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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Bonding and Fantasy-Bhaswati Chakravorty

Bonding and Fantasy-Bhaswati Chakravorty

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published Published on Jul 11, 2013   modified Modified on Jul 11, 2013
-The Telegraph


Has rape become an inspiring act? Protest, debate, anger, mutual blame, marches, mob violence are spilling out of streets and screens, yet the rape count continues to rise relentlessly, almost as if the outrage over one incident is inciting the next one. Such a narrative is to an extent encouraged by the way incidents are reported in newspapers and television, but the facts are inescapable, and everybody, including the rapist and the rapist-to-be, is a consumer of media. Even the police appear to be taking action when forced into it, and there have been a number of arrests - although the Kamduni chargesheet shows that the arrests signify only a cosmetic change. But the last is a different matter. The point is that arrests do happen; yet these do not seem to cause even social shame. There is another rape soon afterwards.

Increasing sound and fury appear to be matched by an escalation in the frequency and physical hideousness of the crime. This may partly be an illusion, as many would argue: there is more awareness, more reporting, more outrage rather than a substantive growth in the actual number of reported rapes. But that argument strengthens the point. Instead of deterrence, the increased attention appears to be acting at best as irrelevant and at worst as stimulus. And if zero tolerance is the ideal, then the achievement so far is a blackly topsy-turvy world in which those violated and often killed are getting progressively, and shockingly, younger.

Rape is as old as human history, but when the National Crime Records Bureau says that it is the fastest growing crime in India, it calls for an understanding of the precise conditions that are nurturing this growth. While it is important not to forget that the fight against rape and all other women-targeted crimes is the fight for women's rights to live, move, study and work freely, to share space equally with men, and the universal weapons of that fight are education and awareness for both boys and girls, it is also necessary to look at more specific issues. For example, it may matter who is speaking to whom, how such messages translate as they move from country to city and city to country, from penthouse apartment to canal-side shack and vice versa. Is the language of solidarity enough?

The threat of rape itself is a weapon against women, and, together with the pressure from pious policemen and pompous politicians to dress ‘decently' and not go out after dark, it is forcing women and girls to accept the home as shelter. But that space is no different from the deserted stretch down which the student from Derozio College walked home on her last day. Soon after her death, a 12-year-old student of Class V in New Barrackpore was found strangled at home, where she had been alone for a while. Although the police said it was just a strangling, her family was convinced it was a rape. In Gaighata, around the same period, an eight-year-old student of Class III was left bleeding after a brutal rape while she was alone at home. A little before that, a 13-year-old had been found raped and murdered in a field in the same area. From rooms at home to fields and roads, from taxis to running buses - every space has its particular characteristics, history, function and convergence of users. Strategies for resisting the violation of each have to be evolved with these specifics in mind. And then it is the room at home that would remain the most vulnerable.

Recent reports of rape, gang-rape, and rape-and-murder in this state are throwing up a suggestion that needs to be handled with care. Assuming that it might be a covert but self-perpetuating theme in media reports, and also that not all rapes are reported, attention is being drawn towards the fact that girls going to school and college from homes where the father is perhaps a mason, a small trader or a daily wage earner are often targets of the sex criminal. The perpetrators, too, may have a distinct, if fluid, social identity: local strongmen or their followers, coming from a swelling population of middlemen, local developers, suppliers of anything one can pay for, licit or illicit, owner-manufacturers of country liquor and their customers, idlers with money made from selling inherited land for modern apartments, hotels, shopping plazas and factories. Not all of them are uneducated: this is the vision of a clash between two polarized aspirational segments, with violent domination and sometimes annihilation as the strategy of the segment that thrives on the edges of the law. Kamduni exposed the landscape of development. This is also a mindscape that development may spawn on its way, through a transitory yet dangerous forming and re-forming of classes, resources and desires. This does not answer the question why women are the preferred targets in this conflict, but the picture itself may be worth thinking about.

But again, such a theme is also a function of media attention and selectiveness. Changes - economic and cultural - occur at all levels. The numbers of reported rapes fall far short of the reality. The shame of rape is overwhelming, and the criminal is often familiar or even close to the person hurt. It is more than likely that sexual violence has increased in other spaces. Enquiry and comparison would show if date rapes have increased, for example, or party sex with unwilling or frightened ‘friends'. Can such situations be addressed in the same terms of education, enlightenment, safety and freedom as those applied to the events in Kamduni or Murshidabad? Freedom and agency were what Suzette Jordan thought she had when she went to the nightclub in Park Street. She has reclaimed them, but that was her personal courage.

It was the rape and torture of the girl in the Delhi bus that suggested the need for more, and different, questions. The aspirational element mentioned earlier was there then - the girl's family had migrated to Delhi so that she could study - although this may not have been directly relevant to the encounter that destroyed her. We cannot know why the potential criminals chose to pick her up together with her young male friend. The destruction of her dream to rise beyond her background may have remained her private tragedy, not an element in the conflict.

There was a surreal quality in the entire sequence. It was a play, where a group of men played different parts to lure the victims, and having put the companion violently out of commission, they watched one another rape and then torture the victim, orchestrating perfectly the change of hands at the wheel. The excitement of driving the bus around the city while taking a girl deliciously apart must have been acute. There was elated confidence even in throwing the pair out, without bothering to check if they were alive or dead - an elation that can be sensed, if only as a vibrating chord in the memory, in some of the recent rapes in Bengal.

It is necessary to acknowledge and think through the theatricality of the Delhi episode. It could have been a YouTube clip, or a film or visual from some other source available at the the click of a mouse. Shared spaces in internet cafes, weekend blue film sessions made possible by pooled resources, or as a kind gift from a prospering friend, in a local club or the friend's new flat, may all have a role in the creation of that theatre. Such sources of inspiration or even imitation may lie behind what was done to the girl besides the serial rapes. The increasing cruelty of recent rapes - of the girl in Kamduni, for example - evokes the same sense of sick elation and theatricality. It is no longer possible to shy away from these connections, even though they impinge on the holiest of political correctnesses, freedom of choice and creation. Addressing them does not mean censorship - it means thinking.

In the bus, the men were enacting a fantasy. Rape and torture were a shared fantasy, the enjoyment of which was both intensely personal, felt on and through the body, as well as shared, like a successful collective enterprise. The men's companionate contact was through extreme violence upon a woman. To label this simply as the product of a culture that glorifies violence is not enough; it would need analysis on the basis of refinements of violence, hatred, domination and submission imaged in secretly watched visuals, and connected to dreams of possession and annihilation, and the sense of power achieved through contempt, resentment, hatred, sex-and-bloodlust and a new kind of male bonding.

There may be a route here to an understanding of the increase in gang-rapes. Fantasy may even have a role when a young man crosses over to his neighbours' house to rape their eight-year-old daughter. Such incidents have occurred innumerable times through the years, but it has to be asked if it is still the same crime.

While commenting that rape is a rising trend in India, the NCRB is also mapping the growth in violence and criminality with relation to other crimes while the country goes through a period of rapid change. Rape is part of this larger background, but it also stands out, although it has provoked the most massive popular protests. The search for reasons could continue, exploring why the police are almost uniformly reluctant to register complaints of rape, why the conviction rate is so abysmal, why the Union government diluted the Verma committee recommendations so shamelessly or why the West Bengal government, irrespective of which party is in power, is always anxious to claim either that it is too common an affair to bother with or that the target of violence is to blame.

Why does the Indian State love rapists? Does that add to the rapists' inspiration?

The Telegraph, 11 July, 2013, http://www.telegraphindia.com/1130711/jsp/opinion/story_17101976.jsp#.Ud5PPazcjco


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