Analyse

Women in India demand safety even at night

Gie Goris

29 August 2024 • 22 minutes reading time

Every day, 86 cases of rape are reported in India. Usually no one crows about it, but sometimes the outrage over so much gender violence erupts. In recent weeks, women flocked to the streets en masse to demand their 'right to the night'. What is going on?

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It could have been small reports on the inside pages of Indian newspapers. On the night of 9 August, a 31-year-old postgraduate medical student was raped and murdered at R.G. Kar Hospital in Kolkata, West Bengal. On 13 August, in Badlapur, Maharashtra, two pre-school children were sexually abused by cleaning staff in the school toilets. On 18 August, a 20-year-old (dalit) nurse was raped by the director of a private hospital in Moradabad, Uttar Pradesh. On 21 August, 11 girls were found to have been sexually abused during a summer camp at a school in Krishnagiri, Tamil Nadu. On 26 August, a 19-year-old nursing student was found unconscious in Ratnagiri district, Maharashtra. According to initial reports, she was drugged and raped by the auto rickshaw driver who was supposed to carry her home.

Due to a confluence of circumstances, the rape and murder in Kolkata became front-page news (see box), making every sexual offence in India breaking news in August. 'But everyone, from perpetrators to political leaders, is counting on neither media nor public to sustain that attention,' says Vrinda Grover in an interview with The News Minute. 'My experience is that after a while, only two people are left: the victim and her lawyer. Therefore, media should continue to report on this and also bring follow-up stories.'

X-ray of a scandal

The victim who was raped and murdered on the night of 9 August at R.G. Kar Hospital in Kolkata, West Bengal, was a 31-year-old postgraduate medical student. She was taking a rest break during a 36-hour shift, but could not get to the place she otherwise used for it, so she went to a classroom. There she was raped and eventually murdered.

The outrage certainly has to do with the widespread realisation that night-time medical care can be vital for everyone. Moreover, the victim (we do not use her name because it is against the law in India, although many Indian media do not abide by it) was not on the streets at night and was not engaged in a complicated relationship with the perpetrator. In other words, she was an "ideal victim" with whom everyone could and wanted to identify.

Very quickly, moreover, the rumour circulated that this was not a "vulgar" sexual rape, but a murder to prevent the victim from carrying out systemic corruption on R.G. Kar. That rumour got extra fuel when Sandip Ghosh, the director of the hospital cum medical college, resigned three days after the rape. It became even more vindictive when Ghosh got a new appointment as headmaster of the Calcutta National Medical College the same day. As a result, anger also began to turn against the state government and state Chief Minister Mamata Bannerjee. This, incidentally, prompted the BJP, which is in power in India but not really gaining a foothold in West Bengal, to organise politicised protests.

Gender violence starts with gender inequality

I have always been reluctant to write about highly mediatised rape cases in India because they so easily feed a comfortable sense of moral superiority in Europe. This was evident, for example, in the Nirbhaya rape case in Delhi, a brutal gang rape in a moving bus on 16 December 2012. During an interview on Terzake about it at the time, I was asked: 'What is wrong in Indian culture that men behave so violently towards women?' I had fortunately looked up the figures of reported rapes in Belgium that afternoon, so I could immediately refute the assumption - that sexual violence against women was a typical Indian phenomenon. Sexual violence against women is not a typical Indian phenomenon.

But when does restraint become complicity? Climate journalist Stella Paul, one of a dozen or so women activists I contacted for this article, is at least pleased with my intention to write a piece on the topic. 'My family was not happy about my birth, as they were hoping for a boy. When I was a year and a half, I contracted diphtheria (or croup, a deadly infectious disease, ed.) and my family destroyed the medicines that could have easily cured me. I survived only thanks to my mother because she found a doctor willing to perform an ultimate surgery. I have lived with a scar on my throat ever since, a tangible testimony to what our toxic, patriarchal system does to me.'

Writing about the R.G. Kar rape case would be incomplete if it were not also about Reclaim the Night, the nocturnal protests through which women across India demand their right to be safe at work, on the streets and in their homes even after dark. 'What we are witnessing today is an unprecedented, decentralised and mass uprising led by women,' Aparna Ghosh, a committed teacher, responded from Kolkata. 'The outrage is translating into action, and not just in Kolkata where the young doctor was raped and murdered. This is a movement that is bringing women to the streets all over India, which is in stark contrast to the protests after the Nirbhaya rape case in 2012. Then it was all more confined to Delhi where the crime had taken place.' That case got a lot of media attention here too.

But the problem runs incredibly deep. On August 21, The Wire reported: 'No fewer than 151 MPs in the national parliament or state parliaments have lawsuits pending against them for crimes against women. This is according to a survey of a total of 4693 statements.' If gender violence is so common even among people's representatives, it should come as no surprise that so little is being done to combat it structurally. 'As long as perpetrators of sexual crimes have political power, you can hardly expect the law to instil fear in other sexual predators,' Stella Paul sums up.

But it is not just about brutal violence.

The Global Gender Gap Index 2022, published by the World Economic Forum, places India at position 135 out of 140 countries. The index measures economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and longevity and political empowerment achieved. By 2022, less than one in four adult women in India was active in formal or informal employment, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) found. In fact, that 24% is a decline from 1990, when it was 27.8%. According to the Indian government, that figure suddenly jumped to 37% female labour force participation late last year, but that increase appears to have been achieved entirely by counting women who are not in paid employment.

According to the Status of Women Report 2015, the result of a 2013 government order, that female labour force participation figure hides quite a few disparities between them. In urban India, only 15.5% of women participate in the labour market, compared to 30% in rural India. Among Muslim women, only 10% are professionally active and among "working" women, only 4% have formal status, including social protection. And of course, gender stereotypes play a role in study and career choices. Medical courses have more female students than male, while girls make up only 26% of engineering students.

The opportunities of dalit women (dalits are the formerly untouchable caste groups) in the labour market are especially limited due to continuing prejudice and persistent practices of untouchability, including in the cities, which usually only allow them to get into dirty and underpaid jobs. The same report, incidentally, makes it very clear that gender inequality is much broader than mere income inequality or low labour force participation: 'In India, economic, political, religious, social and cultural institutions are largely controlled by men. Dominant patriarchal values are reinforced and legitimised by a combination of family, caste, community and religion.'

‘Wat we vandaag meemaken, is een ongekende, gedecentraliseerde en massale opstand onder leiding van vrouwen.’

Girls are unwanted burden

According to the report, this leads to a culture where "women are worshipped as goddesses while being murdered for their dowry. The figures reported by the government on gender violence show that there is no improvement in that area for the time being. The number of formally registered complaints of violence against women rose from 320,000 in 2015 to 428,278 in 2021.

One of the most visible forms of gender violence is gender selection before birth or discriminatory treatment after birth. Documentary filmmaker Nupur Basu made No Country for Young Girls about it for the BBC in 2008. 'The selective abortion of female foetuses is illegal in India but is practised on an industrial scale. That practice is the result of a society that worships sons and rejects daughters and is made possible by the involvement of the medical community, the police, the judiciary and politicians,' she said in a response to the recent violence.

The latest census in 2011 found that gender discrimination was responsible for a completely skewed composition of the population. For every thousand boys under the age of six, there are only 914 girls in India. Boys are preferred because they have to take care of their elderly parents later and because they continue the family line. Girls are often seen as an unwanted burden, especially with soaring dowry expectations to offer their in-laws.

Moreover, after marriage, girls move to those in-laws, so investment in education or welfare may also be presented as a "loss" that benefits only the other family. This partly explains why, 10 years ago, 35% of all Indian girls and women were illiterate, a rate among the highest in the world.

"Women are expected to endure all kinds of atrocities - from insults and domestic violence to rape and child marriage - in silence, because if and when they break that silence, the consequences are huge," says the Status of Women Report 2015. This is also the belief of Rukmini Rao, a leading women's rights activist from Hyderabad. 'Dowry deaths (murders of women whose in-laws think they brought too low a dowry, ed.), acid attacks (attacks with caustic acid, ed.), honour killings (so-called honour killings, often linked to caste in India, ed.), we have become so used to it by now that this violence no longer makes the news,' she said during an interview in October.

Violence in the plural

Violence against women is on the rise in India, says Nupur Basu. Latest figures show that more than 32,000 rapes are reported every year. That's 86 per day. In Belgium, there are 13. Add to that the unreported acts, the many other forms of online and offline abuse, domestic violence and marital rape, and you get an idea of the scale of the problem. 'In India, gender violence takes very different forms and the societal response to all these crimes is selective, depending on caste and class.'

‘Gendergeweld is in India wel algemeen, maar niet veralgemeenbaar.’

Nupur Basu

'Gender violence is never an isolated problem in India,' Vandana Gopikumar also said during a talk in Chennai last month. She is an initiator and director of The Banyan, an initiative that puts homelessness and mental health care for single women on the agenda. 'In India, much of life is defined by social roles and these are linked to gender, class and especially caste. The lower women are in the caste hierarchy, the more vulnerable they become to discrimination, to insults, to real violence.'

'Gender violence is common but not generalisable in India,' is Nupur Basu's view. 'It is a reality that takes different forms and is responded to differently depending on the caste and class of perpetrators or victims.' This is also the view of Sujatha Rao, who headed the federal government's Department of Health and Family Welfare and in 2017 published the book Do We Care? India's Health System: 'Patriarchal norms and values are found across religions, castes and classes, but uneducated women and women from lower castes do face heavier violence and more abuse.'

Nupur Basu: 'Women from all castes and classes share their second-class status in this society, so women from higher castes or classes are also vulnerable. However, violence against women from lower castes, and even rapes of girls and women belonging to dalits or adivasis (tribal communities, ed.), are so common that they no longer cause a fuss. Combined with widespread misogyny, such caste discrimination also results in a staggeringly low conviction rate.'

Yet caste and gender discrimination does not function in the same way everywhere. In southern states such as Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, for example, women have gained much greater access to proper education, which means that their voices also carry much more weight politically. 'That makes for a more gender-safe environment,' responds Sujatha Rao, 'but that is not all. Caste violence remains significant, even in the south. And that always translates into violence on women.'

The ideal victim

In the days after the Nirbhaya rape case in 2012, Mohan Bhagwat, the supreme leader of the Hindu nationalist mass movement RSS, let it be noted that 'crimes against women occur only in India, not in Bharat (the Sanskrit name for India, ed.)'. It is the westernised lifestyle of Indian cities that leads to violence against women, Bhagwat felt, 'while the values and norms of traditional Hindu Bharat are all respect and reverence for women'.

Bhagwat's assertion was striking, but not exceptional. In 2020, the Karnataka High Court released a man accused of raping his workmate because the woman had fallen asleep after the act of violence. 'That is not fitting for an Indian woman and it is not the way our women react when they are dishonoured,' Judge Krishna S. Dixit found.

In a sharp opinion piece for The Economic & Political Weekly in 2021, lawyer Disha Wadekar wrote: 'By arguing time and again that a victim was "a woman who respected herself", or "a chaste Indian woman", or "an honourable and virtuous woman", the image of the ideal victim was created, the one who deserves justice.' Wadekar argues that the ideal victim is measured by standards that date back to the age-old precepts of Manu, the legislator who also established the division of society into castes. 'What virtuous people describe as a good woman is a woman who is in control of her thoughts, words and body and is never unfaithful,' Manu wrote.

The consequence of that approach to perpetrators and victims is that it is almost impossible for women from oppressed castes to be seen as "ideal victims". Wadekar refers to the 1972 rape case of the tribal girl Mathura, in which the Maharashtra High Court initially acquitted the perpetrators because the victim was "promiscuous and used to sex, had not raised an alarm or called for help and no signs of physical violence were found". In the same vein is the observation that outrage is much louder and more widespread when low-caste men sexually assault a woman from a higher caste than when caste relations are reversed.

In cases of sexual violence against children, the vast majority of reports reveal that the perpetrator is a close relative of the victim. This family reality ensures that in the vast majority of child sexual assault or rape reports, the perpetrator is a close relative of the victim. As a result, there are virtually no reports from higher castes or classes to mitigate social harm and disgrace. 'It is the poor and low castes who are fighting this battle for all of us,' activist Trisha Shetty remarked during a programme on Al Jazeera on August 23.

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Responding to violence with education

In Kolkata, and subsequently in numerous other Indian cities, women took to the streets to protest against ongoing violations of their rights to safety, own choices and physical integrity. Doctors and other medical personnel laid off work and media devoted extra space to gender violence. The scale is larger, but the protest does recall the demonstrations in Delhi in 2012 and other notorious rape cases before and after.

According to Sujatha Rao, those previous protests changed nothing for women. 'Nothing has happened to make women's workplaces safe. As more women go to college and demand their individual rights, they also become more vulnerable to the sexual predatory behaviour of men who often act under the influence of alcohol and pornography.'

Urvashi Butalia, founder and director of feminist publishing house Zubaan, nuanced that. Zubaan published six landmark studies on sexual violence in South Asia (Body of Evidence), so Butalia knows very well how painful and horrifying the reality is. Nevertheless, she said during an interview in October last year: 'It is true that statistics indicate that year after year, more violent acts or crimes against women are being reported to the police. This simultaneously shows a growing problem, but also an increasing debate about it. There is an ongoing problem with violence against women, but that does not make India the worst country for women. After all, some really positive things have happened in the past few decades. Just look at the commitment to equal representation for women in panchayats, or village councils. As a result, today there are almost one and a half million women co-managing their local communities.'

The observation that women experience more violence as they claim more freedom should not, according to the women of Reclaim the Night, lead to the kind of recommendations the state government in West Bengal came out with shortly after the rape case. In particular, the recommendation that women should be assigned to night shifts as little as possible finds no mercy. In an open letter dated 22 August, the women of Reclaim The Night respond that such a thing is impracticable. 'Because how are you going to replace midwives? Or female doctors and nurses who are predominantly female? Moreover, it is the exact opposite of what women are demanding - structural interventions to safely exercise their right to work. On the contrary, ensure that there are safe places for women as well as men to rest during their long night shifts. How difficult can that be?" they ask.

'On the other hand,' responds Aparna Ghosh, 'I do not believe that increasingly harsh punishments, let alone the death penalty, protect women from sexual violence'. The other feminist pioneers I contacted also oppose the populist call for swift justice and the death penalty for perpetrators. 'The four perpetrators of the 2012 Nirbhaya rape were sentenced to death. That sentence was effectively carried out in 2020. But the deterrent effect of those executions was zero,' says Vrinda Grover. 'The death penalty only serves to score political points, not to address the underlying problem.'

When asked what should be done, the answer is strikingly common: more and better education, especially sex education. For Rukmini Rao, it is a real cri du coeur: 'In ancient India, sexuality in all its forms was celebrated as a source of pleasure and life. Just look at the images on the temple of Khajurao and on so many other, small and large temples in India. Today, however, sexuality is taboo in schools and families are too prudish to talk about sex. Children do not know their own bodies. Girls are kept in the dark about menstruation. Young men grow up separated from girls and form an image of sexuality purely on the basis of pornography that is increasingly and cheaply available on mobile devices. Women are reduced to sexual objects, men become more violent.'

Vandaag is seksualiteit taboe op school, en zijn de gezinnen te preuts om het over seks te hebben.

An end to the abuse of power

Sujatha Rao supports the call for better sex education, but thinks even that is not enough. 'There is also an urgent need for better enforcement of existing laws and a faster and more effective justice system. But also more and better career opportunities for girls, more belief in equal rights and an accelerated effort to achieve a gender-equal society.'

Repression never suffices as an answer, believes Rukmini Rao. 'Feminist action is not limited to protest against individual violence, but also focuses on better access for girls to quality education, nutritious midday meals at school, safe mobility, resistance to alcoholism. The horror of gender violence has lasted for centuries in India. Yet as feminists, men and women, we continue to fight for change. We want new and better laws AND for them to be better enforced. And we want an end to men's abuse of power over women, which is what sexual violence ultimately is. The government must finally take responsibility for this.'

Gie Goris schreef INDIA. De onzichtbare gigant (432 blzn, uitgeverij Lannoo) dat dit voorjaar verscheen.

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