Decry Rape and Be Noticed

Kalpish Ratna begin their article with a deconstruction of the sentence “A young woman was raped on the streets of Delhi” . Apparently, since 16 December, every word in the aforementioned sentence (except the verb ‘raped’) has turned “autonomous”. Thankfully, Kalpish Ratna (KR) have provided us with a 6-step guide to unpack what the sentence is now really saying, which is:

“All young women were, are, and always will be (raped) on the streets of Delhi”. They arrive at this conclusion with a mind-bending exercise in logic:

Because: the definite article has been negated by the public outcry that followed the news. “It happened to me too” .

According to KR, as the stories of others who have also suffered sexual violence began to finally be heard, circulated and discussed —  India was really displaying symptoms of mass hysteria, an emotional contagion through which we began to mimic one another like lunatics.

2. Young = This is the most powerful word in the sentence, because both “the challenge and face of the response” are young.

Predictably, this is where the authors grouse with the “technology and pseudology of infinite replication” appears. To KR, “youth” is synonymous with the internet-savvy middle class, twenty somethings tweeting off their phones as they stand around with candles. The authors selectively forget that the same technology and pseudology – recognized as the most effective form of advertising –  were also used to engender debate and recognize aspects of the law that need amendment by the Justice Verma Committee.

3. Woman = the weakest word, since the only identity it admits is one of victimhood.

This is surprising, because much of the noise this past month has been about dissociating victimhood from womanhood — from the woman that is raped and then blamed for it, from the wife who suffers her husband’s or in-laws’ atrocities, from the young girl who cannot think about getting on a bus without being violated in some way or the other. It is evident that KR never stepped out of their homes to check what the noise on the streets was all about — but were they unable to sneak a peek at what the slogans plastered across those placards were saying too? How exactly do “Meri skirt se oonchi meri awaaz hai,” and “Castrate the bastards” reek of victimhood?

4. Was = described as the smartest word, since it “represents memory” (yes, KR, that is in fact the purpose of ‘past tense’) and “robs the other words of free will by reinforcing “an immutable status quo and the fatalism of an ordained future”.

In other words, if it has happened before, it will happen again. Unfortunately, it is true that lighting candles will not stop rape. Neither will signing the petition called “Stop Rape Now”, currently lying unread in my inbox (who are you petitioning anyway? Rapists?) But dear KR, this is how a democracy could work: If enough people want something to change, they could get together and try to be heard, so that they can affect change.

This is how a democracy will most certainly not work: If no one cares about what happens to the other.

5. On the Streets – The streets, a ‘metaphor for vulgarity in any Indian language’, have become the arena for discourse, debate and prime time television.

It is true that much of our rage, when not online, was vented on the streets. A lot of street-rage-venting then appeared online, and then on air, on television. What the phrase ‘on the street’ also implies in any Indian language is something “out in the open”, as opposed to concealed, veiled, hidden away like a shameful secret.

KR fail to note, perhaps as a result of having dismissed the discourse before engaging with it — that when Indian female writers echoed that they too had felt unsafe, been stalked, been groped, been violated – like almost every woman they had ever spoken to – in public spaces, in their homes, at work, at school; by recounting their own experiences, they were not hijacking the conversation from the most recent rape, but in fact, adding new dimensions to its discussion. Suddenly, everything from demanding better street-lighting, to marital rape, to the army using rape as a weapon of war made it to dinner-table conversations and facebook statuses. Will it change the world? Perhaps not. Is remaining silent, or worse, unaware a better alternative to over-sharing? Definitely not.

6. ‘Of Delhi’=  to imply privilege.

Neither Jyoti Pandey, her friend, nor her rapists were privileged. Several protesters (both virtual and actual), were. In another essay, Arundhati Roy too wondered if the middle class was outraged by this case merely because it was ‘one of their own’, that had been brutalized. It was the only way to explain why the rapes of thousands of lower caste women, North Eastern women, Kashmiri women, and other dead women had been ignored.

The strange thing though, is that we hear this argument every single time a group of people wants to protest — that they are not representative of every single version of “otherness”. In Kashmir we are told that protesters are anti-Indians instigated by a “foreign hand”; in Chhattisgarh and the North East we are told that rape victims are deliberately demeaning the Indian security forces; when young women went marching on the street with their own version of the international ‘slutwalk’, we were told that they were westernised, upper middle class women, and that to acknowledge their right to wear what they wanted was to trivialize various other traumas less privileged women were dealing with in the rest of the country.

The easiest way to delegitimise a protest is to introduce this idea of inadequate representation to it. Speak about women in Delhi, you will be asked — what about the rapes in Kashmir? Look at Kashmir, and they will demand to know why you do not care about the North East. In a society of multiple castes, classes, religions and demographics, any protest can only begin by being representative of a small group of people. If their crisis resonates with the rest of the country — as in this case it has, since the harassment of women cuts across class and caste — it stands a good chance of being the flutter that created a storm. So yes, a rape on the streets of Delhi could in fact do a lot to change the country.

KR accuses India’s youth of being conformist, of being at a protest march just because the next guy is, because “it’s the cool thing to do”. “What is Young India shouting about? The rapists? The police? The law? The judiciary?” KR ask, “Some of them are… Many many more are shouting to be counted. They’re shouting to voice their fears, their terrors, their certainties, as in: I refuse to be raped, I have been raped, I will be raped. They find themselves suddenly catapulted out of anonymity, empowered by their fear.”

What they fail to realize is that this clamour to be counted is precisely what makes the hundreds of women vocalizing their fear a powerful catalyst for change.

Here’s a simple question. Even if this is merely a protest of the privileged, if the only reason we have decided to pay attention is because the incident occurred in a South Delhi neighbourhood, should the solution then be to

a) ignore the protest of the middle class, which is, as described previously, young and media savvy enough to arrest the entire nation’s attention through constant technological mimicry?

or

b) educate them about what else they could fight for.

No prizes for guessing what KR think we should do.

*****

Further on in their article, KR abandon deconstruction and rush into rhetoric. It seems the horror, the loss and the crime have all been forgotten – “absorbed in a litany of grievances” and turned into a “fractal”. Tragic. Except, weren’t they just arguing against the privileging of this particular case over other, less prominent instances of rape? KR wonder who is being outed, and whom validated, through this crescendo of rape-criers. “The country? The writer?” they ask, befuddled.

How about — the offender? Or the victim, validated through choosing not to remain silent any longer?

While KR believe rape is a figment of the hysterical imagination, as writers, they seem to be singularly lacking in any. One of their central arguments about ‘imagined danger’ is that while the dailies cannot stop talking about how unsafe women are, and the methods of self-defence they must employ, the streets and situations they must avoid — when KR venture out (after what seems like an eon spent in their cocoon), they find to their shock and horror, that women continue to go about their daily lives.

Perhaps this is where KR cease to be writers and become insular surgeons, so wealthy and cocooned that they cannot imagine how a woman who is scared could still negotiate her daily life, continue to get on a bus or work in a place where she is harassed daily — simply because she cannot afford not to.

Of course, they do manage to cobble in their own wordy description of rape in the midst of all this decrying. What’s a good opinion piece without an utterly baseless opinion? So we are told what rape is really about:

“Rape is violation. Its assault on the body implodes the mind, and makes it a crime like no other. Its fallout is diverse, its trauma is unpredictable. Following the knowledge of a rape, the mind is bludgeoned by this betrayal of life’s most basic instinct—how can that be degraded to this? Within the silence of this concussion, very many things can happen. This horrendous rape demanded that we listen to that silence. But we did not. Instead, we heard the Monkey Man.”

*****

According to the authors, our protests are so loud that they make it seem like this is the first time India is reacting to rape.  Which is embarrassing to the elite and educated, like KR, who have always cared about rape. In fact, their true anxieties about the protest are revealed towards the end of the article when they say — as a result of these women screaming about being violated, American and British publications have taken notice, and are sniggering at us, the BBC posting headlines like “What is wrong with Indian Men?”. Nothing could be worse than this, especially for India’s genteel, globally-aspirational folk who convince themselves that rape only happens to other people.

“Why is rape in India different from rape anywhere else?” KR demand, “it is a crime committed by a rapist on a woman. Not by all Indian men on all Indian women,” they say. To encourage further discourse, to bring up misogyny and rape culture and patriarchy will derail us. The rapists will walk free. Don’t write about rape, the authors tell us, because at least one or two of your five readers will get excited and rape someone.

Finally, KR end with employing reasoning so spectacularly circular that they need to buttress it with a disclaimer:

“It is too early to tell, but there are already reports of copycat rapes”.

Well, that certainly seems like a good reason to shut up.