"So fucking disappointing, I tell you."

I was filled with a deep sense of disgust, repugnance, loathing and anger when I read about the brutal gang rape and assault of the 23 year-old physiotherapist and her friend, aboard a moving bus in Delhi. I was, and I still am, indignant, as my hands shook when I read about the the inhuman and brutal nature of the crime. I cannot, however, give into anger. I wish I could – and god knows, I want to. But I simply can’t. One reason is because being angry feels good, but the feeling’s cosmetic; secondly, regrettably, I came to terms with just how inured we have become, socially and culturally, to such issues. Sure there’s a lot of media outrage, blood-lust and cries for vigilantism out there – but, where was this “outrage” when Dalit girls were raped, and brutally assaulted/murdered in Haryana only just a month back? – When Khap Panchayats ludicrously suggested that early marriages and stopping consumption of chow mein would magically stop rape, as these measures would address the uncontrollable sexual urge among the men? – Or when Mamata Banerjee claimed that free interaction between boys and girls, who hold hands in public, leads to rape? – When three children were raped, murdered and their bodies disposed-off in the Nehru Nagar slums in Mumbai?

Manufacturing conscience, manufacturing outrage

Clearly, we need the outrage. But the problem is: this is manufactured outrage. A cosmetic, placatory mechanism, much the same way such outrage and sympathy was manufactured in two other high-profile cases in the last year, namely the Amboli double murders and the Guwahati sexual assault incident. Our conscience, our sympathies, despite the sincerity, are farcical, misplaced and superficial; in an earlier post, I’d argued that unless we discuss the problem of violence against women, be it rapes, molestation,  assaults, or whatever, and not tangential issues, there would not be any real move towards addressing this issue. For a moment, I thought we were beyond that. I was wrong. With respect to the Delhi gang rape, there’s a clamour for justice, and justice, in this case, is loosely translated to two things: either hang the perpetrators, or castrate them. I have a problem with both these suggestions.

Why “killing/castrating the bastards” would not help

The death penalty debate is the single most divisive issue that I’ve come across in the last few days, especially since one of the accused requested that he be hanged. One side argues that death would give the perpetrator “an easy way out”; instead, they must be made to suffer, either through life imprisonment, or, as this radical post suggests, be castrated. This side adds that death penalties have, and can never be effective deterrents. The castrationists (I believe no term would suit them better), however, think that the prospect of having their “balls cut off” would inspire fear, and ergo, at least to a point, prevent rapes.

I have no intelligible response to this hogwash. But let us evaluate the problems posed by the castrationist argument, shall we? Most glaringly, it completely ignores the more discursive nature of gendered violence (something I’ve discussed below). For one, the plea for castration is based on retribution: “do the same thing to them that they do to the woman”. How does this logic, functionally speaking, differ from a death penalty?

Vivek Kaul, I believe, presents a convincing argument in destabilising this misplaced assumption. He’s right when he presents his scepticism regarding the efficacy (and therefore, misuse) of chemical castration. In my opinion, it certainly will not serve as a deterrent: sure, rapes may stop or reduce; but instances of acid-throwing could increase, or murders, for that matter. What about human trafficking? Or marital rape? Custodial rapes? Sexual assault by armed forces? 
And to push absurd castrationist claim further: what’s to say there wouldn’t emerge a pre-emptive mechanism? – Based on skewered data, the state  could formulate a demographic group most likely to commit rapes (which, I’m assuming, based on how people have unproblematically pointed out the region from where the perpetrators of the Delhi rape incident hail, would reflect of such essentialism), and then proceed to castrate them before they have to opportunity to rape anyone. Or, as Kaul suggests:

“More often than not they will get hold of some random guy (the homeless, the slum dweller or probably just about the first person they can get their eyes on) beat the shit out of him and get him to confess to it.”

Thing is, last I checked, we were still a democracy, and have not yet descended into fascism. Philosophical considerations aside, can rape be attributed to just a badly essentialised biological drive? Can there be a social etiology of rape? And, if we do, miraculously, arrive at one, how different is this diagnosis from the archaic Khap Panchayat fatwas (apart from being inverted, that is)?

The death penalty, I know, is far more problematic. Commenting on a Facebook post, I suggested that such crimes against women be dealt with “extreme prejudice”. Of course, people took it to mean that I was advocating the death penalty. But before the connotations of my comment are dissected, let me defend my argument here. I am not condoning the death penalty: I think there’s something incredibly wrong in a sovereign, democratic state, backed by the will of the people, meting out judgements in death; nor am I partaking in the popular bloodlust and calling for vigilantism. By “extreme prejudice”, I mean to suggest that we break the hegemonic nature of judicial process; one way to do so, is by shifting the burden of proof from the victim/survivor to the perpetrator. For too long have politicians, community leaders, bureaucrats, police officers and what-nots shifted the blame of sexual assault on the women, for “provoking rape”, or “consenting to it”; that rapes are “political conspiracies”, or simply, that the victims are “prostitutes” (Tehelka, in their April edition, exposed how cops and officials in the Delhi NCR region, callously and shamelessly attributing the blame for rapes squarely on women).

Would you expect justice, any form of justice, in such a warped, misogynistic society? Where the law and public discourse is rigged to discriminate against women at every turn? I think not. That said, even with superficial polemical pleas for “justice”, we are looking only at retributive justice. Hangings, castrations, tougher sentences, lynching – where does the victim figure in all of this? Unfortunately, no matter how much the public clamours for “justice”, no matter how vile their bloodlust is, unless and until our notion of justice can be ameliorative for the victim, and for women at large, such posturing, such polemics are pointless.

In this context, Nilanjana Roy presents a strong case against the death penalty. Since 90% of rape cases in India are perpetrated by people known to the victim, if we do push for the death penalty, it would, she suggests, be “executing the neighbours”. The scenario certainly is frightening. It’s one thing to demand that a relatively obscure perpetrator be hanged; it is, as Shilpa Phadke suggests, a policing of not only women, but also of undesirable bodies (i.e. lower class/caste men, Muslim men, the ill-defined 'Biharis') in the urban space. As callous as it sounds, no one cares about them until they “invade” or “violate” our spaces and rape “our women”. Kaul’s scepticism (and mine, too), I believe, is sufficiently vindicated.

Are death sentences, then, the answer? Honestly, I don’t know. Because, if I am making a plea for “extreme prejudice”, I am arguing that the law function impartially (irrespective of how problematic that may seem in reality). This isn’t optimism, mind you. It is, for the lack of a better term, a necessary evil. I certainly do not, and cannot, subscribe to the belief that recourse to extra judicial means is the only effective answer. And for those who think death penalties would not act as deterrents, I know they won’t. But, since they are legal as of now, if a court of law, with due legal process, delivers a verdict in a case as brutal as this, I certainly have no qualms if the courts gave a death sentence to the accused. That said, I will not sign a petition which demands a death penalty for them. If, conversely, there’s a petition to repeal the death penalty, I will sign it, I’ll vote on it. But, as problematic as it is, I choose not to make misplaced moral judgements regarding the same.

The game is rigged

While sexual assault is, I reiterate, but one aspect of violence against women, it’s important to consider the more discursive nature of the same. Rape, defined broadly as non-consensual, penetrative sexual intercourse, is but one form of gendered, sexual violence. There’s no consensus in the definition of rape. Sure, the modifications in Indian rape laws, may be looked at as a step in the right direction (click here); but, with corresponding changes in the legal mechanism, like the Evidence Act, these moves fall woefully short of their potential. In most cases, though, they are an abject failure.

Patriarchal hegemony and structured misogyny are, and I can’t underwrite this any more than what I already have, very nuanced and incredibly brutal systems of oppression. This does not mean that perpetrators of any crime against women are acting purely in submission, to a force beyond their control. Patriarchy exists in practice. It exists, and it manifests itself every time a woman is denied access to public space, every time she’s a victim of acid-throwing, of battery, murder, sexual assault etc. And these instances, these enunciations of patriarchy and misogyny, these acts of gendered violence (although, following Judith Butler, one could argue that all violence is gendered), I believe, constitute violence against women. Would castration or the death penalty stop anything? I’m afraid not. It’s far more deep-seated. Maybe, as many advocate, we need long term plans, or as one person suggested: “As labour force participation increases, sex ratios should self-correct via a positive feedback loop”.

Although I agree with a considerable portion of them, and a bulk of my academic work focuses on the critical analysis of hegemonic masculinity, I’m not entirely optimistic about such long-term plans; not with the kind of reality we are witnessing today – the callousness, the ignorance, the disinterest, the selective reporting, the selective protesting, the manufacturing of conscience and outrage by the media, to name a few. I was wrong to assume that the issue of women’s safety, of violence against them, has shed considerable hogwash from the time of the Guwahati incident. It has not. If anything, it has gotten worse.

The polemic remains the same

We have heard this polemic before. Every time gory visuals flash on our screens, every time we are tagged in badly composed Facebook posts, or asked to wear black to “protest against the Delhi rape case” (regrettably, though not unsurprisingly, one might ask: which rape case? Yes, that’s how bad things are), I grow more and more disheartened. The polemics, essentially, are templates: to arouse anger, fear, disgust, outrage and what not. Petitions demanding death penalties are shared; previous cases become statistics; new ones occupy more column inches, and then fade away.

And it gets us nowhere. It does nothing to ameliorate the brutality inflicted on the woman. Namita Bhandare, in an insightful piece written after the series of rapes of Dalit girls in Haryana, argues that women who survive any form ofviolence, in this case, rape, are survivors and not victims; that they deserve justice, and not sympathy. I couldn’t agree more with her proposition. But when you hear about survivors, like the woman who was raped in Calcutta earlier this year, (the one Mamata Banerjee alleged was a political conspiracy to malign her government) living in penury, stigmatised, marginalised, with absolutely no support system, I am…disheartened. Then you have people like Dhoble raiding bars and pubs, supposedly busting prostitution rackets, while women are assaulted in broad daylight, and callously labelled prostitutes by his counterparts in Delhi. I don’t care if they are in different states; they are the fucking system. And then I am asked to change my display picture to show solidarity, or wear black to college, attend a march or partake in some other cosmetic exercise. So fucking disheartening, I tell you. When people ask me, with my “presumed superior knowledge and intelligence”, for an answer: I inevitably disappoint them. Hell, I want to be optimistic; I want to believe that there’s a solution. But more than the seemingly increased cases of violence against women, it is the bullshit that follows these incidences, or the apathy and lack of coverage that disappoints me. Just today, a friend of mine said that no matter what we discuss in class (which is a niched space, she added), or what the public thinks: all this makes no difference to her every time she “goes out there”; she has to deal with the stares, the comments, the fear. I had no response. I just hoped that she had a safe journey back home. Fortunately, I thought, at least she was travelling with her brother. The very next moment, I hated myself for thinking so. And I’m not feeling any better since, as I write an incredibly unsatisfying ending to what will be added to a long list of inconsequential ramblings.

So fucking disappointing, I tell you.

Acknowledgements: I am grateful to Shubhra Rishi for her critical comments on the earlier draft of this essay, and for being so encouraging and supportive even otherwise; to my classmate, Shakti Nambiar, for the engaging discussions in our gender studies class, as well as for elucidating the nuances of rape laws in India, and for bring forth perspectives that I'd have otherwise ignored. And finally, I am indebted to Simone Salazar for pointing out the several flaws in my reasoning; her criticisms have always been helpful.