We have to rise up in rage at every instance of sexual violence; we have to protest every harassment and microaggression while exposing how it connects to the whole iceberg of sexual violence; we have to fight caste and race based oppression exposing its existential dependence on patriarchy; we have to fight predatory capitalism that profits from social hierarchies and the destruction of the planet; and in our fights and outrages on the street, we have to be careful not be used by one dominating force against the other.
By Somnath, Aparajita, Saswati
From my membership in all of these groups I have learned that oppression and the intolerance of difference come in all shapes and sexes and colours and sexualities; and that among those of us who share the goals of liberation and a workable future for our children, there can be no hierarchies of oppression. I have learned that sexism and heterosexism both arise from the same source as racism.
(Audre Lorde, “There Is No Hierarchy of Oppressions”).
Unspeakable harm had been done on the night of 9th August, in an institution where people learn to protect and nurture life and pledge to do no harm as a first principle. This came very close to the skin of many and jolted them into action. People took to the streets like the harm had been done to them. In real solidarity, one can almost feel the suffering on their own skin, and they draw strength from the victims and survivors and form a collective body to take on the might of the oppressor, to defend a future that is shared.
Besides a large number of students, there were the professionals and celebrities who are loath to take to the streets. The horrors of the 9th August incident in RG Kar had shaken even the professional class out of their comfort zone to come out on the streets in defiance of state power. Large sections of the crowd blocking the streets were the very same people who would have complained in the past about marches, rallies and protests as being the preoccupation of some pesky people who cause inconveniences of traffic jams and unruliness. It is hard to say whether it was the crime itself or the overwhelming protest against the crime that got the Chief Minister out on the street with her own band of followers. Who was she protesting against? It created a political conundrum of the state protesting against the state when the Chief Minister herself holds the portfolios of health and home.
Violence against women, from subtle to egregious, is omnipresent. From rural and urban homes, in public spaces, educational and government institutions, entertainment, classrooms, workplaces, in trains and buses, every place on earth that is touched by human beings there is violence against women. Every aspect of our lives we can think of, is shaped by patriarchal, misogynist forces. Social and religious norms deepen the misogyny in society and the culture normalises it. The society learns to blame the women, from a young age, when a sexual assault happens on them with the tropes of – she invited it, look what she was wearing, why was she traveling alone etc. by which the women are forced to carry the burden of responsibility of the attacks on them. Deep socialisation into misogyny and a total immersion of our collective consciousness normalises violence against women in a patriarchal society like India. According to a report published by The Times of India on Jan 1, 2024,
The National Commission for Women (NCW) registered 28,811 complaints of crime against women last year and about 55 per cent were from Uttar Pradesh. The highest number of complaints were received in the right to dignity category that involves harassment other than domestic violence and it stood at 8,540, according to NCW data. This was followed by 6,274 complaints of domestic violence. Dowry harassment complaints stood at 4,797, molestation complaints at 2,349, police apathy against women complaints at 1,618, and rape and attempt to rape complaints at 1,537, the data showed.
For every crime that is reported there are a very large number that go unreported.
Closely tied to the omnipresence and immersion of consciousness by patriarchy is the institution of caste. Caste shapes all institutions as well as individual behaviours and our thoughts and dreams. So normalised is the hierarchy of caste that the caste-privileged say -caste does not exist in India anymore. Patriarchy and caste, as they say, are not the sharks but the water. It immerses the consciousness so completely that it becomes invisible by its universality. Being oppressed by caste and patriarchy at the same time pushes one to the very extreme margins of society where caste-oppression and sexual-oppression operate simultaneously. This has been articulated by both Indian Dalit and Afro-American feminists. In her seminal essay “Dalit Women Talk Differently: A Critique of ‘Difference’ and Towards a Dalit Feminist Standpoint position,” Sharmila Rege focuses on the intersectionality between casteism and sexism drawing parallels between racism and sexism in Black and Chicana Feminism. She emphasises that Dalit women have a “different voice” and these women, “underscores learning the lessons of “contemporary political impasse” of black feminism.” The Combahee River Collective, founded by Black Lesbian activist Barbara Smith and her group, echoed similar views in their statement:
We also often find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously. We know that there is such a thing as racial-sexual oppression which is neither solely racial nor solely sexual. E.g. the history of rape of Black women by white men as a weapon of political repression.
There are movements that have been trying to make the water of oppression visible to the fish and it is for them that there has been some progress, however little it may seem. Dalit and Adivasi women have shaped the struggles for women’s equality in India and yet horrific sexual violence on them goes unnoticed and willfully ignored by the media, state and the opinion making class.
Savitri Bai Phule was the first to organise formal schools for girls in India and lead a fight against caste and patriarchy. Phulo and Jhano Murmu led the Santhal Rebellion in 1855-56 against the British who were grabbing land and forest through the dominant caste zamindars and were martyred. Jhalkari Bai, a Bahujan woman, held off the British army while Lakshmi Bai escaped. Privileged history only celebrated Lakshmi Bai. Phoolan Devi was a woman from an oppressed caste who was raped by dominant caste men. Finding no recourse to justice, no solidarity, Phoolan took up arms to fight against caste dominance and patriarchy and came to be popularly known as the Bandit Queen.
In his essay, The Genesis of Caste, Babasaheb Ambedkar shows how endogamy is used to maintain “purity” of caste; to keep the silos of caste impermeable so that there is no mixing or social mobility between castes.[1] In other words, controlling the purity of castes means controlling who marries who and how they procreate, so that caste tags would be passed down the generations. Caste as a social hierarchical system, was created by a relatively small group of people to dominate over a large majority of others. Creation of such a socially dominating system needs violence in copious amounts, a big part of which was derived from the violence of patriarchy. This violence was used by the dominant caste to control the bodies of women so that the “purity” of caste could be maintained and hence the dominance of the small band of men. Ambedkar writes, “Endogamy is the only characteristic that is peculiar to caste, and if we succeed in showing how endogamy is maintained, we shall practically have proved the genesis and also the mechanism of Caste”. Although, many might not be able to see it clearly, sitting in 2024, but, almost all social institutions in India have been shaped by the system of caste which in turn relies solely on the violence of patriarchy for its existence. Caste forms the basis of economic, social and cultural capital, hence also the basis of class in India.
To dominate is to dominate fully – culturally, socially and politically. Domination stops only where it meets resistance. Domination also means, people from the dominating castes having an overwhelming and disproportionate presence in shaping and running the institutions as well as having access to resources. In general, landholding is in inverse proportions in each caste group’s representation in the total population. Dalit families have the least access to land while dominant caste families have the most access. [2], [3]. With 16% share in population dominant caste groups occupy 90% of the leadership in media. [4] There is disproportionately large representation (70%) of the dominant castes in faculty in higher education degrees across all institutions in India and the number of degrees is skewed as well. [5] SC, ST & OBC have a population share of more than 65% but represent 9% in the number of Vice Chancellors in Universities under UGC. Similarly, the share of dominant castes in higher bureaucracy is disproportionately high. And it is not just about the numbers, because institutions are run based on the ideology of the dominant practices of Brahminism and patriarchy. Sometimes the strength of numerical representation is undercut by the ideological apparatus.
Having stringent laws without social change will not lead to any substantial decrease in violence against women. In fact it will only strengthen the grip of the state over the people. The state weaponizes archaic laws like the colonial Sedition Act against the people, while laws meant for the protection of Adivasi and Dalit people like the Prevention of Atrocities against SC-ST or the Forest Rights Act and carefully defanged and under-used so that the infrastructure of domination is not challenged.
The state and its functioning, therefore, is shaped by the dominant forces in the contours that preserves the social structure of caste, based on patriarchy. This is not to say that changes have not been forced by movements and resistance and some grounds won, but any attempt to shake the structure is met with tremendous state violence and inventing newer enemies within the society to deflect the gaze from the dominant class. In its functioning, the state in India remains deeply Brahminical and patriarchal, notwithstanding the constitution or laws.
To prevent oppressed caste consolidation through the entitlements that implementation of Mandal Commission would have brought in, the Brahminical supremacist forces designed a 10,000 kilometre long Rath Yatra to strengthen the imagination of religion/race based ethno-civilizational identity stoking violence in society that would other-ize people of Muslim faith and paint them as the cause of the suffering of the masses. This led to the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992 and laid the grounds for the BJP to reap political dividends in the decades to follow. The imaginary was legitimised by the Supreme Court of India in 2019 and the construction of the Ram Mandir on the destroyed Babri Masjid was affirming of the Brahminical dominance. It is worth remembering that a court assistant had complained against the Chief Justice, at that time, of sexual harassment. Not only was she terminated from her job, she was targeted by the state using Pegasus spyware. Her brothers were suspended from Delhi police and the CJI played the victim. She received no support, no solidarity and obscurity was perhaps her best survival mechanism. So much for justice!
Similar to caste, the construction of race as a social hierarchical system needed the use of patriarchal violence to assert control over the bodies of racialized women and non-binary people. In the US, feminist and anti-racial struggles through long fights have won back some control over women’s bodies. The right to make their own decisions about having children or not, was one of them. The state in the US is also based on a white-supremacist structure and it needs patriarchal violence for its existence. The overturning of the Roe vs Wade judgement is the manifestation of the white-supremacist-patriarchal state trying to assert more control over women’s bodies, to maintain the violent hierarchy of race and keep control over the process of human procreation. After all, for a capitalist economy to thrive, it needs both workers and consumers, the numbers of which it can control better, hence the need to control the process of procreation. The right to same-sex union was also a long battle. All of these hard won rights are at grave risk today in the face of rising neo-Fascism across the world.
While the Republican party in the US, in the name of family values and small government extended state control on women’s bodies, the Democratic party in contrast, is promising to codify Roe vs Wade which would mean that the state would be the actor to give women the autonomy of their bodies instead of it being an existential right of being. To guarantee existential right of being, a different battle has to be fought on the streets to keep the state out of our bodies. What meaning does freedom have if the state can arbitrate on the autonomy of individual and collective bodies!
Maria Mies points out that women face a threefold form of exploitation: “they are exploited by men and they are exploited as housewives by Capital. If they are wageworkers they are also exploited as wage-workers”. She has shown how not only women’s work at home is discounted and unpaid, but the globalised economy also uses her home as a production unit at super-exploitative wage rates. We see women working adding beads to saris, dressing human hair in preparation for making wigs in the remote islands of Sundarbans. These products feed global markets and pay high dividends to the investors. Similarly, the global market for surrogacy exploits the womb of women in the global south.
“…domestic work produces not merely use values, but is essential to the production of surplus value.” – Mariarosa Dalla Costa’s “Women and the Subversion of the Community”
In the years leading up to the ghastly incident in RG Kar, the state in India has been complicit in many unspeakable crimes against women across India. In Manipur, a Meitei mob paraded two Kuki women naked, assaulting them in public leading up to rape by men in the mob. It was a lynch-rape, pushing limits of cruelty on women. The video of this ghastly incident of May 2023 went viral in July 2023 and shook those who became aware of it. [6] There were barely any news reports for 3 months before the video went viral. None of the state machinery swung into action, not a word of condemnation came from bureaucracy or judiciary. Celebrities and the professional class were missing from the streets. In the recording of a recent phone call, submitted to the Commission of Enquiry probing the ethnic violence in Manipur, the Chief Minister Biren Singh can be heard strategizing, urging people to use the incident for further mobilization. Publicly, the state machinery in Manipur and the center condoned the sexual violence by its well-orchestrated silence.
It was here in Manipur in 2004, that 14 Meitei women disrobed in front of the headquarters of Assam Rifles in Imphal and held banners in bloodied letters that read “Indian Army Rape Us” and “Indian Army Take Our Flesh”. [7] The protest came after numerous extrajudicial encounter killings by the army and paramilitary and the rape and murder of Manorama Thangjam. The security forces in Manipur derive impunity from the Armed Forces Special Power Act (AFSPA). The same act has been used in Kashmir for decades to assert control over the population that seeks the right to self-determination. In 1991, security forces had cordoned off the villages of Kunan and Poshpora.[8] While the men were questioned outside in freezing night, soldiers raped women inside throughout the night. Some estimates say up to 100 women were subjected to sexual torture.
On 15th August 2022, the Gujarat High Court gave remission to 11 men serving sentences for having gang raped Bilkis Bano in the 2002 Gujarat pogrom and murdered several of her relatives. She was 5 months pregnant when the ghastly incident took place. The police were complicit in trying to bury the case and exonerate the perpetrators. Bilkis had to approach the Supreme Court which moved the case out of Gujarat to Maharashtra and convicted the 11 men. The Supreme Court stepped in again in early 2024 to remind that it was outside the jurisdiction of the Gujarat High Court to commute the life sentences. The dogged perseverance of the state structures to cover up of ghastly sexual violence points to its complicity. In fact, many of them were valorized as heroes for having committed sexual atrocities on women of Muslim faith. The elected Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh had shared a stage with a fanatic who gave calls to dig out the bodies of Muslim women from their graves and rape them. Violent subjugation through sexual depravity to gain political and social power in India starts with those who have power. More often than not, the pathology of misogyny only begins with the men who perpetrate the crimes, the hidden part of the iceberg is the deep seated social hierarchy and the state.
Four dominant caste men gang raped a young Dalit woman in Uttar Pradesh in 2020, who died of her injuries [9]. Three of the four men were acquitted while the police cremated her body in the middle of the night and did not even allow her parents to perform her cremation. Or for that matter the sexual violence perpetrated on Soni Sori, an Adivasi school teacher, by the police and paramilitary in Chhattisgarh while she was in custody in 2011 [10]. On examination, doctors in Calcutta Medical College had to remove stones inserted in her vagina and rectum by the police in Chhattisgarh. Ankit Garg, the Superintendent of Police who directly oversaw the torture was celebrated by the state with a gallantry award from the President of India and today he serves as the Inspector General of police. What more evidence is necessary to understand the use of sexual violence by the state and valorizing those at the higher pecking order?
None of the ghastly incidents cited here and many more that we do not know, had ever elicited the kind of protest we are seeing in response to the RG Kar brutality partly because they hadn’t crossed the caste-class line. For the current mobilisation to bring about structural changes, the movement has to see how the state is involved in perpetrating this kind of violence, sometimes directly and always by creating a culture for it. When an elected government or the judiciary is seen by the society as condoning or being complicit in sexual violence against women, largely of oppressed caste, race or class, it emboldens the patriarchal forces in society to test out the limits. And as these forces get bolder in their quest to test the limits, they sometimes accidentally cross the caste-class or race lines and get too close to those who are in the social vicinity of the dominant core. The state responds by focusing on individual perpetrators, promising exemplary punishments, media further sensationalizes the brutality – all to hide the structures that nurture and feed the sexual violence it needs to maintain status quo. And once the state acquires the public’s consent for dispensing exemplary inhuman punishment, it reserves that right to punish dissent against it.
These painful moments expose the structures of violence against women, if we are willing to see them. From misogynist jokes, street harassments, objectification of women in films, everyday micro-aggression all the way to the brutalities like the ones in Manipur and RG Kar. To bring about structural change, we have to see the continuum of sexual violence against women and non-binary people and the active role the state plays. Caste, race and class structures obscure the continuity of the contours of sexual violence. For structural change to happen, we have to make common cause in fighting patriarchy, caste, race, and an economic arrangement that profits from these social hierarchies. Men have to be trained on feminist principles of equality.
It is important for us to remember the role of women and feminist movement behind the Visakha guidelines that provide some modicum of protection to women against sexual abuse at workplace. Bhanwari Devi, an oppressed caste woman, was employed by the state of Rajasthan to campaign against child marriage [11]. In 1992 her efforts to stop a marriage between two minors, one less than a year old, drew the ire of the dominant caste men. Five men beat Bhanwari’s husband and raped her. The state acted as expected, in protection of the dominant caste-class. Police refused to file the FIR, bureaucracy and judiciary refused to believe her and the village isolated her and dumped all the stigma on her. Three years later, the Rajasthan High Court acquitted the rapists. The reasons cited by the judge were – a village headman cannot rape; men of different caste cannot gang rape; a dominant caste man cannot rape an oppressed caste woman etc. Essentially, the court tried to bring back the discourse within the frame of caste and patriarchy in an attempt to protect the infrastructure of dominance.
There was public outrage, women’s movements and groups took to the streets and followed it up by filing a public interest litigation in the Supreme Court which led to the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition, and Redressal) Act, 2013, or the Vishaka guidelines. RG Kar happened 11 years after the Vishaka guidelines. Dalit and Adivasi women get the least benefit out of the law because they work mostly in informal settings. Unlike Ankit Garg, Bhanwari Devi wasn’t felicitated by the state and hence continues to struggle to make ends meet.
The RG Kar incident has created a massive rise of protests in the form of Take Back the Night as Kolkata celebrates resistance. Drawing upon the global feminist movement of 1970s, Take Back the Night addresses the crisis of sexual violence upon women. The widespread participation of women from toddlers to senior citizens mirrors the exigency of addressing sexual violence against women and minority communities. Take Back the Night is spreading like wildfire among Bengali communities outside of West Bengal and India. It aligns with the lyrics of this famous Chilean Feminist anthem, “It’s the police/ the judges/ the state/ the president.” According to “The Conversation,” “The song – also known as “the rapist is you” after one of its lyrics – was first performed in public on November 25 in Santiago, Chile by feminist group Las Tesis outside the country’s Supreme Court to mark the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.”
We have to rise up in rage at every instance of sexual violence; we have to protest every harassment and microaggression while exposing how it connects to the whole iceberg of sexual violence; we have to fight caste and race based oppression exposing how its existential dependence on patriarchy; we have to fight predatory capitalism that profits from social hierarchies and the destruction of the planet; and in our fights and outrages on the street, we have to be careful not be used by one dominating force against the other. The most liberating movements that could guide the society in this fight are those led by Dalit and Adivasi women, Black and Indigenous women, Trans and Gender non-conforming people.