Equal

Calls for hanging discourage examination of the conditions of injustice in which sexual violence is embedded.

Are all rapes equal?

What a terrible question to ask, you will say. You are right. All rapes and violent murders should equally horrify and anguish a society and equally call for justice. But they don’t.

A dead rape victim, as many have pointed out, is more keenly defended than one who has survived rape. One who comes from a background seen as meritorious (read upper caste) elicits more outrage. A 14 year-old Dalit girl was gang raped, abducted and mutilated in Muzaffarpur around the same time as the Kolkata rape, but, as many pointed out, brutal rapes and murders of Bahujan women rarely elicit attention.

People proclaim they are exhausted because nothing changes. Maybe it’s worth assessing if one’s own unchanged responses are part of that stasis.

As in 2012, there is now an instantaneous cry of “hang the rapists”.  “We want the hanging. Mamata Banerjee says she wants it, but actually she does not” said Agnimitra Paul of the BJP as proof that her party’s commitment to justice is pure as ghee. “There must be swift investigation into crimes against women and those responsible should face punishment without delay” said the Prime Minister. Here is a party that garlanded the rapists of Bilquis Bano, did not stand for the wrestlers molested by Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, and under whose government the Nirbhaya Fund has remained largely unutilised. A commitment to hanging is not the same as a commitment to justice.

As the political activist Kavita Krishnan wrote, “The men convicted of raping and killing a woman in Delhi in 2012 were hanged. We were told the death penalty would be a deterrent. It isn’t, is it? The rapists at RG Kar hospital weren’t deterred by the memory of those hangings”.

Calls for hanging discourage examination of the conditions of injustice in which sexual violence is embedded.

Reports suggest that the RG Kar crime was retaliation for questioning illegal activities at the hospital. Terming it a suicide, destroying evidence, threatening protestors, point to collusion and cover up for people with power. Similar cases—Payal Tadvi’s death, the Hathras case, attracted considerably less attention. What does the silence around them cover up? Structures of power—like caste—in which all of society is implicated?

Women from Powai’s Hiranandani complex held a protest for women’s safety, but did not allow women from the demolished slum of Jai Bhim Nagar, who have been living unprotected on footpaths for two months to join. They accused them of “hijacking the issue”. If you cannot make the connection between one lack of safety and another, if you cannot see two kinds of women as working women, can you claim to speak for all women?

In 2012, many men rushed to prove their sensitive wokeness through bad poems, something that has been much critiqued. Yet Ayushman Khurrana now recited another. Why don’t men of influence feel they should be informed by feminist critique and reflect critically on their politics? And what does that allow to remain unchanged?

All rapes are not equal because all people are not equal. Justice is elusive in an unjust society. Rape is an act of power, so as we rightly mourn and rage about a crime, we also need to think how our everyday politics can shift that power; to reach for meaningful ongoing solidarities not just well-meaning clichés and passing retribution.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com

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