India Dishonoured: Behind a Nation's War on Women (3 page)

 

1
‘Women and right-wing movements: Indian experiences’ – Sarkar and Butalia, 1995.

2
This is depicted very well in the Indian film
Khamosh Pani
/ Silent Waters (2003).

3
Her name has been changed to protect her identity.

4
The left cannot remain silent over ‘honour killings’, New Statesman, 2012

5
Haryana khap blames consumption of chowmein for rapes, Times of India, October 2012

5.

The northern states of Haryana and Punjab, along with the neighbouring city of New Delhi, are ground zero for India’s male problem. In September 2011, Delhi Police stumbled upon a trafficking racket in Haryana after they found a girl who was reported missing in neighbouring Delhi. She had been lured by a man to his house after she lost her way. The police said she was kidnapped and then sold to a farmer for Rs 70,000 ($1305, £840). Unusually, this was not a straightforward case of kidnapping and rape; the farmer had taken the girl to a local temple where they were forcibly ‘married’. A police officer later told the press that he had wanted a wife to do the household chores and fulfil his sexual needs.

The relatively prosperous north is where the dystopian vision of
Matrubhoomi
is most rapidly becoming a reality. While the sex ratio for children under seven has declined to 914 girls for every 1000 boys across the country, Haryana, Punjab and New Delhi were at the bottom of the league with 830, 846 and 866 girls respectively.
1
Figures from the 2011 Census
The impact this disparity has on a broader level is a massive problem but rarely explored.

There are around 7.1 million fewer girls than boys under the age of six across India according to the latest Census. A decade ago the gap was 6 million girls while it was 4.2 million girls in 1991. Since the sex-selection boom took place in the 1980s, a large chunk of those men are now of marriageable age and unable to find a partner.

Added to this problem are factors such as urbanisation – the economic reforms of the 90s enticed a large number of young, unmarried men to big cities to look for jobs. Many of these men know little about interacting with the opposite sex since they come from more conservative village environments. Sociologists say young unattached males are more likely than others to congregate in groups and as a result, become more willing to engage in unusual risky behaviour. This phenomenon is frequently described as ‘risky shift’ or ‘group polarisation’ – the tendency to make more extreme decisions in a group as opposed to those made alone.

In 2005, two Harvard academics, Professor Valerie Hudson and Andrea Boer, wrote in an academic paper
2
Harvard Asia Pacific Review, 2005 http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~hapr/winter07_gov/hudson.pdf
that such sex imbalances could create dangerous conditions. Societies where the sex ratio is imbalanced will face increasing social problems such as increased crime rates, drug use, alcoholism, smuggling, trafficking, and prostitution. They said. “We are also likely to see the development of a cattle market for women, not only domestically but also internationally, with women not only kidnapped within the country, but also trafficked from border nations.”

States with a higher sex imbalance have higher rates of crime and alcoholism than states with a more balanced ratio such as Kerala. A report by the National Commission for Women found that reported dowry deaths in Punjab rose from 51 to 187 over 1991 to 2000, while reported rapes went from 34 to 310 cases - an increase of 812%. To some degree, the rise in numbers reflects increased reporting by victims, but even the NCRB accepts that they are only the tip of an iceberg.

The scarcity of women, rather than leading to them being more valued, has actually made life more difficult for them. Dr. Vibhuti Patel from the University of Mumbai wrote in 2006: “The society that treats women as mere sex and reproduction object will not treat women in a more humane way if they are merely scarce in supply. On the contrary, there will be increased incidences of rapes, abduction and forced polyandry.”
3
Sex-Selective Abortion in India (2006)

Ranjana Kumari, director at the Delhi-based NGO, Center for Social Research, told the Global Post in 2009: “[Young men] are not able to find brides, so they are going outside the state and establishing relationships with people of totally different cultures. One girl committed suicide because she was feeling very harassed because she didn’t understand the language or the culture, and the food was different. It’s not easy for a Kerala girl [a southern state] to come to Haryana [in the north].”

In 2011, a south Indian news site reported that girls as young as 14 and 15 were being kidnapped and trafficked to areas where men wanted to buy them as wives.
4
‘Many more Panchalis even now, as wife swapping is on the rise’ EnMalyalam.com, 2011
The increasingly skewed sex ratio was leading to rising incidents of rape, human trafficking and ‘wife-swapping’:

Women from other regions such as the states of Jharkhand and West Bengal are being bought for sums of as little as 15,000 rupees [$300 / £197] by middle-men and brought to a different place to wed into a different culture, language and way of life. In almost [sic] villages there are at least five or six bachelors who can’t find a wife. And, families with three or four unmarried men is [sic] not uncommon.

North India has become awash with stories of men having to pay to ‘import’ brides from other parts of the country to have children. The NCRB recorded 35,565 instances of women being kidnapped or abducted over 2011.

The statistics clearly show that the jump in violence against women, especially rape, has outpaced even other crimes. Since 1971, when rape cases were first recorded officially, they have increased by 678%.

There is another side effect: the rise of polyandrous marriages. In Hindi slang, a woman with multiple husbands is sometimes referred to as
Draupadi
or
Panchali
. Both names have mythological connotations: Draupadi was a key figure in the Hindu epic, the
Mahabharata
, as daughter of the king of Panchal (hence her other name), and married five brothers from the same family – the Pandavas.

A news report in The Times of India in 2005
5
‘Draupadis bloom in rural Punjab’ Times of India, 2005
pointed to extraordinary social developments. Across many villages in the Boha area of Punjab, north India, families of up to seven brothers had married one woman, the news report pointed out dryly. Such arrangements had become increasingly common because farmers do not have to divide up their land among different families or heirs if all the sons marry one woman. “Now the small landholdings and skewed sex ratio have abetted the problem,” Gurdial Singh, a Punjabi writer and professor told The Times of India.

These ‘Draupadis’ are rarely interviewed and asked how they ended up in such a situation and whether they consented. Hidden away from public view and scrutiny the practical impact of India’s dangerous sex-imbalance is playing out in villages across the country. The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) even published a briefing paper
6
Multiple Husbands, Multiple Woes: Draupadi, the New Slavery, 2007
calling the rise of the
‘Draupadi
’ a new form of slavery. It pointed out that usually the entire village was complicit in the practice, making it difficult for the police to find and rescue these women. Sometimes they don’t report their predicament because they fear the police won’t take them seriously, which is a legitimate concern in far-flung villages.

Writer and journalist Meera Subramanian, who also runs an online magazine
Killing the Buddha
, says that sexual violence has always been there, “unspoken and unacknowledged,” but the rise of women in the public sphere, along with the growing gender disparity, is “exacerbating cases of violence against women.”

To put more bluntly, men who don’t get married are more likely to be poor and desperate, and have more of an incentive to break the law and get to women by force. This is unfortunately the nature of India’s social crisis – the impact will be felt not just in the form of increased crime but the country’s broader social and economic development.

 

1
Figures from the 2011 Census

2
Harvard Asia Pacific Review, 2005 http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~hapr/winter07_gov/hudson.pdf

3
Sex-Selective Abortion in India (2006)

4
‘Many more Panchalis even now, as wife swapping is on the rise’ EnMalyalam.com, 2011

5
‘Draupadis bloom in rural Punjab’ Times of India, 2005

6
Multiple Husbands, Multiple Woes: Draupadi, the New Slavery, 2007

6.

At the age of 44, Sampat Pal Devi’s life took an unexpected turn. She lived in a small village with her husband in India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh. One day, she heard a man beating his wife relentlessly. No one dared to intervene so, unable to bear her cries, she went over and pleaded with him to stop. Rather than being shamed into stopping he verbally abused Devi too and told her to mind her own business.

“That day, I left quietly, but stewed over it all night. The next day, along with five other women, I went back with a stout stick, and beat him black and blue until he begged for mercy!” she later told reporters, with pride. News of her actions spread around the village like wildfire and numerous women came to her asking for help or to be part of her work. “So many wanted to join us that I decided to give ourselves a name and a uniform.”

In February 2006 the ‘Gulabi Gang’ was born, with a strict dress code that required women to wear rose-pink (
gulabi
) sarees and blouses. They claim to have grown to over 5,000-strong, spread out over several cities across Uttar Pradesh, driven by word-of-mouth, and more importantly, need. “Nobody comes to our help in these parts. The officials and the police are corrupt and anti-poor. So sometimes we have to take the law in our hands. At other times, we prefer to shame the wrongdoers,” she told the BBC in 2007.

The incident that propelled them to nationwide fame took place in April 2006 when they were tipped off that local government officials were pilfering food meant for villagers and giving it to corrupt officials instead. They intercepted the truck, thrashed the people involved and provided evidence of corruption to the government. There have been numerous other such incidents.

Last year, when a lower-caste Dalit woman was allegedly raped by an upper-caste man, the police not only refused to register the case but arrested villagers who protested against the injustice. The Gulabi Gang stormed the police station and demanded the case be registered. When police refused to comply, the women beat them with sticks. That sparked a state-wide inquiry into police misconduct. On another occasion, Devi reportedly dragged a government official out of his car to illustrate the dire state of local roads. They have also intervened in sham marriages, dowry disputes and even tried to combat female illiteracy.

This hasn’t made her universally popular of course. She told an Indian newspaper last year that she had lost count of the court cases pending against her, but never bothered about them. “In fact, I have beaten the cops and a magistrate as well, when they doled out injustice to the ladies of our village. For the past 30 years, I’m fighting against the social injustice meted out to us at home, and I’m not scared of anything or anyone,” she claimed, with a measure of satisfaction.

The story of Sampat Devi is now being made into a Bollywood film with top Indian actresses, to be released in 2013. In the face of overwhelming corruption, misogyny and lawlessness, the rise of such a group is inevitable. Coincidentally, Uttar Pradesh is also the home of Phoolan Devi (a rape victim who started a gang of dacoits to exact revenge) whose story was made into the film Bandit Queen.

It is also the state where a 15-strong group of young women gained fame after they set up a self-defence group called Red Brigades in late 2011. Its 25-year-old leader, Usha Vishwakarma, told The Times of India recently that
1
'Red Brigade takes guard against women tormentors on Lucknow streets' Times of India, March 2013
she formed the group after one of her colleagues tried to rape her. “I fought back and managed to escape. It took a year to recover from the incident but I realised that every girl has the strength to protect herself.”

She joined with other girls in her locality, in the city of Lucknow, because she felt they had to take things in their own hands. “It is the woman who bears the brunt in every case of sexual harassment. No one comes to her rescue and she gets hardly any help from administration or police,” she said.

The incidents were also hurting their chances of getting an education. “Parents were telling girls to stay in their homes so there would be no incidents. They said, ‘if you go to school, boys will be troubling you, so stay home and there will be no sexual violence’,” Vishwakarma told The Guardian newspaper in a subsequent interview.
2
‘Women hit back at India's rape culture’ – Guardian newspaper, April 2013
The gang of girls have been involved in several incidents of protecting women from harassment and abuse, and say their numbers have swelled to over a 100. “We chose red because it means danger and black for protest,” she adds.

Despite the deeply ingrained cultural attitudes, these examples illustrate that Indian women aren’t exactly shrinking violets absent from public life as they are in some countries. There has always been a vibrant feminist protest culture in India over injustices.

Meera Subramanian says there is a lot of anger at how women are asked to keep silent. “I sense that across India, girls and women are becoming increasingly frustrated that becoming more accomplished members of their society, and more visible, seems to be so threatening to the men who have controlled the public realm for so long, and that the reaction can be so brutal and violent.”

In 1972, the ‘Mathura’ case of a low-caste woman, who was raped by two policemen, was the first major incident to spark protests and lead to a change in the law that accepted a woman’s word on whether she consented to sexual intercourse. In 1978, a brother and sister were found murdered in New Delhi after she was raped, and that also led to large street protests. In the same year, the southern city of Hyderabad was brought to a standstill by protests after a young woman, Rameeza Bee, was raped by policemen. Criminal law that dealt with rape was also amended in 1983 and 2002 after a lot of pressure and agitation from civil society groups. In 1986 dowry deaths were the subject of a specific law. There have been countless other amendments and laws since, after protests and pressure by women’s groups.

The most recent protests and vigils across India, after the gang rape of the Delhi student, prompted the government to ask a former Chief Justice to recommend how the law could better protect women. It was not plain sailing; Justice Verma later told reporters that only one state police jurisdiction responded to his call for recommendations on deficiencies of the law. Nevertheless, he made a series of almost universally praised recommendations in January 2013 that were broadly adopted by the government, except, importantly: marital rape remained legal, soldiers were still exempted from being tried for sexual offences under criminal law, and politicians facing sexual assault related charges were not barred from contesting elections.

Karuna Nundy, an advocate at the Supreme Court of India, says laws on violence against women were still problematic as they haven’t been amended enough since they were drafted in 1860. For example, they still contain old phrases such as ‘outraging the modesty of women,’ she points out. Until the Justice Verma report, stalking, acid violence, voyeurism were not even recognised as crimes.

She says women need to be empowered much more and see their freedoms in a different way. “I think if a lot more women actually spoke out … they would see that it is duty of the state to keep violence off the streets, rather than having to keep themselves off the streets. More empowered women express themselves in different ways, act in different ways, and that would go a long way in breaking down patriarchal structures.”

She says the criminal justice system can only go so far in changing attitudes, echoing an increasingly common view among Indian women that calling for a change in the law or the police is not enough – that the problem goes much deeper than that.

Sagarika Ghose, deputy editor at the broadcaster CNN-IBN, wrote an angry polemic in the Hindustan Times following the Delhi gang rape, saying: “The modern woman is seen to be on a collision course with our age-old traditions, part sex goddess part super achiever, loathed and desired in equal measure. A profound fear and a deep, almost pathological, hatred of the woman who aspires to be anything more than mother and wife is justified on the grounds of tradition.” She added: “The battle is fiercer than ever before and it can no longer be fought in seminar rooms and government meetings. [For feminists] the battle will have to be fought on every issue from dress codes to mobile phones to love marriages to divorce to the right to education.”

This is essentially the nub of the problem. Violence against women is also a cultural problem. Culture determines a country’s laws and how well they are implemented; culture discourages or encourages violence against women. The problem may not be just the judiciary and establishment but the traditional values they grew up with too.

The idea that there needs to be a broader shift in changing attitudes is not new to the government, yet it has barely managed to scrape the surface. The New Delhi State government runs a plan called ‘Ladli’ (‘a dear girl child’) that offers parents Rs 10,000 ($200 / £125) just for giving birth to a girl and another Rs 5000 a year when they register for school all the way till college. If she completes her education up to the age of 18 the family gets a bonus of Rs 100,000.

There have been nation-wide efforts too: setting up a network of ‘public cradles’ where families can anonymously drop off unwanted girls, television ads against such practices, launching awareness campaigns with religious and spiritual leaders. But the impact has been very limited, as the statistics themselves show.

There are two key areas where women in India are making progress but still have a long way to go: education and employment. While literacy rates have risen to 65.5%, they are still far behind men at 82%. Similarly, workforce participation of women in rural areas was just 20.8% (54.8% for men), while it was worse in urban areas: 12.8% for women and 55.6% for men, according to the last Census.

In the face of strong, prevailing winds, the progress made so far is impressive. But it is a drop in the ocean given how much change is necessary to avert major sociological damage across India.