The Janus-faced Nature of the Patriarchal Moral-political Economy

When I wrote in December of last year, after the brutal gang rape and murder of the woman who came to be signified as “Nirbhaya”, “Amanat” or “India’s braveheart”, I was angry. The anger now has subsided, or replaced by a cynicism of sorts. However, in that anger, I'd written that I wouldn't have any qualms if the courts give a death sentence to the six accused. In a way, I did anticipate that.  However, now that the four accused (the main accused allegedly hanged himself in jail; the other, a juvenile and reportedly the most brutal, will walk away in three years) have been given the death sentence, there is, I suspect, a deeper malaise, or a sense of unease. And this, let me clarify, has little to do with the ethics of the death sentence. It has more to do with the ideology of it.

The verdict itself is not surprising. “Justice”, we knew, would get served – no matter how problematic its connotations. The country’s reaction to it, judging by the response on our TV channels and social media timelines, is veering between sordid celebration of death, and a cautious criticism of the unethical institution of the death penalty.

In ways more than one, the verdict has betrayed the spirit of the Justice Verma commission's pertinent and timely intervention of interpreting and changing the laws that deal with rapes and sexual violence in India. Writing for Tehelka, Revathi Laul argues that if “we must strive for a less barbaric society that produces fewer brutes, then our impulse to punish must also come from higher, less barbaric reasoning...not by descending to something that is, by all measures of modern day jurisprudence, barbaric.”

But the recent gang rape of a photojournalist in Mumbai in August – and the swift arrests of the perpetrators (the incident forced us to reflect back on the Delhi incident), throws us into a similar quandary. The similarities are striking: the social location of the victims, and the perpetrators; a decadence of geography, of a city whose parts are left to ruins; and the moral outrage both cases have evoked. Therefore, I believe it is time that we ask deeper and more critical questions concerning the very nature of what I have called the patriarchal moral-political economy.

Some notes on the patriarchal moral-political economy

In a previous post, I have attempted to explain what I meant by the ‘patriarchal nation-state’, drawing from the Marxist-Althusserian and Foucauldian notions of “ideological state apparatus” and “governmentality”, respectively. However, that term is somewhat limited in both its scope, despite its theoretical richness, to analyse the events that have unfolded in the last couple of weeks. Thus, I find recourse to the term ‘moral-political economy’ more useful.

First of all, the term moral-political economy entails a wider and more fluid understanding of networks of power in patriarchal societies. The notion of ‘nation-state’ is limited by what the term represented. With the moral-political economy, that scope is somewhat widened. Power is thus conceptualised outside the rigid binary of genders, and is placed in the intersecting discourses of masculinity, class, caste, religion, ethnicity, social geography and spatiality, media and representation, knowledge economies, legality, and a critique of institutions, to name a few. At the same time, there are certain assumptions that are central to its formulation.

First, is the fact that there is no one model of the patriarchal moral-political economy; because its formulation is deeply invested in culture, history and geography, there are moral-political economies. Each engenders different cultural aspects, and yet rests on the fulcrum of hegemony and dominance, and subsequently, resistance and recalcitrance. Second, is that the moral-political economy is Janus-faced in nature. The moral-political economy sustains itself as a hegemonic enterprise; it needs to manufacture conscience and outrage to legitimate the violence it can inflict on certain bodies – of both, men and women – that do not conform to it. The idea of “legitimacy” is of extreme importance here, and is something that I shall deal with later on. Third, is the category of the masculine. Moral-political economies, much like political economies, derive their power by investing it in an ideal-specific category: for socialism, for instance, it would be state, or collective ownership; in capitalism, it would be profit-motive, private property and a free-market economy. In patriarchal moral-political economies, I argue, it is the category of the masculine, or more so the dominant definition of the masculine, which is central in understanding how way power flows, and is configured. The concept of hegemonic masculinity is important in this regard (more on that later).

And finally, using the fulcrum of masculinity, exclusion and hegemony, the usage of the term moral-political economy allows for the conception of power in both, meta-structures and micro-networks; a power that flows through the social body and networks, and at the same time, one that is deeply invested the real and normative structures of the real political-economy.

However, it must be remembered that since the very structure of the patriarchal moral-political economy is fluid and diffuse, nothing can be set in stone. It is as historical as it is contemporary; it constantly shifts, because it needs dynamism to sustain itself. And, more importantly, it pivots on exclusion; it pivots on the operation of dominance, and violence against bodies and spaces; the attacks on each, legitimated by the need to defend or preserve something - be it the dignity of women, children, nationhood, or so forth (what Iris Young calls the masculinist logic of protection). However, while the term itself refers to an oppressive system, it also engenders within it the scope for resistance. That is, in its usage, there lies the possibility of exploring avenues and strategies where it can be resisted, subverted, if not entirely thwarted. This idea is indebted to the legacy of feminist and Marxist praxis and, itself, seeks to formulate a post-feminist and post-Marxist one. 

These points, although incredibly sketchy, are essential in understanding the contemporary discourse of gender and violence in the country. Not in the least because the question of violence is very real, and very glaring, but because there is an ever present danger of public discourse slipping into a space where recourse to the patriarchal moral-political economy is seen as the only viable option for safety. The truth could not be any further from that: in fact, it is entirely the opposite. 

Thus, as the events unfold outside Saket Court, the death penalty has acquired immense ideological significance to bolster the legitimacy (of the hegemony) of the patriarchal moral-political economy. What the death penalty – and those in support of it – represents is the Janus-faced nature of the patriarchal moral-political economy. And it is this Janus-faced nature that: a) manufactures and appropriates the so-called 'collective conscience', 'collective outrage' of the people, and b) legitimates violence against the bodies of criminals, not because of the crime they commit, but because who they commit it against; and, finally, c) in doing so, through its various institutions, it creates and reinforces network of hegemony, that defines criminality (transgression), and its (selective, and often brutal) punishment.

The problem of rarity and the legitimacy of violence

Terming the December gang rape-murder case as “rarest of the rare”, and seeing the sheer brutality and depravity of the violence acted up the 23 year-old victim’s body, the Additional Sessions Court judge, Yogesh Khanna, stated that “gruesome crimes against women are becoming more rampant”, and that is why “we need to send a message that this will not be tolerated”. Politicians, like Sushma Swaraj – who called the Delhi victim a zinda lash (or 'living corpse') – have “welcomed the verdict”, and hope that “it would work as an effective deterrent.”

 While there is more than sufficient evidence to indicate that death penalties don’t work as deterrent (nor do castrations), that is not to say that death penalties do not have any effects at all. It is an existentially warped notion that a sovereign, democratic state, backed by the will of its people, can mete out judgements in death. As some have put it, death sentences might offer closure to the families of those affected, but I am uncertain of the cathartic abilities of the hangman’s noose.

Shuddhabrata Sengupta's post on Kafila dissects the absurdity of the death penalty, and is incredibly relevant to our discussion on the moral-political economy, and especially since they engender a very pertinent question about legitimacy of violence. Sengupta argues that the notion of rarity in "the rarest of the rare" is constructed by means of a hypothetical sliding scale of refinement and intensification of cruelty. He further argues that:

The ‘rarest of rare’ argument automatically devalues the experience of millions of people, because, on the one hand it upholds the principle of the severest retribution, and on the other hand it rations out that (flawed) understanding of justice on the basis of the sliding scale of the ‘lesser’ and ‘greater’ horrors of different crimes. 

Sengupta's arguments underscore a very pertinent question about legitimacy of violence. The notion of rarity also creates a hierarchy of violence that is informed, not so much by the nature or extent of violence, but by who it is directed against, how it is directed and to what end.

Guardian's Jason Burke elucidates on the multiple factors – urban-rural migration, the economic transformation of Delhi, the aspirations and failures of those who do migrate, and the rising decadence of urbanity in Delhi – that came together in brutal coordination, and intersected that December night.

Burke also argues that one of the striking elements of the case is the similarity of the background of the victim and the killers. Burke's systemic critique penetrates and destabilises many assumptions about the December gang rape-murder, and about the social etiology of rape (after all, rape in India has been described as an “epidemic”). The perpetrators, he writes:

“…were thus all representative of a substantial element of contemporary Indian society. They were semi-skilled and poorly educated, like so many other products of the country's failing education systems. They were migrants from the country to the town…There was nothing very extraordinary about them. Yet within hours they would commit acts that would prompt outrage across the planet.”

I do think that Burke’s larger point is a necessary intervention in understanding the operation of the moral-political economy in the nitty-gritty of urban spaces. However, for the wider discourse, and for the moral-political economy itself, simplicity is a very powerful ideological device. And the ideology of the death penalty seeks to negate this very problematic.

With the Mumbai Shakti Mills gang rape(s), it might do so again (although its justification of rarest of the rare will not hold true; partly because the area as a site of prior crimes; and the victims of those crimes do not have equal access to the law). What is important in this case, is that the state chooses to act violently in the name of justice – for women, supposedly. And that’s also precisely where the patriarchal moral-political economy is Janus-faced.

It constructs legitimacy for its violence – in the case of death penalty for rape, violence against the bodies of the perpetrators. It is also important to note that the perpetrators in both the Delhi and Mumbai gang rapes were men from lower socioeconomic statuses, and were partially employed and, more importantly, prone to violence before (the accused in Mumbai have committed rapes in the very space before). Cordelia Jenkins, too, cautions us against this demonisation of the rapists. Writing on the coverage of the Mumbai gang rape, she notes that the problem with the attitude of dehumanizing is:

“…that it overlooks the fact that the young men who did this horrific thing are citizens of this country too, although in our collective anger and shame it is much easier to ignore that, to paint them as monsters, evil to the core, or outcasts. Like other kinds of terrorists, it’s hardest to imagine that they could be home-grown.”

In constructing the identities of the accused – as “footloose migrants”, “north-Indians”, “Biharis”, “Bangladeshis” – the violence against their bodies is legitimated. Any claims that the perpetrators might have citizenship are forfeit – more so, denied to them; they are dehumanised, demonised, and are put on the gibbet for society’s collective violence (the death penalty backed by sovereign will) to act on them.

This ideology of the death penalty – the legitimation of violence through dehumanisation – is, also, a problem of the meta and micro structures of the moral-political economy that I mentioned in the beginning of this essay. The court’s verdict, and the “collective will” it represents, is the operation of the ideology in but one space, and one form of Janus-faced nature, of the moral-political economy. Informal, normative institutions that are outside the domain of civil society are as much a part of it. And that is precisely why I think it is important to place the violence inflicted by institutions like Khap Panchayats in the same discursive framework. The “honour killings” perpetrated by the Khap Panchayats, especially in the state of Haryana, while not directly concerned with rape (I would keep the rapes of Dalit women by high caste men separately), functions on a similar ideology of punishing transgression. While many object to the term “honour killing”, I retain it precisely because it articulates the doublespeak of legitimacy: the very act of transgressing the normative patriarchal lines of caste, and caste endogamy, dehumanises the victims, to the extent of family members brutally murdering them. Thus, in the brutal landscape of gendered violence, the legitimation of violence and death echoes the sentiments of the legal (and ironically backed by our structures of governments) death penalty – that it is meant to set a precedence; in both cases, the “collective will” is invoked, defended and preached. Death sentence becomes the necessary evil. 

Thus, the Janus-faced nature of the moral-political economy certainly is not limited to the (legitimated) violence enacted on the bodies of male perpetrators by the masculine state; it includes the bodies of all those who dare transgress the notion of legality and normativity (for instance, of caste endogamy). The problem of the masculine, thus, is central to the understanding of the patriarchal moral-political economy, for which we must take recourse to understanding the problematic of masculinity.

Hegemonic masculinity, masculinist protection & gendered violence

The intersection of gender, space, social and economic capital, and violence articulate a network of hegemony, that is best articulated by the notion of hegemonic masculinity, and by its extension, the logic of masculinist protection. The definition of the concept of hegemonic masculinity offered by R.W. Connell is:

“The ability to impose a particular definition on other kinds of masculinity… [it is] rather, a question of how particular groups of men inhabit positions of power and wealth, and how they legitimate and reproduce the social relationships that generate their dominance.”

Connell also states that there is a necessity to recognise the complex interplay of between gender, race and class. ‘Hegemonic masculinity’, thus, “is not a fixed character type…it is rather the masculinity that occupies the hegemonic position in a given pattern of gender relations, a position always contestable.”

The merit of this concept is in the formulation of a theoretical framework that states that the relationships within genders are centred on, and can be explained by, the relationships between genders. The idea of hegemonic masculinity, when looked at from the wider perspective of the patriarchal moral-political economy, allows us to see the multiple, intersecting (and problematic) lines of justice and injustice in the terrain of rape and sexual violence against women in India.

The power entailed in hegemonic masculinity, then, allows rapists to display both, a sense of impunity – that they destroy the personhood of the victim, robbing them of agency, and thus, of dissent, too; and, a sense of entitlement – that by the virtue of them being men, they can lay claim to the bodies of those the weaker sex (but not always, female). These two ideas are inextricably linked in patriarchal moral-political economies. The death penalty, in this case, is an extension of that logic of punishment. The punishment given to the accused (in the Delhi gang rape-murder, and the Shakti Mills gang rape), then, can be seen as one for them transgressing their spaces, and perhaps, less for the crimes they committed.

The revelations about the prior rapes committed by the perpetrators in the Shakti Mills compound, too, speak volumes about how the moral-political economy operates. The photojournalist was not the first one assaulted there. The other victims – a rag picker, a sex-worker and a transgender – were raped there before. But their complaints were not registered by the police; in fact, some of them were insulted by cops. The same can be said about the countless rapes of Dalit women in Haryana, or women like Manorama, who were raped by the Armed Forces. It is because, in the moral-political economy, the bodies of its victims do not warrant protection from (and against) the state and other normative institutions of governance; because they are, in a tragic case of irony – like the accused in urban India – not seen as citizens, let alone “India’s daughters”; the violence against their bodies – irrespective of who inflicts it – is erased, and they exist only as that: bodies that lack agency, or autonomy (although their struggles are very real, political, and at times, ameliorative). Their erasure from the discourse of the moral-political economy allows them to exist as epitaphs, for polemics such as the one I write; they exist as motifs, which we use to criticise the state, patriarchy, and so forth; nothing more and, unfortunately, nothing less.

At the same time, rape engenders the very same patriarchal moral-political economy’s attempts to crush dissent, and manufacture legitimacy for, and from, it. People who very rightly raise the question of justice in the numerous rape cases by the Indian armed forces in the North East, legitimated by the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), miss out the insidious operation of the ideology of rape (and its punishment): the difference that is drawn between rape-as-punishable-by-death, and rape-as-punishment. This contradiction is at the heart of the Janus-faced nature of patriarchal moral-political economies.

Acknowledgments: There are a number of people I would like to thank, who in many ways helped me build and defend the arguments I present in this post. First of all, a big thanks to Vaishali J, Ketaki Haté, Malathi Jogi, and Vivien D’costa, for their suggestions and comments on the older draft; to Nolina Minj, for her constant support, encouragement, motivation and love. And, to Shubhra Rishi, for the sustained discussions that have now spanned months.

"They don't really care about us."

Note: This post is a follow-up to an earlier post (click here), wherein I've made certain preliminary arguments on the Delhi gang-rape & murder incident. 

A thought has been bothering me for quite some time now: I’m not sufficiently anti-establishmentarian enough; that, after a point, I’d still be willing to invest whatever little bit of faith I have in my reserves in the machinery of the state, rather than ideologues, demagogues and the so-called civil society. That illusion has shattered.

It’s been about a week since I have been angry and outraged at the brutal gang-rape of a 23 year-old physiotherapist in Delhi, and an equally brutal assault on her friend. I’m still angry, and I want to be. But when I saw cosmetic protests organised at my college just the other day, or when I heard a clamour for death penalties and castrations on the social media, or when I saw politicians and celebrities and god-knows-who-else behave like they’re freaking PhDs in dealing with violence against women, I was disillusioned. The state, I knew very well, was as indifferent as hell. And as Vivek Kaul so rightly wrote, the only reason why the six perpetrators have been arrested – despite the Delhi Police Commissioner’s claims of the blind case being solved in record time – is because the perpetrators were not some politician’s kids, nor were they associated with any political outfits; neither were they cops, nor army-men; or anyone on a very long list of people who will never be held accountable for the crimes they commit.

That’s the first failure. Unfortunately, there have been several more, far too many for me to articulate in this space.

Three problems

Three things that have bothered me, more so with respect to the aftermath of this incident: The first of course is the way in which the media manufactures conscience and outrage (my incredibly crass interpretation of Chomsky’s “propaganda model”; I refuse to call it the “press” or “journalism” because those values, I believe, are entirely absent in public discourse). The industrial nature of the news media requires this manufacturing of conscience; it doesn't care about causes. It happened with the deaths of Keenan and Rueben in Amboli last year; with the Guwahati assault earlier this year; and now, the Delhi gang-rape incident. I’m not commenting on the good or bad of reporting: clearly, some channels and papers are providing exceptional coverage of the incident. But very few manage to break away from this discourse of manufacturing conscience. However, since I've dealt with this issue sufficiently, I shall not bother the reader with any more polemics against the media.

My second problem is with the ideological response to the incident, primarily by politically motivated groups – like the BJP, or the ABVP, or Kejriwal’s Aam Admi Party – they have, all of them, hopped on to the “dissing-the-government” bandwagon. For them, essentially, this case isn't any different from the FDI in retail, the 2G spectrum allocation scam, the coal block allocation scam, or any of the UPA’s other bluders, for that matter: they are at India Gate to garner political mileage. This is political posturing at its worse, and its most crass levels. In a Kafila, post arguing against this political double standard-ness, Shuddhabrata Sengupta decimates Sushma Swaraj’s callous comments on the nature of the crime; Swaraj, who said that rape is “worse than death”, and the victim was “zinda lash” or a living corpse, Sengupta argues, is actually “endorsing the patriarchal value system that produces rape”, and that she and the rapist “are in perfect agreement about the worth of the life of a rape victim”. In another Kafila article, Pratiksha Baxi argues that the right-wing politician is “not concerned with how a strident Hindu nationalism is built on the violated bodies of women”. No one in the BJP (or anywhere else, for that matter) cared sufficiently about Dalit girls being raped and set on fire in Haryana; or when women in the North East, like Manorama, continue to raped, molested and killed by army men and paramilitary forces; or in the Naxal-affected areas, when policemen are engaged in custodial rapes; or when politicians and their goons get away with rapes, and get elected into parliament. Unfortunately, rape is reduced to the violation of the woman’s honour; as an aberration to the normalcy of things, where ‘normal’ is defined as a state where women and marginalised groups blindly accept their exploitation and maintain the status quo.

Third, and finally, I have a problem with the state’s violent action against the protestors at India Gate. Make no mistake, I’ve never taken warmly to protests, marches, vigils and all that; there’s a deep sense of scepticism I have towards “well meaning” civil society action; but a deeper sense of disillusionment at the failure of governance: something I've called a governance of paranoia – wherein the political (and powered) class is informed by illogical reactionism, and not a coherent ideological standpoint. This is not to suggest that the problem is merely anti ideological. It is the failure on the part of ideologies, and modes of governance to adapt, to say: “We were wrong”. Because it is precisely this posturing, this ambivalence in governance, this resistance to acknowledge the truth that “the emperor has no clothes”, is what maintains the illusion of power. I concede that this argument is incredibly complex, but I shall attempt to deal with it further on.

Disparate discourses

There is a parallel I see in the Delhi police commissioner, Neeraj Kumar’s, insistence on not acknowledging the fact that the police screwed up at India gate (and on several occasions in the past), and in the National Rifle Association’s unapologetic stance (summed up with the ridiculous reasoning: “Guns don't kill people, people do”) in the aftermath of the Sandy Hooks shooting massacre in Connecticut, just over a week ago. These are disparate incidents, separated by thousands of miles and, on the face of it, have no commonality. Yet, I believe that they are deeply connected. For one, the brutality of shootings and rapes are borne directly by marginal groups, in this case, children, students, and women – groups that require the state’s protection, by any standard of liberal democracies. Secondly, and unfortunately, both the United States government and the Indian state have, time and again, refused to acknowledge the chronic nature of the problems of gun-proliferation and shootouts, and rapes, respectively; nor have they offered any long term solutions; from President Obama’s teary eyes to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s incoherent and, ultimately, inconsequential mumbling, the state, in both cases and countries, has simply sidestepped the issue, proffering only symptomatic solutions and empty rhetoric. Right-wing ideology and patriarchy are powerful ideologies, no doubt. However, that fact that a sovereign nation should so consistently fail to keep both in check is staggering, unless, of course, there is a deeper problem in the very nature of governance itself.

What we've got here, is failure of governance

Clearly, I’m disillusioned with both major parties in this struggle: the protestors, and the state. My scepticism of the Delhi protests is informed by two major ideas: one, is the criticisms levelled against civil society by the Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek; and idea of the “political society” formulated by the subaltern studies scholar, Partha Chatterjee. While Žižek’s criticisms are founded more on the ideological nature of civil society in his native Slovenia, Chatterjee, being much closer to home, offers more relevant insights. That the nation is following the India Gate protests so closely; that many such protests are being replicated across the country, in Bangalore, in Mumbai, and other cities, is what Chatterjee calls the domain of the “civil society”. Opposed to this civil society is the “political society”, i.e., the social groups like Dalits, de-notified tribes, slum dwellers, who negotiate with governing agencies, usually bureaucrats, low level civil servants, but people who exercise considerable power at the micro-level (my apologies to Partha Chatterjee for reducing his arguments to this dichotomy, but I've done so for the sake of better comprehension). 

I’ve had the chance to observe such negotiations first hand on several research projects: where people living in bastis spend every day without the certainty of work, or that their makeshift houses would be standing by the time they get home from work. There have been many incidents of rapes in similar areas across the country, most of them usually go unreported, or are a column in newspapers which dedicate full pages to advertisements. Things are worse in states like Orissa, or the North East, where atrocities are carried out against women like clockwork. The brutal nature of the crimes against these women, many of whom brave tremendous odds to fight for justice (for instance the International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Kashmir has done commendable work in the Shopian murder-rape case), does indeed unite them in a discourse of resistance.

Despite of all my cynicism and scepticism, I empathised with the protesters at Delhi; while I do not endorse their views, I do share their anger, their frustration, their angst and their fears. From the ground at Raisina Hill and India Gate, Nilanjana Roy and Aditya Nigam wrote that the protestors were anything but violent in the initial phase, and that they did wish to engage in dialogue with the administration, before the police started lobbing tear gas, that is. Why, then, did the administration, in this case, the Delhi police, not engage in dialogue with the protestors? Why must the Indian state’s response always oscillate between abject apathy and excessive brutality? I suspect it is because the very nature of governance, as I mentioned before, is based on the insistence that the emperor is indeed clothed – and the Indian state insists on insisting with tear gas, water cannons, lathi charges and Section 144.

I understand I've not been very clear about what I mean when I say a "patriarchal nation-state" or "governance". Let me address this ambiguity. First of all, with respect to the nation-state, many greater minds before mine have argued that the very nature of the modern nation-state is patriarchal, i.e., it values a particular class of citizens over others; in the West, it's exemplified by the WASP - White Anglo-Saxon Protestant male. In India, as the authors of Why Loiter? Women and Risks on Mumbai Streets have argued, it is the upper caste, upper class, heterosexual, Hindu men who form the top section of this hierarchy. Women, Dalits, lower caste men, Muslims (young men, in particular), gays, lesbians, transgenders, hijras, and a host of other categories constitute the "undesirable" body, in a descending order of undesirability. The patriarchal nation-state discriminates against these very groups, by policing them, by marginalising them.  And this is an anathema to the very idea of modern, sovereign liberal democracies. And by governance, I mean not just the official mechanism of the state, but, following the French Marxist scholar, Louis Althusser's "ideological state apparatus", includes the official state mechanism, the institutions of the family, ideology, religion, media and so forth. In a patriarchal-nation state, these elements, these parties come together to form a virulent discourse of exclusion and belonging; of policing and punishing it's members; of fear and false consciousness (which, Žižek or Sloterdjik would argue, is actually the peoples' cynical acceptance of the fact that they are being fooled).  Perhaps, there is a problem in my usage of the term "governance" itself, which assumes that there can be an ideal mode of governance, that is, in the liberal democratic sense. The assumption, I am realising now, is certainly ill-founded, as both Althusser, and the French social theorist, Michel Foucault (particularly his works on governmentality and biopolitics) would agree.

Rape, then, is a political tool against dissent: it is an articulation of violence, of intolerance, of the severest insensitivity; of patriarchal governmentality’s recourse to extrajudicial means to crush any and all levels of transgression, political, social, or otherwise. Delhi police’s action against the protestors at India Gate was rape; it was an assault on democracy; it was a step into a fascist future, right alongside the demands for death penalties and castrations; it was an act of violence which endangers not just women’s safety and rights in our country, but that of citizens’ altogether; particularly social groups which do not have access to media coverage, let alone the posturing of political parties, or the sympathies of the general Indian public. And the failure to acknowledge the fact that rape is a problem - that it is not about sex; nor is it about "men assaulting women", or about morality; that it is used to further political agenda, to silence dissent, to obfuscate the nuanced nature of violence, is a muted justification and a shameless vilification of rape.

“They don’t really care about us”

The patriarchal nation-state, the elite civil society and misogynistic political ideologies, by their nature, are inimical to the discourse of women’s access to rights, to address the burning issue of violence against them. Violence against women, in this case rape (‘women’ being incredibly fissured category) is either a political tool itself, or is of absolutely no concern to the parties I mentioned above. Women claiming to speak for women, like the BJP MLAs, propagate the patriarchal ideology of subordination of women by placing a price on their honour and chastity; families would seek to police women, restrict their mobility; the state, as we have clearly established, fails on so many levels – failing to ensure protection, and at the same time, violating it; civil society, on the other hand, is limited by the very narrow nature of its interest; and as for academia, well, I certainly can vouch for the feeling of helpless that has gripped me.

Who, then, speaks for the women? Who cares for them? Are women, as many feminist scholars argue, merely property in the patriarchal political economy? – To be terminated as a foetus, or be killed before they have a chance to live? – That raped women, or those who exercise their sexual freedom, are “damaged goods”?

At this point, I have nothing better to offer than a handful of these questions: questions that I hope someone would answer; or, more importantly, that someone would ask. Personally, I have no hopes for an answer. I am angry, and at the same time, I am reflecting back on my masculinity, on the assumptions that society has thwarted on my gender. Unfortunately, I do not know how many men out there are doing so. Responding to my previous post, one of my professors suggested that rape is a man’s burden…that there is actually soul searching to be done by every man, because at some point in our lives we have all done violence to women. I want to disagree with this, but I know that I can’t: for, not speaking against injustice is also to exacerbate it, if not to partake in it. That is one of the reasons why I write. But, if ever the process of writing was cathartic, it has now ceased to be so.

Acknowledgements: First of all, I would like to express my gratitude to everyone who read, and commented on, the earlier post: their comments and responses have been incredibly motivational. To Shubhra Rishi, for once again being critical and supportive, and for the engaging discussions over GTalk; to my teacher, Fr. Joseph, to whom I am indebted for the sociological nature of my arguments; to my class mates, particularly Natasha Patel, Tasneem Kakal and Simone Salazar. And, finally, to Runcil Rebello, Achyuth Sankar and Anubhav Dasgupta for being such avid readers, and for all the 'Shares' and 'Tweets'.

"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.