Rape and other ‘anti-India conspiracies’

If the Indian government wanted to become the laughing stock of the world, it couldn’t have done so more effectively than by banning the BBC documentary ‘India’s Daughter’ on Delhi’s December 2012 gang-rape. The film was watched by millions the world over, and became a cause celebre for feminists, defenders of free expression and even progressive Hollywood actors.
The film powerfully depicts, mainly through her parents’ narration, the life of the 23-year-old paramedical student who was barbarically raped and grievously assaulted. It pays tribute to the wave of anti-rape protests that followed. Not least, it’s an account of how the rapists, their lawyers, and others, justify violence against women.
India’s Daughter forces the viewer to reflect on the pathologies that afflict Indian society, which discriminates against women and finds a hundred rationalisations for doing so.
That’s why the hysterical official reaction to the film is so revolting, as is the charge that filmmaker Leslee Udwin violated the conditions set for interviewing Mukesh Singh, the convicted rapist, and other prisoners. Urban development minister M Venkaiah Naidu smelt an anti-India ‘conspiracy’ in the film, and home minister Rajnath Singh declared that his government wouldn’t allow anyone to single out India for an anti-national attack.
But Udwin didn’t violate any conditions. She showed the full raw footage to the prison authorities, and also the 15 minutes-long edited material used. They raised no objections.
The film doesn’t single out India for rape. Rape, like wife-beating, is prevalent in all countries, itself a testimony to patriarchy. Rape is grossly under-reported in India because of the stigma that’s attached more to its victims than its perpetrators.
India has recently witnessed a number of extremely violent gang-rapes. These have caught global attention, not least because of attempts by police and political leaders to minimise their incidence and to proffer advice on how women should dress soberly, or how they should avoid strangers.
But rape has nothing to do with how a woman looks or how ‘provocatively’ she dresses. That’s why 82-year-old women are raped, as are six-year-olds. Most rapists aren’t strangers, but men known to the victims. Rape isn’t about sexual attraction; it’s about male power, violently exercised to subjugate women.
The official response ignores the reality of India, with mass killings of female foetuses, which have left more than 40 million women ‘missing’ over a century. In India, sex-based discrimination begins early with deprivation of food, and carries over into adulthood in countless ways.
Extreme male-supremacism sets the context in which women are viewed as inferior. The dominant view oscillates between seeing women as worthy of worship (an epic hypocrisy, based on a glorified, false notion of motherhood!), and regarding them as sources of temptation and objects of carnal desire, who must be exploited. Both reject the notion that women must have equal status, independent agency and human dignity.
Thus, ML Sharma, a defendant’s lawyer, told Udwin: “A female is just like a flower… a man is like a thorn… The flower always need[s] protection…” He also said: “In our society we never allow our girls to come out… after 6:30 or 7:30 or 8:30 in the evening … We have the best culture. In our culture, there is no place for a woman.”
Another lawyer, A P Singh, declared: “If my daughter or sister engaged in pre-marital activities…I would most certainly take [her] to my farmhouse, and in front of my entire family, I would put petrol on her and set her alight.” Mukesh Singh said: “It takes two to clap”; since the victim was out in the streets late at night, she “asked for it”; had she not resisted, she wouldn’t have been killed.
These views are shocking, but hardly confined to these men. They are aired day in and day out by khap panchayats, police officials, Sangh Parivar luminaries, judges and ministers, including most recently, Haryana Chief Minister ML Khattar.
This crowd sees India’s Daughter as a ‘conspiracy’ to tarnish India’s image, and prevent it from equalling the west in wealth, stature and prestige. This speaks to a sick kind of nationalism.
The nationalist argument was used by the Intelligence Bureau and the home ministry to prevent Greenpeace activist Priya Pillai from flying to London where she was to testify before an all-party committee of MPs on violations of environmental regulations and tribals’ rights in Central India by Essar, a UK-headquartered corporation.
Pillai, they said, would indulge in propaganda aimed at preventing India’s ‘development’ and prosperity by prejudicing western investors. They stooped to trying to drive a wedge between Pillai, and other activists such as Aruna Roy, Medha Patkar, Admiral Ramdas, Nandini Sundar and myself.
They claimed we never testified before a foreign/international committee, but “relied” on the institutions of “India’s vibrant democracy”, including peaceful protests, litigation, and the media. Some of us refuted this invidious distinction (scroll.in/article/707224). Many Dalit anti-caste campaigners have used UN and even European Union and US forums.
However, the official argument shamelessly justifies and encourages the exploitation of India’s vulnerable Adivasis and mineral resources by foreign corporations. So much for ‘nationalism’! It also victimises those who want to enforce India’s own environmental laws.
The Indian state since the colonial times has used its ‘sovereign’ power not to defend the people in whom real sovereignty lies, but to limit, circumvent and violate their rights – by banning publications and activities, refusing visas to progressive scholars and activists, or shielding corporate criminals and communal thugs.
This is true with a vengeance of the Bhopal disaster, in which the government betrayed the victims through an unethically paltry settlement. It applies to the deportation of Japanese activists who wanted to share the experience of the Fukushima catastrophe with the protesters at the Koodankulam nuclear plant. It holds true of scores of people’s movements being harassed under the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act.
The Indian government’s international conduct often shows an admixture of hubris, insecurity and paranoia. It dishonestly but selectively presents what it fears as a ‘trap’ or ‘conspiracy’ designed to prevent India from exercising its sovereign options to advance legitimate interests.
India in the 1960s opposed the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) on the ground that it created “Atomic Apartheid”, or a division between nuclear and non-nuclear-weapons-states. Beneath the lofty moral stand was crass intent: to keep the nuclear option open, revealed through the 1974 test.
In the mid-1990s, India demonised the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which Nehru pioneered in 1954. New Delhi denounced it as a “trap” to eliminate its sovereign security options – after arguing for decades that nuclear weapons never give security and nuclear deterrence is “morally repugnant”.
Two years after rejecting the CTBT, India embraced deterrence and joined the ‘Apartheid’ system – on the side of its masters!
This reflects, and in turn reinforces, a toxic, bellicose, blind nationalism, disseminated through textbooks, soap operas, newspaper articles, TV talking-heads programmes, and ‘Mera Bharat Mahan’ slogans painted on trucks and auto-rickshaws.
Such toxic nationalism believes in India’s unique destiny to be the world’s greatest nation – never mind persistent mass poverty, malnourishment of half its children, and hideous inequalities. This is the kind of hubris that inspired Hitler and brought disaster upon his people. India must fight it resolutely.
The writer, a former newspaper editor, is a researcher and rights activist based in Delhi.
Email: prafulbidwai1@yahoo.co.in