Rape in India: Reading between the lines

Sometimes photographs even ones that go viral arent worth a thousand

words. Heres what they wont tell you
June 15, 2014 5:00AM ET
by Neha Dixit @nehadixit123
In a village called Badaun in the northeastern state of Uttar Pradesh in India, two
teenage girls, cousins, were gang-raped and hanged from a tree. One girl wore a
bright orange tunic with purple pants; the other wore dark green. The silver
embroidery on their clothes reflected the rays of the sun. Five men, including two
police officers, have been arrested. Two others are absconding. When the girls
families went to the local police station to report their daughters missing, the officer
refused to register the complaint until angry protesters forced them to do so the next
morning, May 29, when the bodies were discovered.
The girls, 14 and 15, had gone to the peppermint fields a 10-minute walk away at
around 9 p.m., to relieve themselves as they always did. They were from a lower,
landless caste, while their attackers were from the dominant landowning caste the
same as the recalcitrant police officer.
A horrific image of the two girls still-hanging bodies went viral, despite Indian media
laws that prohibit revealing the identity of rape victims. But behind the photograph of
this rape and rape in India in general is a plethora of forces misogyny, caste
prejudice, poverty and more. What follows is an attempt to explain some of them.
1. The caste system
In India the caste hierarchy originated with Hinduism and spread to other religions.
Landowners usually belong to the upper caste, while the landless and workers come
from the lower castes, a majority of whom are considered untouchables. They are
not allowed to enter temples, sit, eat or share common resources such as wells and
roads with the upper castes. Dalit is a broad term used for the so-called "untouchable"
community in India.
Despite a reservations system in government institutions for those belonging to lower
castes since India gained independence in 1947, they have struggled to overcome a
long history of oppression. Land reforms, a top priority during the freedom struggle,
are a long-lost dream. They were meant to break up large feudal landholdings and
divide surplus land among the poor, landless lower castes. Lower-caste women are
still subjected to sexual atrocities by the dominant upper-caste employers. Casteism
is so entrenched in certain sections of society that a judge dismissed a case of
rape against a Dalit by a group of upper-caste men on the grounds that an upper
caste man could not have defiled himself by raping a lower caste woman, as
happened in the widely debated Bhanwari Devi case. A lower-caste social worker,
she was gang-raped by upper-caste men in retaliation for her public opposition to
child marriage.
2. Migration
According to the 2011 census, 30 percent of the Indian population are migrants.
Because of an agrarian crisis, a rising population and urban-centric development
policies, the tide of mass rural-to-urban migration is surging. With skyrocketing rents
and inadequate infrastructure in the cities, migrants are forced to live in ghettos and
slums devoid of basic amenities like water and electricity. A lack of community
support allows for more instances of brutality against women.
Migrant women primarily work as daily wage laborers, construction workers and
domestic help, often in exploitative circumstances, which leaves them vulnerable to
sexual abuse. Migration can also lead to the trafficking of women for commercial sex
exploitation or forced labor. According to by a widely publicized report by a former top
cop, P.M. Nair, 75 percent of the victims of trafficking are tricked into it by the promise
of a lucrative job. Migrant women are quick to take the bait and are instead sold off at
brothels or to placement agencies. According to the National Crime Records Bureau,
more than 100,000 trafficked children were rescued from domestic work in 201112, a
rise of almost 27 percent from the previous year. The figures could run into several
hundred thousand if women above 18 are included in the data. The National
Commission for Women receives complaints of eight cases of murder of household
help every day from all over the country. Most are sexually abused before they are
killed, according to the same report. The Domestic Workers Welfare and Social
Security Act, which mandates decent working conditions for domestic workers, has
been pending in parliament since 2010. With no legal framework for proper wages
and a suitable work environment, housemaids economically dependent on employers
can end up as sex slaves without the means to report abuse to the police.
For migrant men who come from rural areas where the womans place is in the home,
this works the other way around. According to a 2010 International Labour
Organization report, the female workforce in the Indian capital, New Delhi, doubled
from 1995 to 2010. The graph is still moving upward. This gives working women not
only socioeconomic independence but also more visibility and participation in public
spaces traditionally a male prerogative. Rape then becomes a weapon to reclaim
power. The December 2012 survivor popularly known as Nirbhaya was gang-raped in
a moving bus at 9:30 at night by five migrant men.

3. Public spaces
In India, most public spaces are occupied by men. In a patriarchal society, many
consider women out in public spaces to be either for male consumption or defiant
creatures who need to be taught a lesson through sexual harassment. A 2011
survey conducted by Jagori, an Indian womens empowerment group, shows that 42
percent of women in Delhi were harassed both physically and verbally while waiting
for public transport.

Similarly, 50 percent of women in Delhi found the lack of access to clean and safe
toilets a hindrance to their accessing public spaces. Even in big cities like Mumbai, for
instance, there are half as many public toilets for women as for men, and most of
them close at 9 p.m., unlike the mens toilets, which are open all night. The two girls in
Badaun were raped when they had gone out to the agricultural fields to relieve
themselves. The government funds doled out to construct toilets under the sanitation
campaign in Badaun were instead used to construct rooms in peoples houses. The
villagers said that constructing a rain-proof roof over their heads, which they could not
otherwise afford, was a bigger priority than constructing a toilet. According to a 2013
report by Water Aid America, 300 million women and girls all over India defecate in
the open. A large majority belong to the poor lower castes in rural areas, who cannot
afford a toilet. A recent study, "Danger, Disgust and Indignity," suggests that in 2013,
400 women and girls in Bihar, another northern state, were raped when they had
gone out to defecate.

4. Moral policing
On Jan. 24, 2009, 40 activists of a Hindu right-wing group entered a pub in Mangalore
in southern India andassaulted women for consuming alcohol. This anger is in line
with a patriarchal society in which the bodies of women are the repositories of culture
and family honor.
The Rashtra Sevika Samiti, a powerful Hindu womens group, claims that Indian
women are not feminists, we are family-ists, and motherhood must be a womans
ultimate goal. They regularly counsel victims of domestic abuse to compromise
instead of breaking the family structure. Similarly, caste-based village councils, known
as Khap panchayats, have banned women in the northern states of Rajasthan,
Haryana and Uttar Pradesh from using cellphones, getting educated or choosing a
marriage partner. They issue frequent diktats of honor killings and gang rapes against
those who defy them, or they impose a socioeconomic boycott on the womans entire
extended family, which can be reversed only after a heavy penalty.

Acid attacks on women by jilted lovers are an extension of these beliefs: Women who
use their agency against the male order must be punished. According to Acid
Survivors Trust International, a U.K.-based organization that works to end acid and
burn violence, 1,000 acid attacks take place every year in India. In some rural and
tribal areas, women who turn down sexual advances or challenge patriarchal norms
are paraded naked, tied to a tree and lynched. Nearly 200 women are killed every
year after being branded witches.
5. Sex education
The newly elected government, led by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, is opposed
to sex education. In 2009 a parliamentary committee, headed by BJP leader
Venkaiah Naidu, recommended that "there should be no sex education in schools"
and said sex before marriage is "immoral, unethical and unhealthy. In 2007, Harsh
Vardhan, now the minister for health and family welfare in the new government, said,
The curriculum prepared in the name of sex education is so much obscene and filthy
that the teachers, lady teachers feel shy reading it. He went on to say that if it were to
be introduced, girl students would drop out of school.
Sex education is largely seen as a Western-influenced practice that would pervert
Indian morality. Yet sex ed is vital for juvenile boys, who may have distorted notions of
sex and consent through pornography. In a recent case, a 14-year-old boy sexually
assaulted a 6-year-old girl in Ghaziabad district, bordering Delhi. The girl sustained
several injuries. He was booked for rape and assault.

In India, showing pornography to a child is a criminal offense. Bhuwan Ribhu, the
national secretary of the childhood advocacy nonprofit Bachpan Bachao Andolan,
who interviewed to the 14-year-old-boy, says that he committed the assault after
watching pornography on his mobile phone, and that such incidents have increased in
the past five years. Pornography is readily available over the counters in the form of
DVDs and on the cellphones, he says. Ribhu thinks there is a lack of awareness
about sexual crimes among children. Children are not informed about good touch
and bad touch There needs to be a massive drive at the school level, to educate
children.
The National Crime Records Bureau reveals that last year, 1,316 juvenile boys were
booked for rape. In the Nirbhaya gang-rape case, the brutal act of inserting a rod into
the victims vagina was committed by a 17-year-old a juvenile.
6. Property rights
Despite the passage of the Hindu Succession Act of 2005, which provides equal
inheritance rights to ancestral and jointly owned property, it is not strictly enforced,
depriving women of their rightful inheritance. According to sociological research, this
is partly responsible for the widespread problem of sex-selective abortions in India. It
is estimated that 700,000 unborn girls are killed in India every year through sex-
selective abortions; India has a sex ratio of 940 females to 1,000 males.
Rita Banerji, author of Sex and Power: Defining History, Shaping Societies and a
womens right activist, links the unequal sex ratio to property rights. She says, Even
in the colonial times, it is the rich landlords in Punjab who had the most worrying sex
ratio As higher education amongst women rises, the sex ratio falls, because [the]
patriarchal order does not approve of wealthier women or women controlling family
wealth.
In conservative northern Indian states such as Haryana, the low sex ratio (879
females per 1,000 males) often results in young girls from poor families
being trafficked as brides and used as sex slaves by the male members of the family.
Poor implementation of womens property rights renders them financially dependent
on their families. In incestuous rape cases, for instance, women are unable to leave
because too often they depend on their rapists to support them. India still does not
recognize marital rape.
7. Sectarian violence
Hindu-Muslim communal riots during the partition of India in 1947, and the 1992 riots
after the Hindu right demolished Babri Masjid, an ancient mosque in Uttar Pradesh
(also the state where Badaun is located), set a gruesome precedent for systematic
rapes. Womens bodies were used as proxies for combat to establish the supremacy
of one religion over the other. In 2002, when the nowprime minister of India,
Narendra Modi, was chief minister of the western state of Gujarat, close to 2,000
Muslims were killed during riots. The number of acts of sexual violence has never
been pinned down. Women were gang-raped, their bodies were mutilated and then
burned, to destroy the evidence. In one of the most horrific attacks of that period, a
pregnant Muslim woman had her belly slashed by Babu Bajrangi, the head of the
Hindu right-wing group Bajrang Dal. He then allegedly took out the fetus, holding it
aloft on a sword.
Last September, too, sectarian violence broke out in Muzaffarnagar district in Uttar
Pradesh. Though only seven cases of gang rape were officially registered, hundreds
of women were gang-raped, sodomized and brutally assaulted. While women are the
immediate victims of rape, the act serves to suppress the communities to which they
belong caste, nation and religion. Thus the rapists threaten not just the women but,
through them, their entire community.
8. AFSPA
The origins of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act(AFSPA) lie in colonial times. It
was introduced by the British in 1942 as an ordinance to suppress the Quit India
movement by freedom fighters. It is currently imposed in the seven northern states,
including Jammu and Kashmir, which borders Pakistan. The act allows armed forces
in disturbed areas to use force or to fire without warning, even if it causes death;
search premises without warning; and arrest people without warrants. Most important,
it provides legal immunity to armed forces for all their actions. In 1991, 53 women
were allegedly raped by army personnel during a search interrogation operation in
Kunan Poshpora village in Kashmir. The Indian government called the accusation
baseless in the face of criticism from a number of international human rights
watchdogs. No one from the army was ever charged.
Such misuse of AFSPA by army personnel against women is commonplace. In the
northeastern states, the first such case to be reported in the media was in 1974, when
a teenage girl from the state of Nagaland committed suicide after being raped by an
army officer in front of village elders and left a note blaming the army. Cases like that
never made the national news, however, until 2004, when a group of 30 outraged old
women in the state of Manipur marched naked through the capital, Imphal, to the
army headquarters with a banner reading Indian army, rape us to protest the rape
and murder of a young girl, Thangjam Manorama, after she was picked up for
interrogation by the Indian army.
The protest made international headlines, and in its wake a committee was formed to
evaluate AFSPA; it recommended that the act be made more humane. The
promised amendment in the law is still pending. In March 2012, the United Nations
asked India to revoke AFSPA, calling it undemocratic and draconian. In the newly
elected BJP government, a former army chief was appointed as the minister for seven
northeastern states under AFSPA.
9. Politics
Women are very poorly represented in the Indian political system, making up only 11
percent in parliament. There is a womens reservation bill that was passed by the
upper house of the Parliament in 2010, but it has been pending with the lower house
ever since. If passed, it would ensure a 33 percent reservation for women in
parliament.
Unsurprisingly, then, sexist and misogynist remarks by parliamentarians and political
leaders never fail to lace debates around gender violence. A minister from the central
Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, Babu Lal Gaur, from the BJP, said while discussing
Badaun, Rapes are sometimes right and sometimes wrong. The head of the ruling
party in Uttar Pradesh, Mulayam Singh Yadav, said, Boys commit mistakes. But
should they be hanged for it? Abu Azmi, a Samajwadi Party leader from the state of
Maharashtra, said, Under Islam, rape is punishable any woman if, whether
married or unmarried, goes along with a man, with or without consent, should be
hanged. Twenty-one percent of the newly elected parliamentarians have serious
criminal cases against them, including crimes against women.
10. Laws and reforms
Following the December 2012 gang rape and subsequent mass protests, the Justice
Verma Committee was formed to review rape laws. Among its recommendations were
police reforms and rehabilitative measures for survivors. The committee also insisted
on the need for gender sensitization of the police, dominated by male officers and
governed by archaic colonial laws, and for the recruiting of more women officers. In
September 2012, a low-caste woman from the northern state of Haryana was gang-
raped. In April 2013, she was imprisoned for 10 days on charges of perjury. She had
withdrawn her statement against the rapists because of an economic boycott by the
upper-caste council on her family. Her family members worked as agricultural
laborers. With no financial help from the government, she and her family, who were
dependent on the upper-caste landowners for their livelihood, had to withdraw the
case in exchange of employment. According to the National Commission for Women,
a rape survivor receives up to 200,000 rupees (US$3,350) within a period of one year
of filing a police report. This amount is too little and comes too late to fight a never-
ending legal battle against rapists. The conviction rate in rape cases across India is
an abysmal 26 percent.