Current Events
India's Patriarchy Whimpers On
NILANJANA BHOWMICK
“Let there be no mothers / Let there be no wives / Let there be no daughters / And there will be no crimes,” read Anubha Sharma to a hall packed with students like her, all rapt with attention.
A student of Indraprastha College, New Delhi’s oldest women’s college, Sharma wrote the poem out of frustration after a long argument with her father on the parameters of safety for women.
On Thursday afternoon, she, along with some of her teachers and many of her fellow students, held an impassioned discussion of the infraction of their personal freedom in the aftermath of the horrific Delhi gang rape. Last month, the crime galvanized an entire nation into a flurry of protests, in which Indraprastha students who hail from all over the country zealously participated.
For weeks,teachers and students camped out protest venues, marched, and submitted memorandums to government authorities to make the city a safer place for its women.
But even at this female-centric institution, students’ day-to-day freedoms have shrunk since the December 16 attack. Curfew for students living in the campus dormitories has been brought forward an hour to 9.30PM, and girls are now required to seek permission from the college administration before going out with friends and provide details of the friends they are going out with.
These measures, the girls were unanimous in saying at the meeting on Thursday, pose a serious threat to their personal freedom.
“Every time incidents of sexual assault or molestation happens in any part of the country, we girls face more and more restrictions,” one student said during the discussion. “Why should we pay for the crimes men commit? Lock the men up. We are not the culprits!”
They are not, but in the labyrinth of India’s complicated patriarchy, women are not just victims, but scapegoats. Every time there is a rape -- and there have been at least 10 more gruesome rapes reported in the past month, including that of a 7-year-old girl in Goa -- kneejerk reactions from family members and political leaders alike places the onus on women by imposing restrictions on the way they move and how they dress.
Indian media recently reported that the government of the northern state of Uttarakhand passed an order stopping women from working beyond 6 p.m. in both private and government jobs. The regressive edict, conceived by the state government as a way to curb crimes against women, was widely opposed by women’s rights activists and the political opposition, leading the state’s chief minister to deny that such an order had ever, in fact, been passed.
It was not an isolated transgression.
Earlier, the Delhi police had issued a list of dos and don’ts for women in the capital to stay safe, including not boarding empty buses and going straight home after school/college.
The government of the union territory of Puducherry came up with the bizarre solution of putting girls in overcoats, a move that was strongly opposed by students all over the country and the civil society prompting the government to backtrack.
In Haryana, khap panchayats, the all powerful and all-male informal village councils, have made suggestions that girls should be married off sooner, or not be allowed to use mobile phones. These retro diktats, made both before and after the December 16 crime, have many here worried that hard-earned freedom of Indian women is on the line.
“It’s not just fear about safety. It is an excuse to impose lots of patriarchal strictures,” says Kavita Krishnan, secretary of the All India Progressive Women’s Association (AIPWA). “It becomes a mask for anxiety about your daughter’s sexuality or a control of her sexuality. That anxiety has no simple solution.”
Women, too, are imposing stricter limits on themselves as they find themselves looking over their shoulders a little too often in the wake of the December 16 incident. Many women say they have started dressing more conservatively in response to a society that has repeatedly advised them to be invisible in order to be safe from sexual predators.
“Whatever ten steps we had advanced, this incident has put us back by at least twenty more steps,” says Tulip, a 27-year-old publishing professional who lives in New Delhi.
Tulip, who has led a blithe life in the capital for the last couple of years, sharing a flat with a few other girlfriends, says she suddenly feels trapped. Her parents, who live in the Himalayan town of Dehradun, get frazzled when she goes out in the evenings. On their advice, Tulip had taken to dress more plainly so as not to attract undue attention.
“One section of society will certainly ask for more restrictions,” says social activist Aruna Roy. “[But] if the country shifts back to any regressive position it will be fought tooth and nail by many of us.”
Girls like Tulip and Anubha Sharma, the student poet, have showed up by the thousands to protest venues in the past month with placards that loudly proclaimed their opposition to these patriarchal decrees. They have walked the roads at night to reclaim the streets back for themselves. They have fought with their parents and family members to reclaim their independence. Many activists believe that it is this assertion of freedom at home that prompted such a tremendous social reaction in the public sphere.
“I don’t think that all the reaction was due to the fear of sexual violence,” Krishnan says. “The reaction is also to the assertion of freedom. When woman starts demanding freedom and rights, that’s where the discomfort begins.”
This discomfort has led to an increased policing of women in the Indian society in the wake of the Delhi gang rape. But the Delhi rape and its fall-out has also brought out the steel in Indian women, whose voice of protest this time around has been persistently irrepressible. On Thursday afternoon, as the discussion was winding up at Indraprastha College, a group of young girls in their early twenties debated passionately what they could do to counteract the force of this repression. Long-term change might be still awhile away, but the unwavering voice of youth, this time around, might just hasten it.
“You will have to give space to the hundreds and thousands of young voices that is the future of India, who have clearly stated that they want justice and freedom, they do not want the clock set back,” says Roy. “Today the middle classes have broken their silence and that gives us hope that there will be no going back to repressive times. We women will continue to fight together in solidarity as we always have.”
[Courtesy: TIME Magazine]
January 19, 2013
Conversation about this article
1: Harbans Lal (Arlington, Texas, USA), January 19, 2013, 9:03 AM.
Why are all the restrictions being placed on only women? Are they the guilty ones? This is wrong; men should also be labeled culprit and restricted from times and places where they are likely to harm women.
2: H. Kaur (Canada), January 19, 2013, 2:13 PM.
I can't beieve the college asks the women to provide details about their friends. That just says loudly and clearly that they don't even trust the women to have enough brains to pick the right sorts of friends. The rape is just an excuse to do all sorts of things against woman who have any level of freedom. I read an article in which a young woman from Canada agrees that the rules her college has for women are basically sensible and for protection. There will be a lot of women believing that, I suppose. I know if I was there I wouldn't want my freedom restricted. I would opt for carrying a gun to protect myself from what are apparently hordes and hordes of rapists in gangs at large.
3: H. Kaur (Canada), January 19, 2013, 2:20 PM.
Oh, by the way, the title is not that accurate for the article. The patriarchy in India is not whimpering but shouting loudly from the rooftops. What is whimpering is the right of women to be equal citizens to men. I read in one American paper that up to 100,000 Indian women are burnt to death over dowry every year and the police don't even investigate these deaths as murder. Up to 125,000 a year are beaten to death by their husbands and these deaths also aren't investigated as murders. I can't see it being the other way around. If a woman were to burn her husband to death or beat him to death, society just would not accept these deaths as happening to the husband as an "accident".
4: Baldev Singh (Bradford, United Kingdom), January 19, 2013, 2:36 PM.
This brutality against females is nothing new in that land! When the superstitions that constitute Hinduism were being dreamt up, females became labeled 'unlucky' for the household and society.
5: Ari Singh (Rostov, Russia), January 20, 2013, 12:34 AM.
Interesting article. I am surprised that this sort of brutalty is still practiced in India where the most powerful and influential person is also a woman (Sonia Gandhi).
6: H. Kaur (Canada), January 21, 2013, 12:26 AM.
Ari Singh ji, it doesn't really matter if she is a female. There were female pharoahs in ancient Egypt though women weren't equals. Yes, Sonia too is a part of a dynasty. Her husband was the PM, her mama-in-law was, her grandfather-in-law was the first PM of post-colonial India. She is intent on making her sonny into one too. Though born in Europe, she did say one time that a woman's in-laws know better than her. She said a bunch of stuff that shocked western feminists over 20 years ago. I read an article about what she said. I can't remember exactly, but I was shocked a woman of European origin would take up such Indian nonsense against women. Well, she might just have been saying, it course, because it was expedient. She also didn't let her daughter go into politics, but promoted her son. Plus, she is a Christian. You can check out Christian rights websites to see if they are happy with how they are treated in India. Just type in 'Christians in India and rape', 'Christians in India and murder', and see what you get. She is just a token woman. Some protesters said the only two women safe in Delhi are Sonia and Sheila, the chief minister. They aren't far off the mark for what do these women have in common with the masses of Indian women? Nothing, basically.