Just over a month ago, on the night of 8 August, a 31-year-old junior doctor dozed off after finishing a marathon shift of 36 hours in a seminar room at a public hospital in Kolkata. She was found dead – and raped – the following morning. The authorities of the RG Kar Medical College and Hospital where this took place initially declared her death a suicide, including to the victim’s parents.
Since then, Kolkata has been highly mobilised as protests have occupied the streets with over three hundred marches and rallies bringing the megapolis to a halt. Doctors have refused to work in protest. Days after the junior doctor’s murder, a well-attended night vigil with placards and candlelight marches exhorting to “reclaim the night” held on India’s Independence Day only reflected the utter lack of freedom for India’s women.
But the expressions of outrage – whether on the public square, television studio or on social media – are inversely related to any real effect. After all, India has been here before. Over a decade ago, the brutal gang rape in Delhi and subsequent death in 2012 of a young trainee paramedic out on a date, jolted India and the world. Draconian new laws that expanded the definition of rape to include non-penetration and instituted the death penalty as ultimate punishment were introduced in 2013, but they clearly seem to offer little to no deterrence today.
Modern legislation against rape was first instituted after the infamous 1972 Mathura rape case, where a teenage adivasi, a tribal girl, was gang-raped by two policemen. The local high court failed to convict the men mainly because there had been little physical sign of violence. After a long campaign led by India’s legal luminaries such as Upendra Baxi and Lotika Sarkar, rape was finally redefined legally in 1983 by placing the onus of proving consent on the accused.
Whether in 1983 or 2013, India’s legal framework has merely responded to public pressure rather than been pro-actively concerned with protecting and enhancing women’s rights and security. Look no further than the fact that marital rape is still not a criminal offence in India.
In the current zeal for decolonisation by the ruling Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP), the newly instituted BNS (Bhartiya Nyaya Samhita) – the freshly minted criminal codes introduced this year that replaced British imperial terminology of the erstwhile Indian Penal Code – has instituted a minimum ten-year prison sentence in addition to the maximal punishment of death. Never mind that Indian feminists sympathetic to human rights had explicitly advocated against such an ultimate penalty. Regardless, it seems even the punishment of death has had no effect on the rampant and brutal sexual violence against women.
According to official data, a rape is reported in India every 15 minutes. Yet with some of the highest rates of rape in the world, the conviction rates in India are at the lowest end of the spectrum. Conviction rates are well under 30 per cent and typically hover around 27 per cent. There is a strong culture of impunity and high levels of social tolerance of sexual violence in the country.
At the same time, a series of violent rape cases which have led to the death of the victims have also punctuated India’s public life in recent years as the accused men have been associated directly or indirectly with the ruling politics of Hindu nationalism. That these victims are Dalit (“untouchable”) or Muslim reflects the sanctioned nature of this violence. But even highly publicised instances of rape have not led to any change. It is a staggering fact that lower caste and Dalit women are four times more likely to be the victims of a brutal rape. To say nothing of widespread institutionalised sexual harassment whether in sports or the film industry or any sphere of work. There is little wonder then that, in a departure from global trends, Indian women are leaving the workforce rather than joining it, a trend especially prominent among the formally skilled or educated.
Cliches abound in explaining what is in effect a permanent crisis of women’s status and security. Patriarchy does not begin to cover the routine nature of violence that is the lot of India’s women. In contrast to other public debates in the country, women’s voices are solicited in the media in the aftermath of a violent rape. Three kinds of stock reasons are given that tend to explain away what should otherwise be an intolerable situation. One reason, usually explained by a lawyer or parliamentarian, will point to the police and the criminal judicial system for ineffective procedures and measures. Second, activists will point to the limited role of judicial institutions that despite being armed with the death penalty are curtailed by a woefully weak set of forensic and evidentiary processes. Third, an academic voice might point to the gross inequity not just between men and women but between upper caste and lower caste women. All will however agree that institutions, whether judiciary or parliament, represent society and no real change can take place until the social fabric that holds men as overwhelmingly superior in status and rank, is changed.
The highlighting of women’s voices on issues of rape is in stark contrast to the routinely exclusively male panels on India’s acrimonious television debates, policy fora and summits. This is telling: it shifts the burden of action on women who are otherwise largely ignored in public debate. India’s now routine spectacle of political rallies and congregations are predominantly male and public life is overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, male.
This is in stark contrast to the nature and history of political leadership in the country. Unlike in the West, India has a long record of women in frontline political leadership. Since the days of prime minister Indira Gandhi, who in 1967 became the first woman to hold the top office, the country has seen a regular turnover of women leaders helming parties and governments. The current President of India is Droupdi Murmu, a tribal woman. The Chief Minister of Bengal is Mamata Banerjee – under whose watch the violent rape and murder of the junior doctor has taken place – is a firebrand founder and leader of Trinamool Congress Party and widely regarded as a formidable opponent of Narendra Modi’s BJP. Banerjee and the handful of other female legislators from her party are now busy fire-fighting the BJP, which has sought to make political capital out of a woman’s violent death. While it is hard for the BJP to win any credibility as a pro-women party, Banerjee and her party are now certainly set to lose theirs.
Yet precisely because women have long been political leaders in the country there is a complacency when it comes to the status of women. Barring Indira Gandhi, who quietly but surely changed the status of women through key legislations both on rape and dowry (though she didn’t identify as a feminist), women leaders in India have done little to nothing to further gender equity and justice. After Gandhi, only Mayawati, leader of the Bahujan Samaj Party and India’s flagship Dalit party offers inspiration for her career. The power and style of her leadership when she ran the government of India’s largest and politically most significant state of Uttar Pradesh helped deter the widespread rapes against lower caste women. Yet even she has disappointed, deciding to nominate a nephew as her successor while becoming increasingly politically passive. Few, if any have brought forward a new generation of women leaders.
Mamta Banerjee is no feminist; she has shown zero skill in creating solidarity with women over the last month as anger has swelled over the rape and murder of the junior doctor. If anything, Banerjee seems wildly petulant given that she was once the ace mobiliser of street action who now finds the street protesting her. She has fallen for the BJP’s provocations that accuse her of complicity in obfuscating the criminal procedures investigating the case. In response, Banerjee has reprimanded the protesters for disrupting the everyday life of the city.
Instead of empathy, solidarity and even grief, she and her party have converted this violent death of a woman into a fever-pitched battle of partisanship. Banerjee has not owned up to the failure of her state machinery, let alone used her position of authority to help ensure women’s safety. Instead, she sought to make the death penalty for rape a local statute, an attempt to convert the crisis of women’s security into one concerning federal jurisdictions, as the death penalty has normally belonged to India’s central government in Delhi.
The Kolkata rape case is set to become a watershed moment, not in creating any substantive change in women’s status, but in weakening the opposition. Though hardly a feminist party, the assertive BJP – with considerable help from the once dominant left parties – has successfully worked to dent Banerjee’s popularity in the state, weakening her rule.
Bengalis have an unenviable choice: support a woman leader who has let them down or oppose her though that is likely to strengthen Hindu nationalism in a key state. Of course, Banerjee must be held responsible for creating such a choice. Above all, she should take responsibility for her utter failure to foster any assurance that a woman leader will ensure if not safety than solidarity in the face of violence. In making rape a divisive issue, Banerjee has only played into the hands of men and empowering them anew.
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