A Gendered Problematic

I was filled with disgust and repugnance when I heard about the incident of a 16-year old girl in Guwahati being assaulted by a mob, and being molested, beaten and stripped. There was a huge uproar on Facebook and Twitter; people demanded justice, said lots of things which have been said before. This wasn't the first incident where a woman was brutally assaulted by a unruly mob, in an Indian city. And—forgive my cynical disposition—this was certainly not going to be the last.

But this particular issue, of late, has acquired several dimensions, mostly political; the Chief Minister of Assam, Tarun Gogoi, alleged that this incident was a conspiracy against the government. There have been rumours doing rounds - as they always do - of Youth Congress involvement. Most of all, people have been critical, and rightly so, of the so-called journalist for News Live, Gauravjyoti Neyog, for instigating the perpetrators. Many, therefore, have criticized News Live too for broadcasting the incident; while they (News Live), on the other hand, claim that had they not done so, the issue would've remained unnoticed. 

What I found staggering - apart from the callousness and brutality of the incident - is the aftermath of it, which is manifest in two ways. One of them is outrage over the representation of the incident in Tehelka's latest cover. People, largely, have accused Tehelka - a magazine with the reputation of being one of India's leading critical publications - of cheap, insensitive gimmicks to garner eyeballs. The other reaction was to the series of gaffes made by the National Commission for Women, wherein Alka Lamba, a member of the fact finding team, revealed the name of the victim. Next, Mamta Sharma, the NCW chief, said "women should dress carefully to avoid crime...and not ape the West."

What I read into these two instances are two things: one, that no matter the seriousness of the crime against women, no matter its severity, its brutality, there is really no one on the side of the victim; not the government, least of all local authorities. And two, that we, as a society, are so indoctrinated into patriarchy and misogyny, will try to subvert the issue in question: which is, a woman being assaulted/hurt/murdered/raped and discuss tangential issues. 

I shall tackle the second observation first. Just some time back, I read a piece in LiveMint by Salil Tripathi. While the piece itself was not something particularly profound and engaging, the comments on it, I found, were staggeringly stupid. Yes, stupid. 

People seemed to have taken exceptional offense to his reference to Draupadi's disrobing in the Mahabharata, as a metaphor for the attenuated response we have towards these kinds of incidents; of being apathetic bystanders. They, instead of engaging with the issue of the girl being a victim of the assault, decided to tangentially argue against the author's conception of Mahabharata and his reluctance to engage with the political angle (the Youth Congress involvement) of the whole incident. 

Similar arguments have been made against the Tehelka cover. I do not condone what Tehelka's done. It's wrong on so many levels. It's distasteful. But so was this incident. And fact is, even then, people are fixated on conspiracy theories and political coups. People took offense, vehemently so, to Mahabharata references - choosing to defend Hinduism instead. 

That a girl was assaulted, brutally so, is collectively, forgotten. It's not Tehelka's cover which is distasteful; but the way public discourse is organised. The image is a macabre spectre which will haunt us. For it reflects a deep, rotten part of the way we've come to organize ourselves as a public. For as long as women's rights don't take prominence in discourse, it will remain an utterly marginalized cause.

The NCW chief’s reaction, while being utterly shameful, reflects the power of patriarchal discourse. It shifts the blame on the woman, presuming that safety of women is agentic on their complete removal from the public sphere. What this does is, it ossifies the public as something which is essentially uncontrolled, aggressive, and violent even. However, for most women, the private is also a domain of subjugation and violence—and perhaps of a worse kind. This kind of lopsided analysis fails to take into account that patriarchy is, primarily, a power construct; and, that men are as much the victims of it, as are women, albeit of a different kind of victimization. The difference is, our victimization is hinged on victimizing others—something I find deeply disturbing and shameful. 

In this context, Natasha Badhwar’s piece in LiveMint on examining societal and cultural controls on women’s sexuality is an interesting read. What I took from it, is an understanding that patriarchy, as a hegemonic structure is far more complex than just domination of women. It survives by making men into instruments of domination—which is, I believe, a kind of victimization in itself.

Any understanding of patriarchy and gender, therefore, has to factor in the question of sexuality—that the sexuality of one group (both, actually) is something that has to controlled. Sexuality in India is terribly controlled by morality, religion, family, community and a host of other surveillance mechanisms. That sexuality is natural, that it is a part of being human, is completely and violently ousted in our understanding of ourselves. Hence, violence remains the only way in which sexuality can be negotiated by men; it's a crime, but it's a structural problem. And a deeply social one, too. 

The refusal to discuss women's victimization as it being perpetrated by men, and therefore patriarchy, reflects the shameful lack of initiative on the part of society as a whole - and that it chooses to further victimize the woman, by assigning blame on her. Violence against women, sexual harassment, then, instead of being a result of this structural imbalance in negotiation sexuality, is ascribed purely on the basis of patriarchal morals. 

Can we then really blame patriarchy for everything, thus absolving ourselves of any action, or more so, justifying our inaction? No. I don’t believe so; because that would be stupid. 

Patriarchy is a power construct, but it is also multidimensional; it, at once, makes men into violent, uncouth perpetrators of crimes of the most heinous nature, and propagates women’s oppression by having them internalize oppression and perpetrate it on to others; mothers to daughters and so forth. It also attenuates the criticality of our responses in the guise of pragmatism and false consciousness. There has not been any alternative system to patriarchy (arguably, since there have been matrilineal societies and social groups; however, patriarchy's permeation into states and politics tends to obfuscate the relevance of matriarchy as a concept); it has existed since the time humans began settled life. But that should not mean that we bow down to its arbitrary constructs of maleness, femaleness, heteronormativity and so forth. More so, there is an urgent need to critically engage with, respond to and challenge patriarchy—particularly it’s ‘taken-for-granted’ nature. We need to bring the oppression of women, and the violence against them, into the centre of public discourse—and not make tangential and irrelevant arguments.

For, I repeat, as long as women's rights don't take prominence in public discourse, they will remain an utterly marginalized cause. 

"My name is Karl. And I am not a Marxist"

Mamata Banerjee is no stranger to controversy. Conspiracy, it seems though, is what really bothers her. Well, personally I have run out of jokes on her conspiracy theories regarding crib deaths, censuring newspapers, and labelling rapes as orchestrated by her detractors. And now she had to go and remove references of Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels from the state higher secondary syllabus. And more recently—which is actually a day old—she got a professor arrested for circulating a “malicious, and derogatory” cartoon of her on the internet.

It was rather hilarious, until the Marx bit. But now, I’ve hit saturation point. I mean, there is a limit to how many times you can tweet about one person on Twitter. And like I said, I was running of jokes.

From a probashi (diaspora) point-of-view, I’ve always imagined how life in WB would’ve been like. I mean, apart from my annual trips to my ancestral home, and the two-day stay at Calcutta, I have never really explored the culture there, and nor have I had a chance to understand the politics of the state—at least, in a way I understand it back home, considering the Saffron legacy in Bombay and Maharashtra. Now, however, I am not too sure. I think being a distant commentator (and thus, far away from Mamata’s jurisdiction) is what I would prefer. Heck, I’m even trying to contemplate under what section she could charge me (to the utter horror of my dad). The thing is, honestly, I know that the politics of the Trinamool are fed by paranoia and paranoia alone; their ideology, so to say, is an anti-ideology—violently negating every (seemingly oppositional) belief system, be it political, ethical, cultural or moral.

So, without taking on the Trinamool and Mamata directly (mostly, because I don’t wish to recycle Arnab Goswami’s profound critiques) I think I should give a little thought to the ‘real’ victims of the Didi’s vendetta: Marx and Engels.

My first tryst was Marx was in the 10^th standard, when I first wished to read Das Kapital, as much as I wanted to read Rousseau, or Jefferson—because back then, history had a way of inspiring the mind of a fifteen year-old, and the idea that I could bask in the ideas of these great men, ideas which inspired revolutions, was just fascinating.

Fast forward four years, when I’ve actually read quite a bit of Marx, well enough to see the naivety and sheer stupidity of Mamata’s move. And I don’t think Mamata’s solely responsible for this—the more widespread outlook on Marx, and Marxism, are often very crass and diluted versions of Marx’s original ideas. For example, almost everyone—every layperson at least—would equate Soviet Communism with Marx. While Marx’s vision of the Revolution did indeed encapsulate the establishment of a communist stage,[1] but he never envisaged a communist state—which is a contradiction in terms.[2] The later works of Marx are often his more scientific one; that is, his vision of the revolution isn’t merely a utopian one, but a scientific and logical one, which is rooted in the class inequalities and exploitation of the capitalist political-economy.[3]

The Communist Party of India’s (Marxist) attempts have also been an ideological corruption of several of Marx’s core arguments; the bourgeoisie social location of its top leaders, like Karat, Yechury and their well-rehearsed arguments against the neo-liberal economics, are examples of a few. However, the real issue here is not the CPI(M), but the problem of putting a Marxian ideology (once again, a contradiction in terms, insofar as Marx’s works are concerned)[4] in the multiparty political scene in India.

I’ve had the privilege of learning under teachers who’ve presented both the strengths and weaknesses of the bulk of Marx’s works, and under them, I’ve had the confidence to engage with (and critique) some of his ideas, which I wouldn’t have, had I not been interested in the philosopher as a naïve 15 year-old. And by removing the reference to Marx (for, they’re exactly that: references to Marx and Engels, in context of the Russian and Industrial Revolution, where they all but mention Marx for a mere paragraph or two) she’s sending out a very wrong, and erroneous message to the to-be intellectual van guard of tomorrow: the fact that someone else gets to choose and thus, to shape what we would learn; the ideology of the state, an ideology of paranoia. I agree with Derek O’brien when he says equal weightage has to be given to Mahatma and Mandela. But is Marx any more, or less, important? I don’t think so. For, as a friend of mine put it, in education, balancing is not synonymous with deletion.   

In one sociology class, we were debating the relevance of Marxian thought, one side of the argument stating that Marx’s works have lost their relevance now that the revolution he predicted never happened, and that even universities abroad don’t study Marx. Then again, on the other hand, modification of Marxian thought, like the new-Leftism of the Frankfurt School,[5] and very recent movements against neo-liberal economics, like ‘Occupy Wall Street’ have showed that the central arguments of Marx’s works will always be relevant, because of their deep engagement with the struggles of humanity. And as long as the debate rages, young people will find one way or another to read up on Marx, and by god, we need educational institutions which can guide students without corrupting the core ideas of an intellectual tradition. 

Marx’s sociology was, in many ways, incomplete. But which theory is otherwise? I think (arguably) his most central idea—that of economic determinism, has been proved wrong by both his critics as well as his successors.[6] But that only enhances his relevance, not diminishes it. In a country like ours, until we’re able to tackle the most basic, and human issues, the German philosopher would continue to influence as well as intimidate, many like me and my peers. But I cannot see a reason why Didi should be so bothered. I mean, by the extension of her logic, the next step would be to ban left-lane driving in West Bengal. Then again, to those of you familiar with WB traffic, there is hardly any lane driving, in the first place.

Endnotes

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[1] Marx essentially sees history as dialectic, that is, it moves through stages with different competing interests between social groups; the stages he refers to are: primitive communism, where everyone owned everything; slave mode of production where the slaves had no rights; the feudal mode, where the serfs were tied to their lands; capitalistic mode, where the capitalist owned resources, including the labour of the workers; and, the stage of communism, where the capitalistic economy was dismantled, or overthrown.

[2] For the revolution to be successful, Marx predicted, it was necessary that the state, which is an apparatus to favour the capital-owning class, to “wither away”.

[3] In a capitalistic political-economy, it was in the state’s benefit to favour the capital-owning class as it ensured greater profits for the state. The population, for Marx, was effectively divided into the bourgeoisie and the proletariat (haves and have-nots, respectively) and the latter were exploited by the former. Class struggle was thus, the basic premise of the revolution, for Marx.

[4] For Marx, ideologies or the “superstructure” (e.g. religion, political systems etc.) stemmed from the “base”, viz. the material or the economic sphere, i.e. the relationship of man to the means of production.

[5] By the mid-twentieth century, proponents of Marxian thought were disillusioned with the Soviet state’s practice of ‘corrupted’ Communism, and the blatant capitalistic economies of the West. Thus, a new wave in Marxian thought emerged, of which one of the most well-known is the Frankfurt Institute (1930s to 1960s).

[6] The Frankfurt School, for example, used the ideas of another sociologist, Max Weber, and argued against the economic reductionism of traditional Marxian thought, saying that ideologies and ideas were equally important as, and not entirely dependent on, the economic sphere of life.