The victim of the inhuman gang rape that triggered the protests was targeted for operating outside of the puritanical restrictions traditionally imposed on Indian women (by going out at night in the company of a male friend). The attackers told police they were out to “teach her a lesson” and their lawyer has said in their defense that respectable women do not get raped. This attitude has been echoed in statements by government officials and political leaders across the country (not just from the Hindu right but members of the Congress Party as well).
Though from a relatively modest background (her family being of a backward–though not untouchable–caste and having migrated to the city from a tiny village, her father a middle peasant turned skilled worker who sold his land to finance his daughter’s education), the victim was college-educated, English-speaking, a paramedical student and call-center worker, thinking of buying a smartphone, dreaming of buying an Audi, attacked on the way home from seeing a Hollywood movie (Life of Pi).
The protests were based in a layer of urban, middle-class youth which, though relatively small, has grown rapidly over the last decade or so. They are (the sons and daughters of) the few who, at least for the time being, have benefited from the policies of liberalization and privatization dictated by the imperialists in the absence of the Soviet Union. This layer identifies with the upwardly mobile victim and her Westernized lifestyle. And it fears the far larger section of the population represented in this case by her attackers, the lumpen, semi-employed or casually employed slum-dwellers whose ranks are constantly growing as a consequence of the enhanced imperialist exploitation made possible by the same neo-liberal policies referred to above (e.g., by forcing peasants off their land to make room for industrial agriculture or high-tech manufacturing). The new middle classes naturally look to the state and its cops for protection against this element.
The protests thus had a dual character. On the one hand, they were motivated by solidarity with the victim of a horrific anti-woman crime and a desire to defend the minimal right of women to move about the city at any hour and associate with the opposite sex in safety. On the other hand, they were dominated by reactionary calls for more police, for expanding police powers, for denying legal rights to those accused of sexual violence, and for castration or the death penalty for those convicted. They thus recall the reactionary, populist, middle-class-based mobilization led in 2011 by Anna Hazare in support of an anti-democratic scheme to grant dictatorial powers to an unaccountable state body to supposedly police government corruption.
It is only from a highly privileged point of view that it makes sense to ask the Indian state to protect women. Cops in India are not merely typically indifferent to reports of rape, they are among the most notorious perpetrators of the crime. Most women are accordingly afraid to have anything to do with cops at all, and the rape of women in police custody is a regular occurrence. Rape is moreover a key tactic of Indian police, deployed by them (along with military and paramilitary forces) to intimidate workers, the poor, the oppressed, and political activists. Its use as a tool of repression is a hallmark of Indian state (and state-sanctioned) operations from Chhattisgarh to Nandigram, from Kashmir to Manipur, from the Congress-led 1984 anti-Sikh riots in Delhi to the Hindu-right-led 2002 anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat. It is not for nothing that the Indian state grants its forces official impunity for such crimes and other atrocities in the “disturbed areas” of the north-east and north-west under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which exempts them from civil prosecution.
The reason rape is such an effective form of violence in India–targeting not merely individual women and their families but whole (caste- or religion-based) communities–lies in the paramount significance Indian society places on women’s “honor,” a legacy of pre-capitalist backwardness. In India this patriarchal value-system has everything to do with caste, which is founded on the control of female sexuality. The shame brought about by inter-caste relationships is the most typical motive for honor killings in India, with families killing their own daughter or her lover or both. Just two months ago, 268 untouchable households in three villages in Dharmapuri, Tamil Nadu were burned to the ground in retaliation for the elopement of a caste-Hindu woman with an untouchable man.
Sexual violence against women is a normal, everyday means of enforcing the caste hierarchy, from the stripping and parading of low-caste and untouchable women naked to rape and torture that often ends in murder. The rape or sexual exploitation of untouchable (dalit) women is especially commonplace, and the most typical perpetrators, along with police, are men from the dominant land-owning caste of the village, on whom the women and their families normally depend for work.
(January 11, 2013)
