A decade since the gang-rape and murder of a student on a bus shocked India, state spending to combat violence against women and girls is just not adequate. A fund named after the 23-year-old woman who was raped and killed in 2012 is low on resources and under-utilised, found the “Towards Violence Free Lives For Women” report, noting that a rape takes place every 15 minutes in the country of 1.3 billion. During the coronavirus pandemic, Indian women have suffered increased violence, job losses and taken on more unpaid carework. Many women, who have been forced to stay at home due to lockdown measures, have been cut off from support services and have suffered at the hands of abusive partners. Indian government set up the Nirbhaya Fund to “enhance the safety and security of women” after the bus gang rape spotlighted India’s appalling record on gender-based crimes, but gender justice has still not been met. Shakti Mills rape case I’d like to put more light on, On 22 August 2013, less than a year after the furore that followed the gang rape in Delhi, and after the Verma Committee report led to a change in the rape law, a twenty-two-year-old photojournalist and her colleague were accosted by a group of men when they went to take pictures of an abandoned textile mill in Central Mumbai, a stone’s throw away from a busy railway station. The woman was gang-raped while her colleague was beaten up. Luckily for her, even though traumatized—the rapists filmed the act—she had her wits about her. After the rapists walked with her and her colleague to the nearby Mahalakshmi railway station, where they issued dire threats that if they were to report the incident to the police, the videos of the rape would be released on social media, the woman decided to go immediately to the nearest hospital to get a medical examination. Changes in the law after 2013 established that any hospital, private or public, would have to attend to a rape survivor, report to the police and conduct a medical examination. Earlier, only public hospitals could do this. The fact that she was a journalist, that her seniors came immediately to her aid as did other journalists, helped ensure that the police did not delay in moving on the case. The issue that I’m very much concerned about here is that we have been time and again ensured that government and other administrative organs are taking full responsibility for the safety of the women of this country? But where is this safe environment we are talking about, practically is it even existing?
These incidents that I have further talked about will it make it explicitly clear as to why I believe there’s no safety that can be assured to a woman in India and it is absolutely not easy to be a woman in our country anymore. The recent news that has made all of us go cold has taken place in the National Capital itself, 26-year-old woman was stabbed to death by her husband, 40, at a crowded market place in Delhi’s Rohini area on Saturday (April 10) on the suspicion of her having an affair with another person. The man also threatened people as some passers by tried to intervene in the matter and save the woman. The woman was seen lying on a road’s side in a pool of blood. Her husband tried to escape from the spot with the blood stained knife in his hand, but was chased by police. This man had the audacity to stab her 25 times with a knife that too in broad daylight and the more unfortunate and darker side of it is although people were witnessing the incident, nobody came forward to help the woman rather people have been seen recording the entire incident, this brings us to a very simple question, “Is humanity absolutely dead in our country? Is there any mercy left for the girls and women of this country?”. Talking about the awareness amongst the citizens of our country to take a stand in support for the victim, the condition is very pathetic. Where even the media which is eventually called the fourth pillar of democracy is showing no mercy on the victim, what can we expect from the normal public. With reference to this I’d like to mention about a case where worse still, a reporter from some newspaper climbed sixteen floors of a private hospital, where the woman was being treated, to try and get into her room to interview her. She was stopped by the police guarding the floor. What was the necessity of this kind of intrusion into the survivor’s privacy? This has been the tragedy of the Indian media in the twenty-first century. It fails repeatedly to be sensitive to the problems that rape survivors face after they have been sexually assaulted and brutalized. The story of what happens after a rape exposes the fault lines in the implementation of laws and in the working of our criminal justice system. In the Shakti Mills case, the survivor was an informed young woman who also had some support. And yet, what she faced in the process was traumatic. Multiply this account thousands of times over, and you get a sense of the horror that poor and marginalized women go through.
Talking about the very recent case in Jharkhand, The Steel City of Jamshedpur was shook by the recent incident that took place in the area called Kadma where a man killed his wife, his two daughters and their tuition teacher who happens to be a female. From the initial probe it was found that all four were killed with an iron dumbbell. The children we just 11 and 15 years, What could be the reason behind this gruesome brutality? If a woman is not even safe in her own house, where is she expected to go? What is she expected to do if the predator turns out to be someone so close to her, the husband itself? Just as levels of violence against women have risen, lockdowns and other movement restrictions have made it more difficult for survivors to report abuse and seek help.
Talking about the rape culture in India, women are being treated as objects, being beaten up, killed on the roads, being raped, gang raped and what not. To go back to one of the events that happened last year, On September 14, 2020 a 19-year-old Dalit (formerly “Untouchable”) woman was tortured and allegedly gang raped by four upper caste men in Hathras district in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Her body was severely brutalized; her tongue was torn, limbs fractured, and spinal cord damaged. The woman succumbed to her injuries in a hospital in New Delhi a fortnight later. As shocking as the bestiality of the rapists is the abject failure or rather, the reluctance of the Uttar Pradesh police to follow due process. Apparently, police accused the woman of lying, refused to register a rape complaint, and delayed taking the victim to a hospital for treatment. A police official even claimed that no rape took place as semen was not found on the victim’s body. Apparently in a bid to destroy evidence, the victim’s body was swiftly cremated in the dead of the night by the police. Family members were neither allowed to see her body nor to be present at the cremation. Sexual violence against women is pervasive in India. These figures are likely to be just the tip of the iceberg. Only a fraction of women who are raped file a complaint. Most victims prefer to remain silent because of the social stigma attached to rape. It is not uncommon for the victim to be blamed or for aspersions to be cast on her character. A single mother who was gang-raped in Kolkata in 2012 was stigmatized as a sex worker. On December 16, 2012 a woman was gang-raped in a moving bus in Delhi. The rapists penetrated her with an iron rod, rupturing her intestines. The gruesome violence she was subjected to did not stop people from asking why she was out at night with her boyfriend. Did she invite the sexual assault? Why are questions always posed on the woman or the girl as to what was she wearing when she was raped, what caste is she, with whom was she at that time, why was she out so late at night and what not. Also silencing of victims or witnesses is not uncommon should a victim or her family dare to pursue justice through the courts. A woman who was raped at Unnao in 2018 was burned alive by five men, including her rapists, a year later as she made her way to a court hearing.
Women aren’t safe in India. Pick up a newspaper or randomly switch to any news channel on your television set, there is a good chance you’ll come across yet another case of sexual harassment of a woman, a minor or even an infant. In such times, you expect the people in power to take crucial steps towards women safety or at the least be sensitive while speaking about the horrifying cases that surface every day. Instead, they end up justifying the sexual harassment with their bizarre and clueless explanations while some simply choose to blame the victim. The kind of remarks these so called politicians make on the victim are even more shameful, Days after the victim of the Hathras gang rape passed away, Surendra Singh, a legislator of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party in the Uttar Pradesh state assembly, said that “such incidents [like rape] can be stopped only with sanskar” adding that “it’s the duty of all mothers and fathers to imbibe good values in their daughters and bring them up in cultured environments.” This isn’t the first time a politician has made a foot-in-the-mouth statement. Sexist, misogynist, and insensitive statements go hand in hand with some politicians in our country. It is this mindset that needs to go, Putting the onus on women to prevent sexual violence is not just absurd but dangerous.
“Will you marry her?” asked the Chief Justice of India to a man who is accused of repeatedly raping a minor. The accused stalked the victim on her way to school, gagged and tied her whilst he raped her, threatened to throw acid on her face if she spoke up and continued to rape her several times thereafter. The facts only came to light when she tried to commit suicide and her mother stopped her. She and her mother tried to file a police complaint, but the mother of the accused stopped them promising her son would marry her when she turned 18. It is shocking that the Chief Justice would think it appropriate to offer marriage as a solution to the horrific criminal behaviour without even considering the rights of the girl. However, this is symptomatic of a deeper malaise in the system when men in power continue to impose suffocating rules and policies, pronounce misogynistic and sexist statements, totally ignoring the rights of women, treating them as objects. The idea that one needs to marry one’s rapist as though that justifies the act and is the right solution is atrocious. The idea that one needs to register oneself at the police station so that one’s movements can be tracked for one’s safety is equivalent to being voluntarily surveilled and there is no backing down from there on. In a way, we are being asked to give up our rights with regards to freedom of choice and movement in return for protection. What if we choose not to register ourselves or marry a rapist? Does it mean that the State has no responsibility to ensure our safety? Does it mean that we will be blamed should we get trolled, attacked, stalked, assaulted and raped? Curtailing a girl or woman’s freedom in any way, warning girls and women to not go out alone or to dress and behave in a culturally appropriate, male-mandated way cannot prevent sexual violence. Rather, we need to din into boys and men that aggression is not masculinity and being macho is not “cool.” It is only by tackling misogynistic mindsets among men and women and dismantling the patriarchal aspects of the sanskar that some people uphold that sexual violence can be tackled.
Changes in the law after 2013 established that any hospital, private or public, would have to attend to a rape survivor, report to the police, and conduct a medical examination. Earlier, only public hospitals were allowed to do this.