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.

On censorship, surveillance and dystopia

Cynics often take stances that are dark, pessimistic and leave little room for what sociologically could be called an ‘agency’-based approach. Censorship is one such area. Invocations of Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World, conspiracy theories, surveillance societies, are inevitable and unavoidable. Reality, however, to disappoint many, is far more complex and nuanced than ‘governments-out-to-get-us’. But then again, governments are getting us—artists, journalists, or activists, who express dissenting opinions, or upset the status-quo; people who question governments and regimes—both, dictatorships and democracies. The media and culture industries are stronger and more insidious than ever: not only are they manufacturing consent, they also manufacture conscience, often from a moral high-ground. Conversely, there’s also a new wave of media that destabilises these assumptions, with credible and commendable critiques. The picture, to put it in simpler words, is horribly complicated. And because we’re very used to a debate configured in binaries, his often disappoints cynics and their critics.

Last Thursday night, I had the opportunity to attend a panel discussion on 'Censorship and Society', organised by Asia Society India and OPEN magazine. The panel, moderated by Supreme Court advocate, Madhavi Goradia Divan, consisted of brilliant speakers, like Mahesh Murthy, Neville Taraporewalla and Anjum Rajabali. Thus, their expertise ranged from media laws, new and social media, scriptwriting, and cinema. The arguments, therefore, covered a diverse range of topics, many of them discussing the nuances of the right to free speech, freedom of expression, and the right to information, and, of course, the media.

However, this post is not a report of last night’s debate; although, many of the arguments from it shall be the foci of my analyses of censorship, it shall not be limited to the same. In the following segments, I will review some of the pertinent points from last night, and proffer analyses of points which the panel missed out, or did not engage with adequately.  

I

In India, in the past year or more, we have seen an insidious culture of censorship and surveillance. Last year alone, several cases have highlighted this: a Jadhavpur University professor was arrested for circulating a satirical cartoon on Mamata Banerjee; Aseem Trivedi, an activist-cartoonist with India Against Corruption, was charged with sedition for “disrespecting” the national emblem and Parliament; in November, two young women from Palghar were arrested for criticising the virtual shutdown of thecity following Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray’s high profile funeral. At the heart of these cases was the infamous Information Technology Act (2008), and the equally infamous Section 66 A—which according to Divan, is “grossly disproportionate”. The “phenomenal diversity” of the media and the internet, she said, presents a paradox: it is both a liberating medium and an inhibiting one. According to Neville Taraporewalla, while the new hyper-media in India is “extremely volatile”, we still are “a pretty free country”. The need to adapt to these new environments, he felt, is still very important. Mahesh Murthy said that, with the IT Act and liability act, the government has potential deniability as individuals can now decide what is offensive and may issue takedown notices for the same. In most cases, the question is largely about power and political clout, rather than hurting the sentiments of people. Earlier this year, Murthy was charged with defamation along others, by IIPM head Arindam Chaudhury, for posting critical opinions against the institute. 

Anjum Rajabali, who wrote the scripts for movies like Aarakshan, Rajneeti, and the critically acclaimed The Legend of Bhagat Singh, suggested that we be more passionate about our liberties and expression. He cited the cases where films in India have been banned, or censored often under the threat of violence made by fringe groups. In many cases, like Kamal Hasan’s Vishwaroopam, films are banned even when passed by the CBFC. He said that the film community is a fairly strong and powerful group; but producers, instead of challenging these calls for bans and censorships, immediately buckle. The government defending the peoples’ liberties, he said, is a pipe dream.

Censorship, then, covers a myriad range of issues and concerns, and it’s nearly impossible to give justice to—or even list out—all of them. From the panel’s discussion, however, it seemed clear that Murthy and, to a lesser extent, Taraporewalla, were of the notion that we don’t need censorship. Murthy’s arguments included the idea that more repression would lead to the Streisand Effect. We, according to Murthy—and this included politicians, public, fringe groups, etc.—need to “develop thicker skins”; that we “need to protect ourselves from offense”, and not expect the state to do so. Murthy, in my opinion, explained instances of censorship as aberrations: how imbalanced and immature society, and the political class is, to react to criticisms (to his credit, he also said that no society is ever mature). However, this is problematic on two accounts.

Firstly, the media is deeply political; access to media, and the access to representation itself is imbalanced, warped and contingent (this was made clear by Rajabali’s response to Murthy). So, to suggest that Muslims should not take offense at drawings of the Prophet ignores the complex geopolitical configurations in which debates on Islam are embedded and embroiled in. It is, also, a hegemonic system: Muslims may not have equal access to representation without reductionist debates defining what Islam is and how violent it is (see, as an example, the Intelligence Squared debate ‘Islam is a Religion of Peace’, especially Maajid Nawaz’s interventions). One need only look at ground breaking studies on media and culture industries, like Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Culture Industry or Noam Chomsky’s Media Control, Necessary Illusions and Manufacturing Consent (co-authored by Edward Herman), for an understanding of how imbalanced, misplaced and biased media representation can be.

Secondly, with the advent of the new media, conventional media has come under intense scrutiny. As Murthy pointed out, the new media (which, he claims is us) has outmoded the conventional media; far more Indians now rely on the web for information dissemination, and access to it; express their opinions on it, and so forth. Thus, any critique of media in the 21^st century has to be a discursive critique, not an objective one. With the sheer complexity of the media, this task has become difficult, if not entirely impossible. And formulating a critique of this shall be my concern in the proceeding paragraphs.

II

According to the Internet World Stats,as of June 30, 2012, there are around 137 million internet users in India, which is 11.4% penetration. And it is only a specific demographic group that has access to the internet, and thus, avenues for representation. Critics of the social media often point this out, but my concern here is with the quality of user generated content. Of course, with limited resources, I can hardly construct trends. But this does not change the fact that there is a lot of hatred, anti-Muslim and anti-Dalit sentiments, misogyny out there on the web.

For instance, the recent phenomenon of ‘Internet Hindus’, and steady rise in Hindutva, is a case in point, brilliantly highlighted by Ramachandra Guha in his book Patriots and Partisans. Misogyny is another worrisome trend. Two particular cases come to mind. A report on BBC Hindi revealed how journalist and CNN-IBN news anchor, Sagarika Ghose and women’s activists, Kavita Krishnan and Meena Kandaswamy were victims of sexist and misogynistic attacks online. Ghose, who was abused on Twitter by right wing nationalists, was called a “high class prostitute”; Krishnan was speaking at a Rediff.com online discussion when someone with the handle @RAPIST posted abusive comments, and asked where he could “rape her using a condom”. Despite the harassment, the chat was not moderated and the handle was not blocked by the site administrators. An apology was later issued to Krishnan (I urge you to read Anja Kovacs' post on what Rediff could have done to support Kavita Krishnan against rape threats).

A plea for more censorship in these cases is very problematic, and often unfeasible. For one, what would constitute censorship here: the fact that members of the public are trying to censure women? Or that we, the more liberal, secular voices, want more regulation? Both these questions only deal with the symptoms: the latter is difficult because most abusers use anonymous profiles or handles, which are notoriously difficult to track. Moreover, the fact that the police and law enforcement agencies simply do not care exacerbates things. Tragically, this leads to public intellectuals and journalists, like Ghose and Krishnan, to self-censor. It is unacceptable that any self-respecting activist or writer, irrespective of their gender and political leanings, ignore such slander and threats, or “have thick skins”, as Murthy suggested.

The deeper problem here is that there is no discipline in using the new media and the internet. While we may celebrate anonymity and anarchy on the web, every time a group like Anonymous or Op India hacks a government webpage (merely a cosmetic exercise in my view), there is no deeper or meaningful engagement with the politics of the internet. Most comments on websites like CNN IBN, or NDTV, or Hindustan Times are trolls, often lampooning the “sickular” nature of writers and journalists. If, as Murthy put it, the internet is a mirror to society, then we are, largely, a very awful society, no?

III

The semantics of censorship, then, can configure our debates and discussion in limited ways. Not that this was a major flaw in the panel; it would be ridiculous to assume that. But it is also equally important that we pay attention to the theme of surveillance. Hugely popular in sociological and cultural studies literature, the theme of surveillance and policing gained prominence with the influential works of Michel Foucault, mainly his book, Discipline and Punish. The radical notion proposed by Foucault was using Jeremy Bentham’s ‘panopticon’ as a metaphor for the policing everyone engages in. Thus, peoples’ sexualities, their health, opinions, and other facets come to be policed by soft institutions, like the market, the health and medical industries. It is important to note that Foucault was wary of configuring panopticism and surveillance in rigid binaries; power, for him, is fluid, and exists in micro spaces and “capillaries”, and wherever there is power, there is also resistance to it. Thus, he recommends that we “cut off the head of the king”; that is, look at power configurations as more fluid and complex, rather than emanating from one particular source, like the government or oligarchies.

Following Foucault, surveillance, then, has a lot of ramifications for debates on censorship: one, there is both abject apathy and brutal repression on the part of the state in defining what dissent or offense is, which influences its response: thus, the women at Palghar were arrested promptly, but women who file complaints receive no action altogether. To put it in simple words: ‘society’ should be as much the subject of interrogation, as ‘censorship’ is.

In an earlier post, I had argued that the arrests of Aseem Trivedi and the Jadhavpur University professor, and the government’s crackdown on the protesters in India Gate after the brutal gang-rape and murder incident, are the result of (what I called) a ‘governance of paranoia’. That is, politicians’ and the political class’ fear of dissent is fuelled by the fact that political leadership in the country has become fragile, tenuous, and must reassert, to use philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s terms, “that the emperor is clothed”. In simpler words, the information society we are living in is more opaque than transparent; information is more readily accessible than its credentials. This makes slander a great political tool. Unfortunately, the real victims of slander—Ghose, Krishnan and the millions of other women—are conspicuously left out.

The debate, thus, must focus on not if we need more or less censorship and regulation, but critically examine the dynamics of the same.  That is, we must constantly be wary of censorship/surveillance of freedom of expression, and of censorship/surveillance of our access to information. It is in the latter that we are often failing.

Education and pedagogy are areas where censorship is most operational. One reason for this, perhaps, is because the link between pedagogy and propaganda is most direct: we saw this in Nazi Germany. China is experimenting on this presently; even in India, the teaching (and writing) of history often reasserts moral values rather than a critical interrogation of the same. But who is it that decides what students should study and what they should not? More importantly, on what grounds are these decisions made? This question: of censorship in education, was the one I posed to the panel. Unfortunately, their response was less than adequate.

There are three particular instances I had in mind while framing my question: one, the Yuva Sena-led protests following which the Vice Chancellor of Mumbai University deleted Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey from the English Literature curriculum; two, Mamata Banerjee’s move to delete references to Karl Marx from the state board texts, and banning English language dailies from libraries in West Bengal; third, a more general point, that is, assault against scholars for “offending sentiments” rather than the nature or credibility of their work. The examples of the GoI denying historian Peter Heehs' visa renewal, and the Sambhaji Brigade’s ransacking of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute also come to mind. Of course, I concede that I only mentioned the first example, which informed the responses of the panellists.

Nevertheless, Neville Taraporewalla’s reply, where he said we need to agitate more, and, curiously, that we have failed the Anna Hazare movement, was completely beside the point. (In my opinion, the Anna Hazare movement failed itself; as did Anjum Rajabali, if I remember correctly. Do read this post I wrote during the peak of the movement). Madhavi Divan’s response was more articulate, when she said that we need to speak up against such street censorship. However, Mamata Banerjee’s ban on Marx and the newspapers was not street censorship; it was one initiated by the political executive. So was the detoxifying of syllabi by Arjun Singh in 2004. And, if you bear with me, so is the Delhi University’s ambitious plan of the four year undergraduate programme (FYUP)—and I say so because not only does this overburden students with less-than-required courses, but because the poor quality of the same would fail to instill any sense of criticality in them (see Gautham Bhan's excellent review of the FYUP on Kafila). 

IV

As with most discussions I’ve had the fortune of attending, this one, too was enlightening. Certainly, there were several perspectives I came across, many of which I wasn’t aware of, or never considered. At the same time, I was also fortunate enough to find an engaging forum to express and apply ideas I already had.

On a more personal note, censorship is something about which I have very strong sentiments: not because, as someone aspiring to be in the expressing-ideas vocation, I wish to ensure that the creeping political influence is kept in check. But, because by denying access to newer ideas, and spaces for debate and discussion, I believe that we’re inching closer to a kind of dystopia—or, as Francis Fukuyama would have it, a tale of “two dystopia”—where our opinions and ideas would either lead to persecution, or self-censorship, both of which are unacceptable to me. For, as I mentioned earlier, it’s not only the censorship of opinion/expression that we must be worried about, but also that of our access to informed, free, and credible opinions and ideas. 

Notes & Acknowledgements: For the comments made by the panelists, I have, to the best of my abilities, provided quotes, and summaries of the general gist of the discussions. And I take full responsibility of any misquotes, and am more than willing to change them, if credible corrections are pointed out. My arguments, of course, are my own, and I believe I have done enough to specify the same. 

There are several ideas, some covered by the panel and some not, that I have missed out entirely; for instance, Wikileaks, the on-going trial of Bradley Manning, or the United States government’s incessant surveillance of journalists, and even the debate on copy-right infringement and intellectual property rights (like the Delhi University photocopying case). These examples clearly can, and need to, be addressed by any discussion on censorship. 

I am thankful to Nolina Minj, Malathi Jogi, Natasha Patel and Alex Thomas for their reviews of this essay. Unfortunately, due to certain logistical constraints, I haven't been able to make the all changes they recommended. I shall do my best to do so in the next blog update.

A Culture of Violence

Let's face it: are we really that surprised with the shameless levels of misogyny on display on our TV screens, and on our Twitter and Facebook feeds? I mean, we know it's that bad, and probably, this just scratches the surface (a very large surface, as this post by CNN-IBN illustrates). Of course, what's happening is that the polemic against politicians and the political class in general is strengthening, and so is the sense of repugnance against the same – which has already quite mature in India in the course of the last few years.

After Abhijit Mukherjee's statement on “dented-painted women”, it was the RSS Chief, Mohan Bhagwat's turn, whose statement – that “rapes don’t occur in Bharat, they happen in India” – is at the focus of outrage by the liberal media (A claim which, not very surprisingly, has merit  according to sociologist Ashish Nandy, who sees a connection between modernisation, globalisation and violence against women). Now, I’m not comfortable arguing in the realm of mythology; I've argued elsewhere that doing so deflects, and obfuscates the question and the nature of real violence faced by women. Not only is the recourse to mythology pointless, arguing on the same place with idiots like Bhagwat, or Asaram Bapu (who claimed that the girl “was at fault” as she“did not plead sufficiently” to the rapists or call them “brothers”, for them to stop), or Ramdev (um, do I need to cite anything?), is ultimately futile because a reasoned argument cannot displace their obscurantist logic. I would recommend that you read Sagarika Ghosh's column on the struggle between modernity and such obscurantism in today's edition of Hindustan Times; it articulates this argument far better than the scope of this post.

In my opinion, the RSS (and its lackeys, like the VHP) are among the most regressive, violent, and at the same time, robustly organised ideological instruments in the country today. And so are institutions like Jamaat-e Islami Hind, or Asaram Bapu’s spiritual-commercial enterprise. While, on the one hand, religion per se really has nothing to do with things, insofar as we look at it in the realm of the secular, democratic nation-state; on the other, it is difficult to overlook the fact that religion is among the several governance mechanisms that form the ideological basis of the patriarchal nation-state and moral-economy (I’ve briefly elaborated what I mean by governance in an earlier post).

Women in such conditions are organised in a descending order, based on their supposed “virtues”. At one point, it seems inevitable that these patriarchal ideologues would make such absurd, but politically virulent statements; because such institutionalised and ideological misogyny are required to establish the domain of control in the patriarchal moral-economy. This is not to suggest that men and masculinities are not policed; of course they are. But the paradox is: the misogynist then becomes the embodiment of the hegemon; the basis of defining masculinities (or a masculinity, in particular) is hinged on, and operationalized in, the acts of violence against women. 

While this polemic against the political class is a step in the right direction, and is entirely justified, what it does, I believe, is limits our interrogation of misogyny, patriarchy, sexism and violence – forms of oppression which happen to be far more pervasive, virulent and often, invisible to the public discourse(s) or anti-political polemics. This is the misogyny of the everyday life; a culture of violence, real, symbolic and otherwise, which women from across classes, castes, and spaces face. A kind of violence practically everyone engages in, including, I suspect, some of the polemicists. Now, as tempting as it is, I wouldn’t go as far as calling this hypocrisy. ‘Hypocrisy’ would mean double standards, and at least an element of volition.  Sure, a lot of politicians are hypocrites (a professional requirement these days, in my opinion), but the kind of double-sidedness I’m talking about is incredibly nuanced, invisible and pathological (and, most importantly, not seen in dichotomies); it is embedded in our language, it informs our responses, colours our perspectives. Political misogyny is, to use a cliché, only the tip of the iceberg.

Snehalata Gupta, writing for Kafila, puts forth a pertinent and critical perspective in her discussion on patriarchy in the classroom. Gupta, who is a teacher at a co-ed in Delhi, recounts an incident when one of her 'difficult' male students, all of 16 or 17 years, suggested that she wear a dupatta in class. Her not doing so, explained the boy, “embarrassed” him and his male classmates – something she termed a "blatant show of patriarchal arrogance". The incident, in my opinion, is ubiquitous and far more common than just this one post. There are certain elements that I'd like to borrow from Gupta's reflexive post in an attempt to understand what I mean by the pervasiveness of patriarchy: namely, the male gaze, peer group socialisation and the operationalization of patriarchy. 

The ‘male gaze’ is an overused term in sociological lexicon, but in popular discourse, it is very rarely understood. Not only does the gaze have a policing or a predatory function (the Foucauldian surveillance), it is also an articulation of the misogyny I was harping on about. The term ‘objectifying women’, as overused as it is in our references to Bollywood and “item numbers”, is more than just reducing them to objects of sexualised desires (there is a variety of literature, for instance, that argues for an agentic function in such objectification; most of the discussions on The Dirty Picture, for instance, encapsulate this). The gaze then is, as I mentioned before, an operationalization of misogyny; a brutal way of policing: (a) sexualities, especially of women (and men) exercising sexual freedom; (b) the process of socialization, which essentially indoctrinates children into patriarchy, as Snehalata Gupta’s post so clearly illustrates; and finally, (c) of ensuring that the patriarchal moral-economy functions through such surveillance mechanisms: the gaze itself being one, and the more well-known examples are what Shuddhabrata Sengupta has called “eminent Bharatiya moustachioed misogynists”.

I've seen such misogyny being operational in the last few years of my schooling. There wasn't, to the best of my knowledge, any serious or untoward incident; but what many of us consider trivial, are actually very strong symptoms of the kind of pervasiveness of misogyny that I am trying to explicate in this essay. For instance, I recall vividly how the consumption of porn, and what kind of porn, defined the sort of male you were; girls were encoded on the basis on their bodies; the classes were segregated almost with religious zeal (I was in a Catholic school, yes); any casual interaction with the opposite sex, if not an opportunity to ‘score’ (I use the term despite its value-laden nature) was, well, looked at as a wasted opportunity. Sure, a lot of this can be called a part of growing up, or adolescent fantasies – something many have indulged in, as well. But there is a problem in trivialising misogyny or rape, especially under the adage of “boys will be boys” or such codswallop. Michele Weldon's article on al-Jazeera, for instance, discusses the way in which community efforts, the family and cultural shifts can prevent sexual violence, in the aftermath of the rape of a sixteen year-old girl in Ohio by two local football stars. What was staggering, she writes, was the way the perpetrators bragged on about them violently subjugating the girl. In her analysis, Weldon writes that “no mother wants her son to grow up to be a rapist, just as no mother wants her daughter to be raped”. However, she concedes that her naive notion of the family being able to prevent sexual violence is flawed; a scepticism I share as well, after having met many amiable parents whose kids were, to put it politely, “difficult”. The production of misogyny and violence, therefore, is not localized to one site; peer groups, class stratification, the media, etc. form a network of the patriarchal moral-economy. Any alternatives focusing on rectifying faults in family and/or education are problematic because it assumes that there could be alternative; an alternative that requires the destabilization of the patriarchal moral-economy, of which socialization and education is but a microcosm.

That said, I also have a problem with our excessive emphasis on misogyny, which by definition is a strong dislike for women. The female object, therefore, is the central focus of misogynistic discourses, and of those trying to interrogate it. However, the fact that many, including myself to an extent, have taken for granted is the gender dichotomy implicit our critiques. Many have argued that there is a continuum of gendered violence of which gays, lesbians, transgender people are as much victims as are women (again, a fissured category). This is something the polemicists have ignored completely; except perhaps, the token Gay Pride marches. ‘Misogyny’, then, is a limiting term insofar as we assume there is a stable category of a biological female. Violence against women is very, very real; but so is the violence against people labelled as ‘sexual minorities’. Following Judith Butler’s highly influential idea of gender performativity, it is possible to argue that violence is indeed located in a gendered continuum; a network of power relations among social groups, relations of dominance and subversion. But this happens to be a domain that is entirely absent in our public discourses and polemics; sure, there has been a lot of discussion on homosexuality after the decriminalization of Section 377 in 2009, or in the collective efforts of many civil society organisations fighting for equal rights of gays, lesbians and transgender people. But these discussions are seldom articulated in the space marked off as ‘violence against women’, or ‘justice for rape victims’.

Women aren't the only victims of patriarchal violence; the culture of violence is virulent, and operates on many different terrains; victimizes many different people; and thus, as a public, already galvanised, I feel it is imperative that we adopt a stance that does not exclude other marginal voices. However, our failure and, I’m afraid, our reluctance, to have done so reflects a deeper problem; a problem of the culture of violence; a problem that we must identify and address. Any interrogation of this culture of violence, of this institutionalised misogyny, of the patriarchal moral-economy, requires a sustained engagement with these problems, and our first step in this direction is to acknowledge that the problem runs far, far deeper than just politicians, and right-wing, fundamentalist outfits.

Acknowledgements: First of all, to Natasha Patel, for patiently reading this, as well as many other drafts in the past, for humouring me and never faltering on feedback; to Tasneem Kakal, for her pertinent comments (some of them on my bad grammar); and to Shubhra Rishi, who I cannot seem to thank enough.

A plea for positive cynicism. Oh, and a happy new year, too.

I spent the last 45 minutes looking for a 1.5 liter bottle of Coke. Shops around here, for some reason, are loyal to Thums Up. Of course, to the average Badlapur resident, it doesn't quite make a difference; especially tonight, as many people aren't that pedantic about which soft drink they're going to mix their alcohol with – Thums Up is the preferred one, I hear. No wonder.

Nevertheless, my frantic, and not to mention pedantic, attempts led to one tiny shop which did sell Coke. In Twitter lexicon, this warrants the hash-tag #firstworldproblems. And now, as I stare at the half-empty glass, waiting for some relatives to pop over, I'm contemplating the past year. 

It's been a tradition of sorts, for me, to write a cynical rant every New Year’s eve for the last two years. The first time, I was alone at home, with no alcohol; the year after, I had a little too much alcohol in me, and a lot of repugnance. This time, right now, I mean, I'm sober. Very disillusioned, and undergoing what may, in the jargon of social sciences, be termed as an epistemological crisis. While the rest of the country's either preparing for a New year's party (except the Indian Army. Such honourable fuckers, these guys are, I tell you) or kicking up a big fuss about Honey Singh's party in some hotel in Gurgaon that I can't remember. 

You guessed it right, this post is about the larger issue that has gripped the nation for the last few weeks, at least: the question of violence against women – a quilted discourse, pinned by the brutal gang-rape and murder of a 23-year old physiotherapy student in Delhi. I was angry when I read about it, when I read about the sheer brutality of the incident, and a host of other such incidents; I’m still angry, frustrated even – which is one of the reasons why I haven’t been able to be my usual cynical self in dismissing the protests in the aftermath; protests that were met with an equal brutality meted out the Indian state, especially the Delhi police. 2011 had seen protests too, led by the messianic figure of Anna Hazare (who has, predictably, demanded death penalty for the rapists); heck, there were cosmetic protests even in Bombay itself, just after the incident. But when I saw people, who are very well my peers, in the tear gas-infested streets, wet and beaten, I realised, like Sam Gamgee in The Two Towers, that there is good worth fighting for. Sure, I disagree with the calls for castration and death penalties – these demands are fascist; but so was the way in which their voices were brutally crushed by the state.

Of course, I’ve said the very same things before, and I wouldn’t want to bother you with any more of it. But there’s one thing that has been rather over-powering, something which is bothering me for quite some time now; the cause, if you will, of my current epistemological crisis. My “presumed superior knowledge and intelligence”, as someone succinctly pointed out, has failed me. Another implied that I was “intellectually bankrupt”. Of course, I’m not taking these claims seriously; I have that much faith in my training. But truth remains, despite my intelligence, and my impressive bibliography (or so I like to think), I feel utterly disillusioned; any intelligible comment (again, or so I like to think) gets drowned in the din and clamour of popular discourse. Of course, it’s a different thing that I, following the prolific and verbose Justice Katju, consider most people to be idiots (unlike him, I’m sceptical of numbers). Truth is, there is no intelligence in public discourse today: we’ve got a media that manufactures conscience; a political class rooted in anti ideology, hypocrisy, apathy; a public that is very good at making emphatic calls; and, of course, Arnab Goswami, without whom, verily, our nation is doomed.

We’ve witnessed a culture that displayed a morbid fascination with death – the vast (and shameless, if you ask me) outpouring of eulogies after Thackeray’s death (I mean, did you see/hear Arnab Goswami weep during Bal Thackeray’s funeral?), and the celebration, literally so, after Kasab’s hanging. In other news, the fourth anniversary of 26/11 was a dull affair; this time, surprisingly, they hadn’t barricaded the memorial at VT (Kasab was hung days after this, actually).

So, where am I going with this? Yes, I’m bitter, repugnant and cynical (and, surprisingly, sober). Maybe, people commenting on my presumed intelligence and intellectual bankruptcy are right. I have a friend who, of late, has been bothered by the fact that I don’t have any clear political leanings. “You’re not a capitalist, nor a socialist; neither are you right-wing, nor an atheist. What…are you?” My answer usually involves complex sociological jargon which, actually, doesn’t quite amount to anything substantial. But tonight, I think I may have an answer for him. I am a positive cynic.

Partly, because one of my friends on Twitter commented that no one else he knows really lived up to their Twitter handle (something I found incredibly flattering; thanks, Bob!). But mostly because positive cynicism, as an intellectual space, really sums up my epistemological leanings: which is, well, disillusionment (that also happens to be my current existential profile). By positive cynicism, I mean a condition wherein I avoid both the naivety and radicalisation of political views. Sure, I punch holes in people’s arguments, and alternatives, more so; but that is an important job; a mission to civilize, as Will McAvoy of HBO’s The Newsroom put it. I’m not backing away from taking political stances, either, mind you. If I think castrations are not the answer, I believe I have sufficiently defended that stance. I’m not in the vocation of giving solutions, either. My training in anthropology doesn’t quite allow for that so easily. But I may be able to tell you where an intervention would fail, and where it might succeed. You see, that’s the brilliance of anthropology. That it’s rooted in a deeper problem, a constant epistemological crisis; that it blends scepticism, analytical rigour, scientific method, abstraction – all disparate elements, if you observe from afar – so brilliantly. Yes, I’m disillusioned by the narrow confines of traditional academia; but that’s changing now; the sociological imagination has become more diverse, more analytical, more empirical. And that is something I am looking to be a part of. That is where I see positive cynicism heading. A critical sphere, akin to the Frankfurt School’s endeavours (apologies for the umpteen references).

Ah, well, I’ve said too much. And I’ve realised that this post isn’t nearly half as repugnant and bitter as the previous two New Year’s eve ones. The relatives are about to arrive soon and I’m on my second glass of Coke now. I think I need something stronger. Alcohol does wonders for disillusionments, I’ve discovered. Let’s see if it has the same effect on epistemological crises. The world didn’t end, and we’re going to have to make do with this one. Oh, and before I forget, happy New Year, and have a brilliant 2013 (#sarcasmintended).

"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'.