Hindu May 11, 2002

Where women bore the brunt
by Raka Ray

Among the women surviving in relief camps are many who have suffered
the most bestial forms of sexual violence - including rape, gang rape,
mass rape, stripping, insertion of objects into their body, and
molestations. A majority of rape victims have been burnt alive. -
Citizen's Initiative, ``The Survivors Speak,'' April 16, 2002.

General Westmoreland, commander of all U.S. troops in the war against
Vietnam, once infamously claimed that the enormous loss of life
suffered by the Vietnamese was not really comparable to the deaths of
Americans because ``Orientals attach less value to life than
Westerners''. A seven-year-old boy said to a friend of mine the other day
``There are so many Muslims in India, so what if some of them die.''
How did he learn the lesson so quickly? At how young an age do we
realise that some people are more human than others that they deserve
to die less frequently, to be mourned and glorified in their deaths, while
others don't? When do we learn that We belong to those who deserve to
live and They don't?

It is not easy to rape a woman, to burn her, or to cut her foetus out of
her body. It requires some effort. But in February this year, this effort
was successfully and collectively achieved in Ahmedabad, as we learn
from the report of the Citizen's Initiative fact-finding team of women. The
report makes it clear that young Muslim girls, pregnant women, women
with new-born babies were chased, caught, raped, cut, pierced,
stabbed, and burnt. How did this come to pass? How did groups of men
come to believe that such deeds could and should be done? Let us
examine the steps.

First, you must have a people that are considered inferior by another
people. It is achieved by years of hard ideological work, to turn the
population into the deadly Other. This Other has no feelings, cannot be
trusted, is dirty, deserves to be punished, and is not as human as We
are.

Where does the creation of the inferior other in India begin? Does it
begin with the organising principle of Hindu society caste? So
successful has this principle of inherent and dehumanising inequality
been that it appears to be rooted in our collective memory. Or does it
begin with the servant in the middle class home who exists to meet the
needs of a middle class child. It comes easily to us to slap someone
we disagree with, to abuse those who are younger or lower on the totem
pole than us, to consider outrageous any claim of a subordinate to
humanity.

But the creation of populations of the ``other'' is only the beginning. The
second step is the belief that women are not only inferior but also
woman's sexuality has to be patrolled so that it is legitimately
accessible to some men and inaccessible to others. Witness the spate
of murders of women who dare marry outside their community. Young
girls and boys learn early that a woman's body is to be monitored,
controlled by, and accessible to a chosen few. A girl, in particular,
learns quickly that her parents' honour and happiness is contingent on
her conformity to appropriate dress and behavioural codes. But
sometimes she realises too late that her body may be torn apart and
destroyed because she has dared to love another human being without
permission. A woman's body ultimately belongs to her community not
to herself.

After we have learnt how to consider those who are not Us different and
inferior, and we have learnt about the need to control and punish
women, we must then take the third step and identify the target
population and it's women. Well that is easily done in this case. As
Urvashi Butalia, Ritu Menon and Kamala Bhasin have shown, the
Us and Them feelings of communities during Partition created protected
and protectable women on one side and unprotected and rapable women
on the other side. The populations were identified at Partition and then
stored in the collective memory to be whipped into frenzy when necessary. The
violence was kept alive by stories, jokes, implicit rules, and writings that
swirled underground in the darkness of both Hindu and Muslim
subconscious, until they dared to emerge in the public eye. Now, as the
Sangh Parivar reigns, these feelings and hatreds are acceptable public
discourse, particularly for the majority Hindu community. So Varsha
Bhosle writes mockingly of ``Mosies'' in her unspeakable column in
Rediff, and becomes a folk hero. To the West's focus on the figure of the
dangerous Arab, we in India, delightedly throw in our prejudices.
Muslims have always been different, their women are both deeply
oppressed and licentious, and the men sexually depraved and cruel.
Didn't you know?

For communal rapes on a mass scale we need still other conditions,
the most important of which is a complicit state. This means we must
have police who laugh or join in, leaders who blatantly discriminate and
lie, and courts, which do not prosecute. The first and second conditions
have been successfully achieved. The police at worst abetted the
violence, or refused to lodge FIRs, and at best did nothing. Every
government official who stood up against the violence has been
harassed or transferred. The BJP MLA of one of the worst-hit areas of
Ahmedabad explained away the violence by referring to the ``natural''
hatred (ghrina) of Hindus for Muslims, the Chief Minister of Gujarat
similarly referred to the ``natural and justified anger'' of the people of
his State, while the Prime Minister focussed his criticisms on the ``trouble-
making Muslims''. The extent of the courts' complicity is still to be seen.

The final ingredient of this ghoulish recipe is essential - a nation full of
people to either secretly gloat that these ghastly acts occurred, or even
worse, to pretend it didn't happen. Equally complicit are those who
shudder delicately that these things could happen in ``our country'', and
assign blame to a group of people, that scapegoat of the upper classes,
the ``anti-social element''. Not Us.

When all of these are in place, why then, we will have created not one
rapist but a nation full of them.

(The writer is Associate Professor of Sociology, University of California,
Berkeley.)