CITIES, NATION AND RAPE

-NABANITA ROY

After an easy search, I entered the National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB)
website, the Indian government agency responsible for collecting and analyzing
crime data and landed up finding a downloadable pdf, reading ‘Crime in India -
2017 Statistics’. And the date at once seemed very contemporary and relevant for
understanding the pattern of crime, particularly against women.

To the backdrop of my search was the need to find some statistical record of
crimes against women in India. With Priyanka Reddy’s rape and murder in
Hyderabad and the nationwide protests against the heinous crime, I had to
understand why some ‘rape victims’ only spur discourses on Indian rape culture
or the toxic masculinity of Indian men, whereas the rape and murder of 19 -year-
old Jaba Roy from Dinajpur on September this year, head dismembered,
discarded in public space or the rape and murder of 10-year Khushboo Parveen
from Falakata on the following month, were never accommodated as subjects of
the mainstream discourses to define the rape culture. Priya Virmani in her article
‘Why is the rape crisis in rural India passing under the radar?’ mentions that
despite the rape and murder of Jisha, a Dalit girl, bearing “chilling similarity to
the Nirbhaya case... was followed by an eerie silence” adding that “India can’t
afford to be geographically selective if it is to tackle these shocking crimes”.
Simor Denyer in his ‘In rural India, rapes are common, but justice for victims is
not’ writes while referring to the gangrape of a teenage girl in Haryana, that,
"Thousands of Indians have taken to the streets in recent weeks to protest the rape
of a young woman on a moving bus in New Delhi. But in rural areas just a few
hours’ drives from India’s capital, where police and activists say rapes are
common and increasing, such incidents draw scarcely any attention, let alone
outrage”.

One might ask were not these crimes heinous enough to agitate the masses or
impact the laws/policies/politics involving women? Were the crime scenes way
outside the center, the city, to never qualify as news at all? Or is there a subject
called ‘real rape’ with a steady pattern that qualifies as rape in the language of
sensational media? Does Indian national media speak only in some languages, or
what are the qualifiers of being national news? How do they succeed in
engendering a nationalist outrage which becomes both personal as much as
political for the common people?

One common engagement that emerges out of these questions is the city and the
city-centric knowledge system that informs the production of national discourses.
One might even stretch it further to argue the city and the city-centric knowledge
system informs the production of post-colonial national discourses as it is a very
post-colonial way of mapping crimes through cities. To validate such a claim, one
has to consider the ways and methods of reporting any crime in India and
understand how crimes get recorded in India.

As I kept scrolling through the content of the ‘Crime in India -2017 Statistics’,
there was a very clear pattern discernable to map the crime rates, that of the
State/Union Territories crime rates followed by crime rates in the metropolitan
cities. Crime against women was thus contained within these two categories,
State/Union territory, and metropolitan cities. Quite inevitably the question arises,
does State or Union territory include all the rural spaces and ‘non -metropolitan’
spaces? And why is the category ‘Crime in Metropolitan Cities’ given precedence
over other places? Do only Metropolitan spaces qualify as Indian? Should Jaba
Roy, Khusboo Parveen, Adivasis in the remote tea estates of Alipurduar and
Naxalbari be conflated as numbers only?

Sudhir Krishnaswamy, Shishir Bail and Rohan Kothari in their working paper
titled ‘Urban-Rural Incidence of Rape in India: Myths and Social Science
Evidence’ talks about this drawback, “A major drawback of data provided by the
NCRB is that it does not classify data according to its urban or rural origin.” The
megacities constituting only “13.3 percent of the population of the country” falls
short of even the urban population which is “closer to 31.1 percent of the national
population” as mentioned in the paper. The paper draws home the fact that “there
is no clear trend of a direct relationship between the rate of urbanization and the
rate of reported rape incidence in any of these states” contradictory to the claims
of leaders like Mohan Bhagwat who justified rape in post-Nirbhaya context, as
an onslaught of “westernization” and that rapes occur in urban India, not rural
Bharat. Kiran Bedi, retired IPS officer, in the Indian Express article retorted
vehemently to such rhetoric saying, “The ground reality is when does the rape
victim report her crime, when there is a police station available, when there is
sensitive officer to report the crime, when the family takes you to report the crime,
when there is a doctor to examine you, when she knows the accused will not be
bailed out and will not harass her... these facilities just do not exist in ''Bharat''.
These exist in India, i.e., in Delhi, in Mumbai." Both of these arguments, where
Mohan Bhagwat visions “Bharat” as a prelapsarian paradisiacal space of gender
equality and Kiran Bedi’s “Bharat” a structurally oppressed space cutting down
voices of resistance, hints at a schism between Bharat and India that still exists
in-text and at a representational mode. Does, therefore, the schism also hint at a
representational disparity what Binalaxmi Nepram in her Tedx Talk ‘Responding
to Rising Armed Conflict in South Asia’ trenchantly marks that National Media
is limited to Delhi NCR “where their OV vans can reach”.

Tripline on ‘Mapping Indian Cities by a number of rape cases per 100,000

women-2012' which draws on NCRB for its cartographical analysis, visually
marks the disparity between privileged cities and the muted spaces. And secondly
the rational process of conflating the bodies into numbers. These visible red stains
dotting the Indian metropolitan cities become signs of a lacerated nation, within
the discourse of development and women empowerment. While the other spaces
perform only as a backdrop to contextualize the city.

A staggering amount of data floods media, corroborating numbers, degrees and

types of crimes, of violence, abuse particular to any state that is either ranked up
or down in the list. A hotchpotch of data confuses our minds. Yet at the very
center of these posts or news, state surveillance, monitoring, inspection, and its
failure are focused as areas of interest and knowledge. Revealing such data with
a metaphoric claim to justify the diseased state with red stains, the victims
coalesce into data tables to justify such claims only. The violence is simply
rounded off in numbers. Barring few names/subjects most rape victims simply act
as the signifiers of other larger numbers, her body becomes a numerical addition
to the records that define the heath of a state only. Also, the Open Government
Data (OGD) platform boasts only of excel sheets, incoherent java extensions, that
display state subjects as victims, suspects, culprits. Can Jaba, Khusboo, and other
muted digits ever transcend the simulated boxes? Perhaps they will remain
galvanized in it.

The pattern to record crimes by agencies and reporting them by the mainstream
media are complementary. One feeds the other consisting of lacunae and spectral
presences of voices that have been painted white in maps and diagrams. Priyanka
Reddy, Nirbhaya, Asifa cannot stand for others, cities cannot stand for the
villages/suburbs. Each victim is entitled to their share of justice, their experiences
to be contextualized within the broader discourses of crime against women. Each
of them has names to be remembered. Or else, if we are to go by the idea that
justice delayed/silenced is justice denied, then denial is but the poetics of absence
to be spurned into tales of demons that hide inside tamarind trees which
grandmothers will whisper every night.
References:
https://azimpremjiuniversity.edu.in/SitePages/pdf/Urban-Rural-Incidence-of-Rape-
in-India.pdf

http://archive.indianexpress.com/news/rapes-occur-in-urban-india-not-rural-bharat-
says-bhagwat--bjp-defends-him/1054615

http://archive.indianexpress.com/news/kiran-bedi-livid-over-mohan-bhagwats-
rapes-hardly-take-place-in-bharat-remark/1054507

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/jul/06/why-is-the-crisis-
in-rural-india-passing-under-the-radar
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/in-rural-india-rapes-are-
common-but-justice-for-victims-is-not/2013/01/08/c13546b4-58d6-11e2-88d0-
c4cf65c3ad15_story.html
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/meet-the-journalist-documenting-indias-
unreported-rape-cases/