MLA Bhanwari Lal Singhal who believes that schoolgirls wearing skirts is the problem;

#Nor for the Pudhucherry government that wants to put our schoolgirls in overcoats and ferry them around in segregated buses;

#Nor for ‘spiritual leader’ Asaram Babu who said The Delhi Rape Victim (I capitalized that to distinguish her from the 635 or so other women who were raped in Delhi these last 12 months) could have avoided her fate if only she had called her assailants ‘brothers’;

#Nor for the dozens of other ‘solutions’ being proposed that show a total ignorance of the problem and an absolute focus on whatever antediluvian agenda the proposer holds dear.

In passing, I don’t give a damn too for a tendency, at least on my timeline, for the conversation to segue into whether the ruling party or the opposition is more to blame or whether the media is ‘biased’ towards this or that particular political grouping — because, frankly, every political group currently active in this country has come out of recent incidents reeking of the medieval, the antiquated, the regressive, the repressive. All these conversations tell me is that we are still unable to move beyond our own peculiar, particular mental cocoons.

I don’t give a damn for any of the above because much as these statements give the media pegs to hang their ‘righteous indignation’ on, none of this is new, or startling. I haven’t heard anything in recent times that I hadn’t heard already — from an uncle who during dinner table conversation casually condemned a cousin as ‘fallen’ because she chose to leave the family fold and live life on her own terms; from parents who, sight unseen, refused me permission to marry the girl I wanted to because in their worldview, any girl who would ‘fall in love’ and ‘go out with’ men (or at least, with me) couldn’t be a ‘nice’ girl worth being invited into an ‘ancient family’; from ‘well-meaning’ ‘family friends’ who denied me shelter for the crime of marrying an ‘improper girl’; from a ‘friend’ who over rum and coke casually discoursed on the ‘bed-worthiness’ of a girl who had, just some weeks earlier, tied a rakhi around his wrist; from another ‘friend’ who once got up a dinner party and invited a bunch of us over just so the invitation could include a girl he hoped to take to bed that night…

The attitudes reflected in recent statements by various political worthies is neither new, nor particularly remarkable; tune our antennae inwards, and all of us can recall much worse being said in our presence — and sometimes, even said by us.

I notice that some of the more egregious statements have been ‘withdrawn’ — but how do you withdraw the mindset that spawned them? I notice that some political groupings have distanced themselves from those of their fellows who recently gained foot-in-mouth notoriety — but how do you ‘distance yourself’ from what is in your midst?

I don’t give a damn for any of the above because while we collectively obsessed over such asininities, a teacher and a watchman were found to have raped tribal girls in a school in Chhattisgarh; another minor girl was first raped, then forced to consume a poisonous substance in Faridkot; an 18-year-old in Alwar found life so insupportable thanks to constant harassment that she preferred death by self-immolation; a 15 year old was set on fire because she resisted rape… (okay, I’m stopping here — if your stomach isn’t turned yet, just google ‘rape’ for yourselves).

And? Even as the Delhi police take prompt action against Zee News for airing an interview with the Delhi victim’s friend in which he accused them of playing with red tape while he and the brutalized girl lay naked, cold and bleeding on the roadside, elsewhere in Delhi the discovery of a raped, murdered woman’s body turned the spotlight yet again to a seemingly endemic refusal on the part of the police to take timely action.

That’s what I give a damn about, just now — that even now, even after all this, nothing has changed.

Or at least, that is not quite true: something has. In Noida, the discovery of the woman’s body triggered mass protests and that in turn led to punitive action against the errant cops — just as the Patiala cops involved in harassing an 18 year old rape victim and hounding her to her death were suspended/sacked.

This is what we need more of: more protests when such things happen, more heat on the law enforcement machinery to force them to act. We need for police forces across the country to realize that here on, there is a penalty attached to not doing their job.

While on that, I don’t get the rubbish being spouted by top cops about holding courses to sensitize police to take action in cases of rape.

Say what?! Isn’t it the primary job of the police to take action when someone comes to them with a complaint? Any complaint? They don’t need to be ‘sensitized’ into doing their job — they need rather to be severely penalized when they don’t do it.

These are the things we need to focus on, I’d submit. The rest? Mere noise, of no significance whatsoever.

Reading Matter:

1. Via Nilanjana Roy and a new hub created to document, discuss and act on gender violence, a curated list of stories worth reading from the past one week

2. Natasha Bhadwar on the tyranny of silence and how the victims are finally finding a voice again

3. Harini Calamur, eloquently making my case for me, on why we need to focus laser-sharp on the basics

4. Annie Zaidi on why women are proving to be their own worst enemies

5. Law professor Mrinal Satish on the startling ways in which the law on rape is applied in practice. An excerpt:

Let me provide a concrete example of how the stereotypes find their way into the trial process through medical examination. Assume that in examining an unmarried rape victim, the doctor notes the presence of old tears on her hymen. The doctor also notes that she was able to insert two or more fingers into the vagina of the victim. Although the doctor does not expressly opine that the woman was sexually active, this information is conveyed to the court by way of the medical report. My study showed that in cases where the medical report indicated that the woman had been sexually active before marriage, lower sentences were imposed on the offenders who raped them. In contrast, in cases where the offender had raped a virgin, the sentence was relatively higher. Thus, the sexual history of the victim had an impact on the sentence imposed on the offender. Another factor related to virginity is the perceived loss experienced by an unmarried victim, in terms of her marriageability. The Supreme Court has in a number of cases noted how rape adversely affects the chances of a woman finding a suitable groom. In this context, the Court has even held that the marital status of the woman can be a relevant factor in rape sentencing. It is not surprising then that offenders who raped unmarried (and virginal) women got higher sentences in contrast to men who raped married women. Further, courts tend to impose lower sentences when a victim who was unmarried when the offence was committed, gets married during the trial. Since the rape did not impact the victim’s ability to get married, the harm caused by the offence is discounted. An egregious example of this approach is the Supreme Court’s decision in Baldev Singh v. State of Punjab (2011), another gang rape case that got a lot of media attention. One of the reasons that the Court gave for reducing the sentence in this case was that the victim was now married.

PS: Even as I finished writing this post and checked Twitter to see what else was going on, I found a teaser for a TV chat show coming up. Apparently the likes of Pooja Bedi, Chitrangadha Singh, Arjun Rampal and spokesmen from the VHP and Asaram Babu’s outfit are about to debate the latest hot topic: should Asaram Babu apologize (for idiotic remarks already alluded to earlier in this post).

Seriously?

PPS: It also turns out that in our haste to find new statements to outrage over, we are even making some of these up now. Vide this furor over a ‘second’ Mohan Bhagwat statement. Do we think of the disservice we do, the credibility we collectively lose, when in our rush to judgment we forget to fact-check?

PPS: I am traveling, with limited time and access; blogging will be intermittent for the duration. See you when I do.

Suryanelli rape case reopened

Just how good is this news?

For nearly eight years, a woman from Kerala who was gang-raped by 42 men in 40 days has been waiting for the Supreme Court to take up  her case.

Today, the Chief Justice of India Altamas Kabir said hearings will begin within three weeks.

No, not that the poor girl had to wait eight years for the highest court in the land to find time for her, but the fact that the Supreme Court is in fact going to hear the case — for it is one that represents much that is wrong with our police and judicial systems. Here’s a quick recap, quoting from an earlier post:

Do you remember Suryanelli? The story of a 16-year-old girl who was abducted from a bus, raped by the conductor, then handed over to a couple who, over the next 40 days, transported her like a traveling circus all over Kerala and pandered her to 42 different men, all of whom raped her?

The story has an instructive coda. A Special Court was set up three years after the incident (the first time in Kerala history that such a court was set up to fast track a case of rape; it happened because of massive public protests). In September 2000, the court handed down major prison terms to 35 of the accused. Dharmarajan, an advocate and main accused, was absconding at the time; he was subsequently arrested and, in 2002, sentenced to life in prison.

All good, right? Not. Two weeks after the Special Court verdict, the Kerala High Court gave bail to all 35 accused and let them out of jail. And in 2005, the aforesaid High Court acquitted all 35. More, it deemed that Dharmarajan, the man who had along with his lady friend taken this minor girl the length and breadth of the state and facilitated her serial rape, was guilty only of the crime of “sex trade” — and sentenced to just five years and a fine of Rs 50,000. There was, the honorable judges deemed, no evidence of any “conspiracy” to commit crimes against the girl — like, you know, Dharmarajan was just sort of accidentally escorting her around Kerala, and accidentally, some things happened, too bad, so sad. Oh, and the judges also had some acerbic comments to make about the “character” of the teenager and her “motive” in filing a complaint.

That young girl — in keeping with the Joneses of the media, I’ll name her Mayoos, The Hopeless One — who, last heard from, was employed in a menial job and attempting to get on with her life, lives with the trauma of the multiple rapes she endured for over a month and the knowledge that the authorities she turned to for succor deemed that all that happened to her was somehow her own fault.

In 2005, her family filed an appeal to the Supreme Court asking for justice. Years rolled on. Early last year, in a sudden, surprising development, she was charged with embezzlement of funds and initially, suspended. When various rights groups protested, she was reinstated and transferred after securing some form of written apology. (Additional details of the case here).

The question most found baffling was this: She was a very low level staffer, in a rank where normally you don’t get to handle significant sums of money. Ergo, the accusation that she had somehow walked off with over Rs 2 lakh seemed, prima facie, to fail the smell test.

This, in tandem with the High Court verdict that completely overturned that of the special court, has created in popular perception the impression that the entire case was manipulated with the sole purpose of saving the high and politically mighty — an impression italicized by some of the comments the High Court, in its judgment, made about the then 16-year-old girl, and the downsizing of charges against the principal accused.

How much truth there is in that perception will be known soon enough when the Supreme Court begins its long overdue hearing of the case. However, that nothing is black and white, that there are layers to even seemingly straightforward stories, was underlined for me yet again when, on Twitter, I asked a couple of lawyer friends to explain the dichotomies in the case.

Here is a transcript.

Bottom-line, the wait is almost over, the case will be heard — and, given everything that is at stake, it will be a trial worth following.

Somebody’s daughter, and the politician’s syllogism

‘India’s daughter’ was cremated yesterday. (While on that, am I the only one who finds that appellation patronizing in the extreme? I understand the emotionalism behind it, but surely a society that failed the girl in life is, in claiming her in death, adding post-mortem incest to gratuitous injury?)

Anyway. She was cremated. And we console ourselves with the knowledge, or rather hope, that she is in a far better place now.

But even as her ashes cooled, somebody’s daughter, an engineering student en route to her tuitions, was forced into a car, raped, filmed, dumped.

Somebody’s wife died in Jaipur after her brother-in-law attempted to rape her and when she resisted, strangled her.

Somebody’s daughter, a 14-year-old, consumed pesticide in an attempt to end a life made insupportable when her brother-in-law and his friend raped her over a period of six days.

Somebody’s daughter was brutally attacked in the presence of her younger sister by the neighborhood boy who failed in his bid to rape her.

Somebody’s daughter, who went out of her home to ‘attend a call of nature’ (providing toilets to the less privileged is of course not on anyone’s agenda), was spotted by a passing stranger — and raped.

In Bhopal, somebody’s teenaged daughter, trying to make ends meet by working at a construction site, was gang-raped.

In Patiala, where somebody’s daughter committed suicide the other day when police added humiliation to rape, somebody else’s daughter, who was seeking a job in the police force, was raped, repeatedly and over months, by a cop and one other.

Somebody’s sister was assaulted by a conductor on board a moving bus in Bhagpat in broad daylight while others watched and her sister begged for mercy; when the bus was later intercepted and the girl’s family sought to question his conduct, the perpetrator and “his aides” responded with their fists. The police arrived and arrested two members of the victim’s family while allowing the conductor to go free.

The part that that gives me pause? It is not as if I did an exhaustive search for rape cases over the past day or so; these are just some instances that floated past me on my Twitter timeline this weekend. Plus, these only catalogue rape, both attempted and accomplished; they don’t even begin to map the unnumbered instances of “eve-teasing” (read the brilliant Nilanjana Roy on how futile that expression is), groping and all other forms of harassment women suffer in the home, on the commute, at work and at play (Read this, to get a sense of how pervasive abuse is; and here, a video where the women of Delhi speak of how they dodge abuse, harassment.).

Meanwhile, the search for instant solutions continues, driven largely by the media. On ‘Black Saturday’ (an honorific accorded 29.12 to distinguish it, presumably, from all those other gray and tan and off-white Saturdays when rape and molestation did not surface on our collective radar), I watched one TV anchor ‘grill’ Federal Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde. Thus:

Sir, will you give us your assurance that charges of murder will be filed against the six rapists? ‘Yes, I assure you charges will be filed and we will ensure the strictest punishment.’ But sir, will you give a time-bound assurance? ‘I have assured you that charges will be filed…’ But sir the question is will you give a time bound assurance? ‘I have just assured you et cetera.’ Anchor concludes: That was Home Minister Shinde who did not give us a time-bound assurance despite our repeated demand for a time-bound assurance and so we still don’t have a time-bound assurance…

Just so we are clear that a “fast track court” is not the sublime solution we think it is, read veteran journalist Kanchan Gupta’s recap.

Elsewhere, for the entirety of a ‘special news hour’ that lasted 180 minutes, a noted anchor harangued a succession of panelists into agreeing with him that the government should ‘immediately, without any further delay’, summon a special session of Parliament. (And if there is some irony in summoning for a ‘special session’ a Parliament that, this year, set records for the least number of days worked, the least number of discussions, the least amount of time spent on question hour, the least number of bills passed, the most number of disruptions and walk-outs, leave it be).

What is this ‘special session’ supposed to do? Introduce the death sentence for rape, for starters. But how to introduce a provision that is already available to judges, and has been used often enough in the past? As recently as March 2012, a Sirsa (Haryana) court had imposed the death sentence on Nikka Singh, 22, who raped a 75-year-old woman and then murdered her by strangulation.

(In passing: Among the more risible outcomes of the presidency of Pratibha Patil was her wholesale commutation of death sentences imposed on 35 convicts, as she neared the end of her term. These included five people sentenced to death for rape. Oh, and to continue the comic interlude, one of the rapists she looked leniently on — Baburao Tidke, convicted for the rape and murder of a 16 year old — turned out to have already died of AIDS five years before Ms Patil posthumously accorded him a fresh lease of life. The disbelieving laughter that incident provoked echoes, still. This is the same Pratibha Patil, by the way, who now screams for blood.)

The point, however? The sentence of death is already part of the palette of punishment.

In passing, do we even remember that a bill designed to curb violence against women has been pending before Parliament for any time these last six years? That it — among other pieces of legislation — has been pending because our Parliamentarians have been too busy walking out when they are not creating “disruptions” and therefore have had no time to debate, discuss and pass the bill? Do we remember that another bill, aimed at preventing sexual harassment in the workplace, has also been languishing ever since 2010 because Parliament hasn’t had the time to get down to it? Seriously — we are now calling for special sessions of Parliament to do what Parliament could not be bothered to do during regular sessions, lo any time these past few years?

Why this frenzied demand for instant solutions? Simple: fear of fatigue. For all the grandiose pronouncements of determination, for all the solemn vows that we will never forget, for all the self-serving announcements in the media that this ‘issue’ will be kept on the front-burner for as long as it takes, we know the truth: that in days, a week, tops, the energy will flag. 180-minute news-hours will be dialed down and the issue will become an also-ran mention while we move on to the latest scandal du jour.

It will happen, it is inevitable — after all, didn’t we make similar chest-thumping pronouncements about the fight against corruption?

But if we are to move on without feeling a tad sheepish, we need to be able to claim a victory — any victory. There needs to be a salve, a sop, to the collective conscience. (Reminds me of George Bush, prominent codpiece and all, claiming ‘Victory’ in Iraq through a stage-managed photo op after the Saddam statue was toppled and before the real war on the ground had even begun). We have a name for this: closure.

And in response to these demands, the political class is forced to respond, equally short-term. Appoint a commission. Call for chemical castration. Demand an emergency session of Parliament. Something. Anything.

These are manifestation of the politician’s syllogism which runs thus: We must do something. This is something. Therefore we must do this.

However, a ‘solution’ has to have some relation to the problem it seeks to solve. Step back for a moment and consider this: The Delhi rape? It happened in a bus that was plying without a proper license — a bus, in fact, that continued to operate despite complaints from no less than the DTC. It happened in a bus boasting windows tinted a darker shade than what was permitted, and covered over by curtains; the cops let it pass thru five different checkpoints despite specific laws proscribing such, and a specific Supreme Court stricture demanding that the capital’s cops enforce compliance.

What laws did we lack, that this crime happened under our noses?

What law was lacking that kept police from taking cognizance of this? What law was lacking that led police to behave thus and cause a young woman to end her life? What new law can we pass to ensure this does not happen? Which law will you amend to ensure that police don’t allow someone who molested a differently abled woman, deaf to her screams, to “give them the slip“?

Do you remember Mathura? She was somebody’s daughter, too. While her distraught family stood outside the doors of justice weeping, she was raped inside the very police station where she had gone to register a complaint. There was outrage then, too. Laws were passed, others amended, then too. And yet, as the grim catalogue of crimes against women in the 38 years since indicates, nothing has changed. Or more accurately, it has all gotten worse.

All this is just the police. If by chance or due to public pressure, investigations are carried out and cases registered and brought to court, the judges turn them down. When judges convict and hand down salutary punishment, the perpetrators go to the higher court in appeal, are promptly given bail, and the case is never heard of again. (An earlier post recorded the more famous of such instances).

So what do we have to show for all the laws we already have on our books? This: 635 reported cases of rape in Delhi alone, in the year just ending. And one solitary conviction.

The problem is not inadequate laws, or lack of laws — the root of the problem lies in lack of enforcement of existing laws, which in turn confers on the rapists a sense of immunity, even of entitlement.

If that is the problem, then the search for a solution has to begin with police reform. (As Saikat Datta points out here, the politicians who we now demand should meet in “special session” are the root of this particular problem.) Reform has to empower the police to act without fear, and include deterrent punishment when they fail to act; reform also has to set in place adequate oversight mechanisms so that citizens who fail to find redress know where to turn, which door to knock on.

And if we must reform our laws — and there is little doubt we must — then that reform should be sane, sensible, considered reform that addresses the real problems, not a knee-jerk addition of castration or whatever else catches our addled fancy. (Read Supreme Court lawyer Karuna Nundy’s recommendations, for instance, to see how reform can be thought through.)

But all that is a long, tortuous trail to take — it is far easier to stick political band-aid on the issue and move on to other preoccupations. Hence these demands for ‘instant solutions’. But if we want real solutions, lasting solutions, then the hard road is the one we need to take, these are the conversation we need to have, the goals we need to pursue — no matter how long it takes.

PS: Here, a round-up of essential reading on the Delhi rape and related issues. If you come across interesting links, please add to the comments field? Thanks.