We as a society have not moved beyond the culture of caste domination and consequently failed to generate a rigorous critique of caste-based atrocities
Are we, the self-professed aware society — the presumptuous lot who believe we have a right to shape discourse in this country and consume it ourselves for our own satisfaction — equally guilty of ignoring the Hathras gang-rape of a Dalit woman by upper caste men? Have we been conscionable enough or just wished her away with the smoke from her pyre, having exhausted all our concerns and candles about women’s rights on Nirbhaya, just because she was closer to our kind, a working woman in Delhi? Or have we given into the fatigue and helplessness of justice that came seven years too late? Or in these days of all kinds of distancing, simply thought that the dust bowl of Hathras was too geographically and psychologically distant to merit our attention? Why did we have to wait for Nirbhaya’s mother to take real and concrete action, asking her lawyer to take up the case for another wronged and abused daughter and fight legally? Where were activist-lawyers who are ever ready to move the courts? We never forgot to wish the Prime Minister on his birthday but why did we not use our hashtag power to force a comment out of him at that very blighted moment or ask him how his slogan of beti bachao beti padhao had been trampled upon and demonised as beti daraao, beti hataao?
If Nirbhaya was an overnight shocker, the Hathras girl wasn’t. The news was doing the rounds though we chose not to register it. The first reports that the 19-year-old had been gang-raped, bruised, battered and left to die in the fields, where she had gone to graze the cows, surfaced in the middle of September. Local media was aware of it but sexploitation of Dalit women by upper caste men is so common in the heartland that it isn’t considered newsworthy or human enough to follow up on. This despite the fact that the rapists tried to strangulate her, cut off her tongue for fear she could testify against them and almost broke her spine that left her paralysed. Now, it turns out, the girl had been stalked by these men for quite some time but for all the helplines and women’s cells, in a tiny hamlet of about 15 Dalit families surrounded by upper caste headmen, such democratic tools stand no chance. She writhed in excruciating pain for 15 days in hospital, fighting like a warrior for her dear life. Still, nobody, least of all the media, probed a gruesome murder of womanhood. Or even asked crime diary questions, like why wasn’t an FIR registered, why were the FSL samples not taken immediately but days later when sperms are not to be found anyway to establish rape?
What were we, the literati, busy with then? Precious news hours on actor Kangana Ranaut’s insult by the Shiv Sena, the demolition of her office and the stereotyping of the woman as a victim despite her privilege and power. The nation had to give her justice; who cared about a poor Dalit woman or the other Dalit women who are being violated even as we write this but will never be heard or be talked about, snuffed out before they can make a sound? The girl had to die to make the national news. Besides, we mindlessly devoured the interrogation of Deepika Padukone on her old recreational habit of using party drugs. And “awwwd” at how her caring husband was a real man, worried about the “anxiety attacks” she allegedly suffers from. Simply because the guilt was not on us but a set of pretty, powerful people who we may desire to be but knowing we won’t, are happy to just pass the burden of sin and resultantly feel smug about our moral order. We could hold a relentless media trial on actor Sushant Singh Rajput’s death but not on the Dalit girl. It mattered little that the Hathras girl, when alive, just rippled along the margins of our consciousness but since she was not upper caste, she didn’t threaten our peace or stir our conscience enough. All we had to do was stand by her when she had the spirit to fight, campaign with her. But as thinking people, we chose not to react. Selective crusades are egoistic, not altruistic. An afterthought is a bitter consolation prize. Rather debt.
The fact of the matter is that for all our claims of diversity and plurality, we do not live it. We are deeply casteist and hegemonic and, therefore, territorial and protectionist about our kind. We like to read about and watch excesses on Dalits but never feel the need to own their problems as our own. Or fight to stop them as we did during Nirbhaya. We have allowed more offenders to act with impunity. Had we felt guilty and not pitiful, the Hathras case wouldn’t be seen as another case of a Dalit woman who was raped and murdered in the fields, her use only worthy enough to satisfy the lust of dominant caste men, who didn’t have societal sanction to do this with their own women. This hypocrisy is one social custom that has survived like a stubborn medieval vestige. I remember working on a special supplement on the Dalit millennium for this paper in 2000 and travelling to a village somewhere near the Haryana-Rajasthan border. Since the Dalits were castaways, they had been allowed a settlement in the fringes. Though social interaction was considered abhorrent, it didn’t stop the upper caste men from going there for sexual pleasures, more by force, less as seeking a service. The Dalit men were either paid off handsomely to remain silent or allow access to their women. The women were not even asked, they were considered “available.” For young upper caste men, a visit here was the rite of passage before they became worldly-wise. One of the upper caste men had then gloated that at least no sex crimes had happened in the village or the youth hadn’t turn deviant. As for Dalits, he reasoned, they got the money to run their lives. What has changed in 20 years as we claim to reform revisionist ways?
For a mindset to change, we, as civil society, haven’t fought enough to make every case of gender and caste violence against Dalits a collective societal threat and give them prime time attention. We have confined Dalit issues to an activist sphere rather than making them the day’s talking point. We have a Corona death tracker running on our devices every day. Do we have a tracker on excesses against women to remind ourselves what we need to do to stop them? How else can one explain the spiral in the crimes against Scheduled Castes and Tribes by seven per cent and 26 per cent in 2019, according to the National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) figures. Uttar Pradesh tops this list of excesses. One just has to scan news reports of the last few months to find a repetitive pattern of violence against Dalit girls. They are usually attacked in fields when they are out on their chores and unescorted, they are brutally raped and killed and then left hanging from a tree, like a trophy in a bestial war, and a warning that more girls would meet a similar fate if their families sought remedial means. At other times, they are strangulated. Some statistics show that at least four Dalit women are raped in India every day. The truth has got to be uglier considering the coercion by upper caste perpetrators, their hold on tools of governance, particularly the police. In the Hathras case, they left no trace of the victim at all. So that medieval powerplay of the hunter and the hunted, that masochistic intimidation of the vulnerable prey and the patriarchal domination continue. As for the caste brotherhood, it is a societal phalanx and an insurance for political capital. So if journalists are asking why an upper caste congregation was allowed in Hathras to shield the criminals, as if it was a shocking discovery, this clannish protectionism is not new. Take the Unnao rape case. The girl survivor was raped in 2017 by then BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar. Her complaint was not registered by the local police, her family was threatened and her father died in police custody after being beaten up by the accused MLA’s brother. No media, civil society or activist helped the girl till she threatened to immolate herself in front of Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s residence. She created her own media-grab moment which finally led to Sengar’s sentencing in 2019. Had there been a justice campaign immediately after the victim’s plight came to light, the tolerance threshold would not have been stretched limitlessly.
Worse, women are failing their own kind. The National Commission of Women, which was so quick to come down on the hurt caused to Kangana and sought the Shiv Sena leader’s arrest, waited to craft a response and then wrote a letter to the UP DGP seeking an explanation on why the police rushed through the cremation of the girl without her parents’ consent. Ruling BJP women members, irrespective of their ideological commitment and no matter who they are beholden to, should have spoken out against this brutal rape. Union Minister for Women and Child Development Smriti Irani had no statement to make on the Hathras episode but had time to defend our laws at the UN. “Several of our legislations such as those pertaining to sexual harassment of women at the workplace, protection of women from domestic violence, protection of children from sexual offences, and our criminal laws’ amendments, have been strong enablers of women empowerment…over the past six years,” she said. Nothing could be a bigger lie. And as for all the educated and free-thinking people around us, who are ever ready to create a digital wave on wearing a handloom sari or putting red and black dots for all kinds of human rights excesses around the world, from Kashmir to Syria to Black Lives, we didn’t have time to consider Hathras as our day of reckoning. The shame is on us. The guilt is in our delay.
