India can't hide its rape culture by hanging Jyoti Singh's murderers
Their swinging bodies will absolve us of our complicity, our vicious participation in the culture of rape.
In December, 2012, I came home from the first evening of protests at India Gate, shaking. On my left were people asking for death penalty, on my right people were asking for chemical castration. In between were smug self-proclaimed progressive Left student groups with posters asking for death penalty and glib leaders speaking against it.
In any case, the ultra Left had called for death penalty in the Billa-Ranga case decades ago.
Most of the rage was coming from men. Aggressive, North Indian men who otherwise harass women on the streets of Delhi every day of their pathetic lives were suddenly up in arms against rape. Just like those Anna Hazare anti-corruption men who parked their bikes illegally and paid tullas bribes to be able to attend the anti-corruption protests and saw no contradiction in it. Men were leading meetings on it, morchas on it, shutting women down saying this was a time for men to stop rape.
Not that the women were any better. Women across Facebook and the streets were asking for these men to be hanged, publicly lynched and even reprisal-raped.
One of my dearest friends, a rape victim, lost me as a dearest friend forever by baying for the blood of the rapists on Facebook. The moral outrage was high, the thinking absent.
At a friend’s house, on one of the subsequent days of protest, we watched numbed as the media kept asking in the repetitive, moronic way unique to Indian TV, why there was no leader to this protest, no party.
Some feminists, few days later, issued a statement against death penalty for the rapists.
Everybody was so angry. Everybody wanted justice. The media was perplexed. Even the Right wing wanted justice. They had no side to take any more.
It was like some public, collective catharsis.
But all catharsis is also about complicity and the refusal to see that complicity is what was so annoying about the rage, the grief, the public outrage and the public mourning.
The appropriation of Jyoti Singh’s voice, starting with robbing her of her name and her re-christening as the projection of our fantasies, was hideous.
Every time the case came up in the subsequent years, as with Leslee Udwin’s unremarkable and quite useful documentary India’s Daughter, all it was used for was to bay for the blood of the men who had raped Jyoti Singh and to feel morally superior about it: over these men, over a white woman filmmaker.
Never mind that she was a rape victim herself. Never mind that some of the self-righteous people attacking the film had agreed to be in it. One of the men interviewed in the film was repulsive because, apparently, his face showed no remorse. We became expert face readers of other people’s remorselessness, never pausing for a second to look at our own hideous faces.
It is as if only the bodies of these men will assuage us. But assuage what?
The fact that rapes continue to happen every day even after December 16, 2012?
The fact that we ignore the rapes of Dalit women (which happened around then in Bagana) or of the disabled (the Nepali woman in Rohtak) and a million other cases that followed and continue to happen (like the rapes of adivasi women in Chhattisgarh and elsewhere?
The fact that the rape culture is so endemic in our culture, rape jokes are what we laugh at all the time and celebrate in all our popular films, in all languages?
The fact that the recognition of our implication in this rape culture is not just some token self-berating from the privileged, but active participation? That participation is through our silence and continued toleration of this indefensible culture.
Mrinal Satish, in a recent book whose stupidity can only come from a law professor, argues that with a new sentencing commission we will have better judgments on rape cases, that stereotypes can be willed away by weeding them out through rational processes and tests. If only life were so simple!
The spectacle of dead men hanging from ropes is the only image that will assuage us. Their swinging bodies will absolve us of our complicity, our vicious participation in the culture of rape. Even the Supreme Court, often the last bastion of common sense in the country, feels absolved.
And we can all crouch before our air conditioners, eat popcorn and watch the show which may well be televised.