The Politics of Selective Protest

By Goldy M. George

28 December, 2012
Countercurrents.org

India tremors under the shockwaves of extremely saddening incident of the cruel gang rape and brutal attack the 23-year-old physiotherapy student and her friend on December 16. The young lady is still in critical condition fighting for her life. It has certainly brought disgrace to the nation as a whole.

Apparently this incident has also instigated the women's organization to come on to the streets in large number for a larger struggle. The recent spontaneous mass rise of various women's and other democratic organizations in protest against the incident provides a ray of hopes in the mind of those who believe in justice and peace. This perhaps is a step ahead in Indian democracy when such mass outcry had been seen across the entire nation.

Three objectives of this process was vibrantly visible; one justice to the victims, two end such atrocious incidents against women and three the role of the state agencies in citizen's security. Notwithstanding, the manner the entire mob got mobilized and the way it has been placed in the media circuit raises a critical character of the Indian upper caste middle class psyche. How would it be if the victim was someone from rural, working class, Dalit or Adivasi community and the incident was much outrageous? This paper investigated this critical aspect with some of the recent incidents of similar nature.

Caste and Sexuality: Rape, Assault, Violence and Dishonor

The same day of the physiotherapy student was attacked another minor Dalit girl was gang raped in Raipur, Chhattisgarh whose case is yet to be filed by the police. [1] An eight-year-old Dalit girl was allegedly raped and murdered in Saharsa district of Bihar. The body was found in a canal the next day. [2] Laxmi Oraon an Adivasi girl from Assam has been running from pillar to post for justice for the past five years but all her pleas had fallen on deaf ears. She was 17 then, and has been traumatised after her naked pictures begging for help were splashed nationally across the newspapers and TV channels. [3]

In January 2012, Rekha Chavan a Dalit woman was stripped, beaten by lathis and naked paraded by the Brahmins in Satara district of Maharastra. [4] In Bhopal on December 4, a 22-year-old pregnant Dalit woman was gang-raped by three persons in the old city and the police accepted the complaint two days later. [5] On October 8, another pregnant Dalit woman was abducted and raped by two youths in Kaithal district of Haryana. [6] In Hariyana alone it was the 15 th incident within a month period. Earlier on September 9 a minor Dalit girl was gang-raped by eight youths in Hisar district. In trembling shock her father commits suicide. [7] Followed by another incident on September 21 in Jind district when three youths entered the house of another Dalit woman and raped her at gunpoint in the presence of her children. She is in her mid 30s and mother to three children. [8]

In 2009 Anita Suryavanshi Dalit rights activist along with her husband was murdered in Bilaspur district of Chhattisgarh. The body of Anita was found after 10-days in a decomposed and disfigured state. Even the forensic report was not able to establish the cause of death till today. [9] None have been yet arrested in this twin-blind murder. In September this year a Dalit woman was assaulted, tortured and tonsured by locals after holding her responsible for the death of a youth under mysterious circumstances in Sambalpur district of Odisha. [10] A 19-year-old Dalit student from Alwar of Rajasthan alleged that upper caste men sexually assaulted her for trying to attend her college. She struggled for a month to get an FIR registered and is still waiting for justice after a year. [11]

Violence against Dalit Women – No anger, outcry or mobilization

Such cases of sexual, physical, psychological and mental attack on Dalit-Adivasi women generally go unnoticed. It is a common happening in most of those villages. Either the dominant caste or the presence of the police force creates . There are thousands of such incidents happening every day in a country like India, which perhaps is not shocking to the majority of 140 crore people. In many incidences it is also believe that a particular section in India like the Dalits or Adivasis deserve such treatment from upper caste as well as the state agencies. It is well understandable that the mob-cultured-outcry is not possible in such cases.

However the most disheartening component is the convenient silence of the so-called progressive sections of Indian society. No cry, no outcry, no protests, no demonstrations or even not a few beyond certain circles have even heard of such incidences.  This part of Indian society as well as progressive section is completely blank.

The Classical case of Soni Sodhi

The most disappointing among all in recent time is the way the women's movements, progressive forums and NCW handled the cast of Soni Sodhi. Soni Sodhi was arrested on October 4 2011 under the alleged charges of being a Maoist courier. After being continuously harassed and beleaguered for nearly a year, Sodhi had to run for her life leaving her home village in Dantewada. She was arrested in New Delhi on charges of transferring funds worth 1.5 million rupees from a corporate mining company Essar to the Maoist as “protection money”. Following her case arrest she was deported to Chhattisgarh, held in police custody.

In a letter to the Supreme Court of India Sodhi cries aloud of her physical, sexual, mental and psychological torture. In her letter she mentions that a police official forced her out of her cell, stripped her and gave her electric shocks causing acute pain and internal injuries over her body, head and spine. Her letters to her mentor Himanshu Kumar gives much detailed account of how she was tortured, the worst among it was the insertion of stones into her body by SP Ankit Garg. [12]

She was unable to walk while brought in the court on October 10, 2011. On October 29, 2011, the government medical college hospital in Kolkata examined her under Supreme Court orders, which reported back on November 14, 2011 that two stones had been inserted in her vagina and one in her rectum and she had annular tears in her spine. Sodhi still languishes in Raipur jail as a Maoist. Amnesty International has called her as a “prisoner of conscience”. Meanwhile, the state government rewarded Ankit Garg with a gallantry award. [13]

This brutal torture and inhuman woes didn't stop there. Sodhi's right to life and dignity have been violated by various jail and police authorities several times over – from foisting false cases against her, sexually torturing and humiliating her in the police station, denying her medical attention, and most recently, humiliating her by publicly stripping her in prison in the name of conducting physical search. [14] The so-called public outcry by the self-claimed aam-aadmi identity of the middle class did not only failed to address this question, rather it faked with the psyche of Adivasi women victims of sexual and societal violence.

Depoliticisation of Women's Movements!

The Indian women's movement to great extents has been depoliticized by the crude entry of her middleclass. In the post 90s one could observe a sea difference in the former. One of the key factors has been globalization, which grew the trends of large scale funding through NGOs and INGOs on women's issues. The erstwhile focus of rural or urban slum based Dalit, Adivasi, working class driven approach shifted to a classical middle class driven approach consisting of professional, skilled and expertized norms and rules.

This phase at one end roped in large number of professionally educated young people from relatively privileged backgrounds that were mostly hired to work on women's issues. Earlier women's groups generally comprising of the unprivileged ones or the victims took up such aspects, usually worked as volunteers. In the new scheme of things, the erstwhile rural Dalit-Adivasi Mahila Sanghatan volunteers do not find any space too. They are just misfits who are either not wanted anymore or required to be thoroughly trained by the new set of people. The ones who survive the odds and compromise to this are only a few; others are not part of it any more.

This is also the phase where a critical leadership emerged. The erstwhile Dalit-Adivasi women's leadership in mainstream movements began to limit to certain limited spheres. Whatever remained in the name of Dalit-Adivasi women's leadership was mostly from the city-based convent-educated ones with the go-get attitude. With them, there was no match of the rural women of similar communities. These few city-based Dalit-Adivasi women, who gained space in the mainstream movements, created a new class and at no level would they like to be identified with those in the villages.

This huge swing of ideological position led to a major shift in the tenor and character of the women's movement in its approach and attitude towards marginalized women, thereby reflecting a dearth of understanding of this caste-gender-power dynamics. Thus in recent times all core agenda of the women's movements were more centered around issues that hardly touched the poor, working class, Dalit-Adivasi women's day to day struggle to survive with human dignity. As a result all caste-based and ethnicity based rape, molestation, attempts to rape, assault, violence, discrimination and dishonor began to be unlooked by the mainstream organizations including women's organizations.

Narrating the experience of Dalit women in a village in Tamilnadu, Cinthia Stephen quotes a girl in these words: “ there is no girl in our lane who has not been coerced or raped by the dominant caste men when they go to the fields to fetch water or for work ”. Stephen's question is valid “ which upper-caste young woman, rural or urban, has ever had to brave repeated rape without to keep her family supplied with water? [15]

The daily story of a Dalit woman, the torture of an Adivasi woman is multiple times intense than the case at hand. It is even looked down by redressal forums like National Commission for Women. This is what it has happened with most of these women. It is high time the mainstream women's movement accept caste as the lifeline of this country and address the issue, create space for people from such sections and address each and every, otherwise all the past legacies may vanish off, in no time.

Delhi Gang Rape And Kashmir

By Aijaz Nazir

28 December, 2012
Countercurrents.org

The case of gang rape in Delhi has remained a focus of almost all the print and electronic media in the country, followed by the violent and angry protests at India Gate, in the heart of New Delhi. Not only the residents of Delhi, but also the whole country has condemned this heinous crime. Living their own life of peace, far from turbulent Kashmir, the young generation of the city has rarely witnessed such protests, yet it arose in anger to protest against this brutal incident. People all over the country have condemned the brutality of the crime and demanded a harsh punishment to the culprits. Cries of justice for the victim have echoed in many quarters. However, this has also exposed the duality of attitude of majority of Indians. If an incident of gang rape against a medical student, on a moving bus in the national capital, is a matter of grief and sorrow for the whole country, provoking it to demand justice, what about Kashmir where many such cases of rape against innocent girls involving Army have come to fore and yet have been overlooked by majority Indians? Why hasn’t the rest of India demanded justice for these girls?

The residents of Kashmir, the “integral” part of India, which has been the bone of contention between India and Pakistan for a long time, which is still considered the most militarized part of the world, where the Armed Force (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) gives extraordinary powers to the military forces, and where protests against alleged human rights violations take place on a daily basis, have cried hoarse demanding justice in a number of rape cases against the innocent daughters of the State.

One of the major rape cases in the history of Kashmir and indeed whole of India is the Kunan Poshpora mass rape incident. A village in northern Kashmir’s Kupwara district, Kunan Poshpora, on February 23, 1991 witnessed incidents of alleged mass rape of 20 women by the Army troops in one night. The incident drew the attention of national and international media. However this was soon forgotten and the womenfolk of the village landed in unending troubles. Women who deserved the respect and honor of the society, were not secure anymore form the cruel face of the armed forces and since that incident, numerous other cases of rape and enforced disappearances have come to fore in the last three decades. Another case which shook the region was the 2009 Shopian rape and murder case which resulted in protests rocking the whole Valley and several families lost their loved ones in the agitation.

Shutdowns, curfews, protests are not new experiences to Kashmiris, something which are unimaginable for the rest of the Indians. Importantly, womenfolk have become the victims of sexual abuse in the State. Several decades have passed but Kashmir is still fighting to restore its internal peace by achieving justice for its loved ones who have been subjected to enforced disappearances and the womenfolk who have been subjected to senseless violation of their dignities.

The root of the problem as pointed by many is the existence of AFSPA which grants special powers to the armed forces deployed in Kashmir. According to the law the forces have the powers to, “Enter and search any premise in order to make such arrests, or to recover any person wrongfully restrained or any arms, ammunition or explosive substances and seize it”.

Does this imply that in a crackdown, the forces can take away all the male members of a community and do whatever they wish to do with the womenfolk left behind? Kashmir has witnessed too many of such incidents.

On March 31, 2012, a UN official asked India to revoke AFSPA saying it had no place in a democracy like India. Christof Heyns, UN’s Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions who visited the region said, “During my visit to Kashmir, AFSPA was described to me as ‘hated’ and ‘draconian’. It clearly violates the international law. A number of UN treaty bodies have pronounced it to be in violation of international law as well.”

Just as the rest of the country is fighting for victim of the Delhi gang rape case, people of Kashmir Valley too have showed solidarity with the victim by protesting against the heinous crime and demanding harsh punishment to its perpetrators. However, majority Indians continue to ignore Kashmir- a region where there is huge number of cases lying since decades, without the slightest hint of any justice. While the issue has remained a focus on electronic, print and social media, the incidents in Kashmir are yet to receive such focus. This has prompted people of this part of the country to raise several questions: Is anyone fighting for them? Has anyone raised the voice against the culprits involved in these acts? A rape is a rape and the sooner the nation does away with its hypocrite attitude and double standards to deal with this menace, the better it is for all the countrymen.

Aijaz Nazir is the freelance journalist from Kashmir, can reach on aijaznazir112@gmail.com