Rape is rape, in India as in Bharat

By Swapan Dasgupta

In the late-1980s, and for a time between 1987 and 1991, Devi Lal became a prominent player on the national scene. Deeply rooted in the politics and rural ethos of Haryana, he was known for his earthy wisdom and disdain for all things that didn’t fit into his ‘kisan’ experience. A particular target of his derision was that section of the country that has come to be known as ‘India’—as opposed to ‘Bharat’. The true representative of this land, Devi Lal used to say, were those whose addresses would be prefixed with the name of the VPO—Village Post Office.

It was an interesting formulation and perhaps something that even Mahatma Gandhi with his utopian notions of self-sufficient village communities would have tacitly approved. The problem was that it left a lot of people (including myself) with a feeling of being second-class citizens. Urban India may well be the Devil’s workshop but it happens to be the only place many Indians can call home.

Nor is it accurate to regard rural India as the natural epicentre of virtue and holiness. In his lifetime, Babasaheb Ambedkar was eclipsed by the larger-than-life influence of the Mahatma and the Congress. But it is worth remembering that the Dalit icon always regarded Village India as the citadel of prejudice and oppression against all those who were damned for being ‘untouchable’ by birth. The self-governing qualities of the local panchayat didn’t inspire Ambedkar. To him and to many who were concerned with caste-based oppression, rural hierarchies didn’t have space for those who were condemned to live apart. The stereotype of happy kisans harvesting grain, flanked by women in colourful clothes, didn’t always incorporate the brutal underbelly of an economic order where some communities were regarded as sub-humans, and their women treated as commodities.

Rape, the RSS chief asserted in Silchar last Friday, is essentially an ‘Indian’ phenomenon. He is only partially right. The brutalisation of women is more widespread in the ecosystems of Bharat—and has been so for centuries.

Mohan Bhagwat is also entirely right when he maintained that the respect for women is idealised in Indian culture. But he would be the first to admit that traditional society was less than welcoming and applied very different standards to those groups it regarded as being outside its social orbit—an attitude that has been transmitted into the widespread disrespect for white, women tourists. The deep reverence for ‘stree shakti’ in Bengal, for instance, didn’t prevent the cruel custom of sati and the social degradation and sexual exploitation of widows by ‘respectable’ sections of society. It also didn’t prevent collective sanction for the sexual exploitation of women from the ‘lower orders’.

A feature of the vibrant social reform movements that arose in the 19^th and early-20^th centuries was their willingness to first admit the shortcomings of Hindu society and then address the question of possible remedies. Some of the reformers—notably Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Swami Vivekananda—were modernists and had imbibed the intellectual currents of the West. But others such as Pandit Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar were steeped in tradition and approached the question of reform from a humanist perspective.

The point to note is that for the Hindu stalwarts of the past two centuries, there was a clear understanding that the Hindu, both as an individual and as a collective, wasn’t the epitome of perfection. In today’s context, going by the admission that cosmopolitanism has distorted the minds of ‘India’ and encouraged unwholesome attitudes towards women, the issue to be addressed is: what can be done to change society? After all, there must be glaring imperfections in the modern Hindu that facilitates the ready acceptance of misogyny—the utterances of the Congress MP from Jangipur and a senior BJP minister of Madhya Pradesh being two recent examples. (I am confining my remarks to Hindu society because it sets the tone for India.)

More to the point, the heads of cultural organisations such as the RSS must begin to ask why their unceasing activism over more than eight decades hasn’t altered things. Why have the samskaras they have sought to inculcate in their followers not had a wider effect on society? Maybe the fault doesn’t lie in the samskaras—although a little less patronising attitude towards women would help greatly—but in the priorities of groups that have sought to create a moral leadership for India. If there was greater emphasis on regenerating the institutions of what goes by the name Hinduism rather than on exercising control over a political party, the nation would have been better served.

There is little point celebrating the 150^th birth anniversary of Swami Vivekananda in style unless the grand speeches are complemented by serious attempts to cleanse the temples of venality, casteism and even the exploitation of women devotees by perverted priests. Vivekananda spoke and wrote at length of the Brahmanical religion’s cruel indifference to the plight of the Sudra and the Chandal. Was he exonerating Bharat and indicting India? Was he creating false binaries?  

Any rape, whether it happens in Delhi or rural Madhya Pradesh, is a collective blot on both India and Bharat. There is little point in saying that one is pristine pure and the other contaminated because it is just not true. We are the children of the same country and together we must hang our heads in shame. 

Sunday Pioneer, January 6, 2013

A DIGNIFIED RESURGENCE - December 2012 may have unexpected consequences

By Swapan Dasgupta

The past fortnight has been rather unique for a Delhi that often gives the impression of being detached not merely from Bharat but from India as well. For the first time in living memory, the festive season was marked by candlelight marches rather than candlelight dinners. The Delhi Gymkhana cancelled its annual New Year party and a Rap singer by the unlikely name of Honey Singh was forced by the strength of public opinion to give his performance at a leading hotel a miss. Those who could took the flight to Goa to celebrate with the owner of a near-bankrupt airline that also publishes girlie calendars. But most of Delhi’s elite bowed to the prevailing mood and fell back on uncharacteristic sobriety to usher in 2013.

Whether the wave of protests that followed the gang-rape and subsequent death of a young trainee physiotherapist from a modest background, was India’s great middle class moment is for posterity to judge. Coming in the wake of an equally spirited anti-corruption crusade by Anna Hazare that somehow got derailed, the commemoration of the spirit of the one who was named Nirbhaya and Damini has unsettled many assumptions. Far from material prosperity and consumerism luring the youth and the middle classes into individualism and indifference, the anger at India Gate and Jantar Mantar unequivocally demonstrated that public spiritedness is alive and kicking. If the London riots of 2011 revealed one facet of thwarted aspirations, Delhi 2012 gave a glimpse of the wholesome face of an Indian resurgence.

What was witnessed in Delhi was a near-spontaneous exasperation with an old order steeped in insensitivity, arrogance and shoddy governance. There were many brutally blood-curdling solutions to the harassment and brutalisation of women that the young women with placards sought from a nervous Establishment. These included the public lynching of rapists, mandatory capital punishment and even chemical castration. And yet, quite paradoxically, this was not a movement driven by a Madame Defarge mentality. It was in every respect a 21^st century movement fuelled by modernist impulses.

It will be some time before the anger over the rape and murder of an ordinary girl whose parents lived in two small rooms of a basement in an unauthorised colony is fully deconstructed. Those who are inclined to dismiss the stir as stemming from the boredom of “dented and painted” ladies from privileged families clearly misjudged the social composition of the protestors. Worse, they were clueless about the fact that the protests struck a chord among many more people than were physically present at India Gate and Jantar Mantar.

This was a misreading that was not confined to the newly-elected MP for Jangipur or even Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde who actually felt that the young people should go home after a small hand-picked delegation had been ushered into the august presence of Congress President Sonia Gandhi to air their grievances. The Congress’ heir-apparent Rahul Gandhi didn’t think the explosion of emotions was serious enough to warrant a modification of his travel plans for the holiday season. A man who the Congress Party believes is destined to rule India, just like his great-grandfather, grandmother, father and mother, didn’t believe that the feelings of so many people warranted anything more than a perfunctory, written statement.

The inability to comprehend the outrage of urban India is certain to rankle in the minds of many long after the dust has settled over this brutal murder. The Prime Minister’s wooden proclamation of sympathy on TV (followed by the theek hai giveaway), the indiscriminate use of water cannons on Raisina Hill, the beating-up of demonstrators in India Gate, the cynical transportation of the dying girl to Singapore and her hush-hush cremation at dawn were tell-tale signs of a regime that just didn’t know how to react to dignified anger. It would have been much easier had the agitation actually turned violent and the protestors had rushed into nearby Khan Market or Connaught Place to loot shops and molest innocent citizens. But that was not to be. The moral advantage remained with those who were angry rather than with those who were shielded by the metal barricades.  

The great fear in the political class is that emotions that galvanised the protests will start affecting political choices, particularly with a general election just a year away.

The Congress in particular has reason to be the most concerned. First, there is anxiety that the blend of cash transfers of subsidies and the promise of a golden age of economic reforms will be overshadowed by mundane issues of bad governance. However, this fear seems exaggerated. A general election has a momentum of its own and it is unlikely—unless the degradation of women reaches epidemic proportions—that the events of the past fortnight will linger in the public memory for another year.

However, the Congress has reason to be alarmed on another count. The outrage over the Delhi rape wasn’t confined to a robust rejection of the social attitudes that contributed to women being viewed as commodities. In a curious sort of way it escalated into impatience with the warped priorities of a government that put greater emphasis on the security of VIPs than on the safety of ordinary citizens. This in turn has led to a questioning of the culture of political privilege that has also been linked to the larger issue of corruption. In 2009, the Congress stole a march over its opponents by giving party tickets to a large number of  young ‘inheritors’ who seemed better able to represent a young and aspirational India.

Ironically, throughout this agitation the young inheritors who are such a fixture on the social circuit of Delhi were nowhere to be seen. Their contribution to understanding and sympathising with the concerns of a young India was absolutely zero. Leading the march to irrelevance was of course the great ‘youth icon’ but the rest of the pack were not far behind. Their abdication of issues that agitated young people was noticed, commented upon and derided. Indeed, the puncturing of the myth of a new political culture to be ushered by the young MPs under the leadership of the Gandhi heir is likely to be the immediate fallout of the December 2012 stir. Nurtured in an environment of privilege and blessed with a sense of both entitlement and noblesse oblige, they have shown their inability to transcend an ossified political culture. Having been accustomed to a supplicant India, they cannot seem to be able to cope with a more self-confident and assertive country that is not moved by hierarchy.

An underlying theme of the protests was the demand for purposeful and no-nonsense governance, particularly in matters relating to crime and sexual harassment. Quite unintentionally, there is now a growing demand for an end to a protracted spell of weak and blundering government. There is a yearning for democratic responsiveness but this is also coupled by the need for a tough rule-based system that puts safety and security of the individual over the human rights of the criminal or insurgent. The search for a leader who can create an environment of modernity and ruthless efficiency of the state apparatus could lead a very large section of India’s voters into unexpected directions. This is what troubles both the dynastic Congress and the stodgy BJP.

History doesn’t always move by design. In hindsight, December 2012 may trigger a series of unintended consequences. We can only await these with unconcealed excitement. 

 The Telegraph, January 4, 2013

Why young MPs avoid insolent India

By Swapan Dasgupta

The protests that gripped Delhi over the past 10 days may have begun as a spontaneous expression of outrage against a particularly brutal gang-rape. But somewhere along the way, they escalated into something more far-reaching and yet ill-defined.

What makes citizens of India’s showcase Capital take to the streets periodically— remember the similar response to Anna Hazare’s movement last year—to vent their dissatisfaction against the ‘system’ is prone to divergent interpretations. Can the unrest be attributed to the arrogance of the rulers and the wide gulf that separates them from the ruled? Is it a problem linked to breakneck urbanisation that nurtures aspiration but leads to the simultaneous breakdown of established values? Alternatively, is ‘civil society’ a made-in-media tamasha? 

Whatever the trigger, one thing is absolutely clear: India’s political class has been left bewildered by the street protests involving large numbers of  mostly apolitical and leaderless individuals. President Pranab Mukherjee’s son has quite rightly been pilloried for his “denting and painting” remark but it is easy to understand the incomprehension of a middle-aged inheritor whose own experiences of student movements didn’t involve rubbing shoulders with “pretty women” in western apparel.

In pre-liberalisation India, the angry young men and women who burnt buses and threw crude bombs in Calcutta were invariably scruffy and fitted a jholawala stereotype. Certainly, what was derisively called the ‘South Calcutta’ (or, for that matter, ‘South Delhi’ and ‘South Mumbai’) types would never be seen chanting slogans on the streets. Until the anti-Mandal protests of 1990, the creamy layer of the middle class was politically invisible.

Yet, appearances can be remarkably deceptive. One of the features of the media interviews of the protestors at India Gate was the glaring mismatch between outward appearance and social status. A few of those interviewed were extremely articulate in English, suggesting a privileged schooling, but most of the women in jeans and fleece jackets were naturally at ease in Hindi. There was little in their outward appearance to distinguish one social set from another. Casual wear has become the great leveller.  

For these lower middle class individuals, many of whom come from India’s dynamic small towns, life in the metros is both liberating and deeply oppressive. Their fierce desire for self-improvement in a city that offers opportunities is coupled with an aspirational lifestyle which, in the context of economic globalisation, also involves adopting the trappings of westernisation. They have consciously broken away from the ‘behenji’ mould that defined their mothers’ generation. At the same time, they are confronted by the regressive patriarchal assumptions of neighbourhoods and workplaces where women in trousers are typecast as ‘fast’ and ‘loose’, not least by a police force that has internalised the khap panchayat ethos.

An earlier discourse suggested that this social transformation would be met by Gen Next politicians who didn’t share the fuddy-duddy assumptions of earlier leaders. However, as the Delhi protests vividly revealed, labelling someone as the “youth icon” or proclaiming a young MP’s familiarity with the social media didn’t qualify them to respond to the anger with purposeful politics.   

Why, it was often asked, didn’t Rahul Gandhi arrive at India Gate to meet the aggrieved?

The answer is curiously simple. An overwhelming majority of India’s young MPs are inheritors who have long been accustomed to the aam aadmi looking up to the netas with forlorn eyes and the leaders in turn responding with a show of noblesse oblige. For them, good politics always meant doling out favours to a supplicant India.

The protestors who gathered to demand better policing and exemplary punishment of molesters and rapists weren’t pleading before dynastic icons with folded hands. They were self-confident, angry and exasperated. They represented a new, assertive and even insolent India. Their expectations couldn’t be met by discretionary hand-outs and even cash transfers. Their demands are a key element of modern politics: the expectation that the state will be responsive and efficient. The chalta hai fatalism of an earlier age has been replaced by a voluble rejection of a meek theek hai.

The people are changing and the political class isn’t. This mismatch will not be unending. Sooner, rather than later, the yearnings of an assertive India will find political expression. 

Sunday Times of India, December 30, 2012