AAP deserves the two-finger test

Whether it's a Union health minister pulling the rug over a blatantly sexist "Putrajeevak Beej" from the stable of Baba "Patanjali" Ramdev to Delhi government's uncouth and unsuccessful move to rehabilitate the nauseating two-finger test to examine rape survivors, India's gender equation remains skewed beyond belief.

And the gist of Indian patriarchy's (a curious mix of caste, class and religion in conflict with gender, body and sexualities) ultimate assault can be distilled in what Michel Foucault had termed the "medical gaze", a particularly odious manner of rationalising and legitimising the worst forms of discrimination. This is where unsubstantiated pseudoscience, in the garb of health and medical examinations, meets the most heinous forms of prejudice, against women in general, and rape survivors in particular. The medico-penal gaze, like the inserted two fingers of the medical representative, mostly male, is, by default, the act two of the serial and institutional violation of the female body.

The Supreme Court might have dismissed it as null and void, the Union health ministry under the former UPA government might have outlawed it, but that doesn't stop the Aam Aadmi Party government in Delhi to try resurrect a circular extolling the circumstantial virtue of the two-finger test. The reason: "To do away with this essential pelvic examination would amount to incomplete assessment of the survivor, which will ultimately result in injustice and low conviction rates."

Note the urgency. The circular rests entirely on the munificent need of the AAP government to ensure justice is meted out and conviction is upheld, even if it's at the expense of subjecting the survivor to the same degree of debilitating humiliation, putting her bodily and psychological integrity at risk all over again. Moreover, the two-finger test (basically a junk method to fix a woman's so-called virginity, or lack thereof, by scrutinising her hymen; her proclivity for sexual liaisons; and, the assumption that any sign of sexual activity is an indication of automatic consent, thereby excluding the possibility of rape altogether) is just as redundant and invasive as the crime it has set out to establish in the first place.

So much for the medico-legal support available to women in this country.

This is yet another example of how the system - from ministries to bureaucracies to government appendages like our hospitals and police force - routinely falls back on the same mindset that is the basis of the sexual crime to begin with. What's the difference between a male sexual offender who considers rape or molestation as merely a way of being a man in the Indian context, and the so-called state that subjects the survivor to the same illogic of digital dehumnaisation?

Since vaginal penetration with an object is "rape" under the bolstered anti-rape law, isn't the State raping the woman yet again by subjecting her to the unsound and absolutely unfounded two-finger test? And, if that's beyond the pale of Delhi government's medical/legal understanding, then we need to ask how is it that a democratically elected government, one that has been given an unprecedented mandate in the brief history of the national capital's electoral experiments, stoops to such uneducated and misogynistic level so as to even consider bringing back this outdated and thoroughly debunked "test"?

It's hardly news that misogyny and everyday politics are like wine and cheese: they just go together. So, if you have a serving prime minister uttering #DespiteBeingAWoman while addressing a neighbouring nation where both the ruling power and the main opposition are headed by formidable women, and whose birth itself was a saga of one woman's insurmountable courage, why should we be surprised that a state government, like the one in Delhi, should fare any better?

While casual sexism in the BJP or Samajwadi Party might be more obvious (latest example includes the SP's Totaram Yadav, who thinks rapes happen with mutual consent), even the AAP has displayed ample evidence of closet bias in the past. Somnath Bharti's midnight misadventure in Khirki Extension against a group of African women in January 2014 reeked of not just sexism but blatant racism as well.

Increasingly, sexual independence of women is being used as an excuse to reconfigure the blame-game so as to make the women liable for rape. There's practically no notion of either "consent" or "dissent", wherein women are never expected have any opinion whatsoever, forever assenting to sexual liaison unless she's married, and therefore, rightfully "owned" by another man. 21st century India is a hothouse of bans and prohibitions, while at once being a simmering cauldron of some of the most brutal and barbaric sexual crimes ever committed.

Isn't it a shame that the hard-earned legislations to curb sexual offences like rape, in the wake of the massive upheaval that was the Nirbhaya movement, are being callously squandered and twisted at the altar of deep-set patriarchy? Instead of moving ahead, we, en masse, are taking one step backwards every single day. From re-criminalisation of sexual minorities to reinstating the most outrageous of medicolegal methodologies, it seems we are onboard a bullet train of bullshit.