Two stories of violence against women that shook us up

On 23 June 2000, Vidya Prabhudesai, a forty-one-year-old typist with the Reserve Bank of India, was waiting at a bus stop near Mumbai Central station. It was 9.40 a.m., still rush hour. Hundreds of people walked briskly in all directions, either running to catch a local train or having just got off one. In all respects, it was an ordinary day.

But for Prabhudesai, this was no ordinary day. As she waited, someone came up behind her, doused her with kerosene and set her on fire. As she screamed and writhed in agony, people watched in horror, and then went on their way. Initially no one stopped to help her. Finally two people did. They rushed Prabhudesai to the nearby government hospital, where she was able to record her dying statement. She did not survive the burns.

The man who committed this crime was Rasik Solanki, a tailor. He admitted that he attacked her because she had spurned his offer of marriage. Solanki tried to kill himself by swallowing insecticide, but survived. And thanks to the statement of the two people who came to Prabhudesai’s aid, Solanki was convicted for life two years later.

Twelve years later, the story was different. On a cold December night, in Munirka, New Delhi, a twenty-three-year-old woman and her friend waited for a bus. It was 16 December 2012. They had just seen the film Life of Pi at a mall in Saket. They jumped on to a bus that they thought would take them to their destination. Instead, the woman was brutally raped by six men in the bus, as the driver drove without stopping. Her companion was severely beaten up.

At some point, both of them were thrown out of the moving bus. They lay inert on the side of the road, unable to do anything. Cars whizzed by. No one stopped, or noticed. Finally, a pedestrian saw them, called the police, after which they were taken to a hospital.

The young woman struggled to overcome her multiple injuries. She died on 29 December in Singapore, where her lower middle-class parents, with help from the government, had taken her in one last attempt to save her life.

These two incidents, separated by more than a decade, illustrate a range of realities facing Indian women today. If in the year 2000, a woman could be attacked by a spurned lover during the morning peak hour in a city like Mumbai, what has changed twelve years later when a young woman is gang-raped in a moving bus in India’s national capital?

In fact, a great deal has changed, principally the nature of the media and the technology that allows news and events to travel at unbelievable speed. There is also a generational shift, where young women are not willing to remain silent in the face of the growing violence they encounter in the public space. In 2000, Prabhudesai’s death brought no one onto the streets to assert that women have a right to say ‘no’. And there was barely any coverage in the newspapers. Twelve years later, the streets exploded with angry young people, mostly women, demanding that the government act to punish the rapists and also change the law. The media gave the demonstrations wall-to-wall coverage.

The difference in the media’s response in 2000 and 2012 is notable for a number of reasons. Both incidents took place in metropolitan cities that have a large media presence, and both the women were middle class and educated and not part of the burgeoning population of the urban poor.
Their class matters because the media tends to focus on crimes committed on the class that reads their publications or watches their television channels.

The difference in the media’s response was partly determined by the nature of the media; in 2000 it was still predominantly print, while in 2012, privately-owned television channels dominated. In the first case, the victim was a nondescript, middle-aged woman, looking after elderly parents, in a dead-end job. In the second, it was a young woman, striving to become something that no one in her family had achieved. The latter made for a more gripping story.

The brutal gang rape and eventual death of the young woman in Delhi is a significant moment in the journey of Indian women protesting against violence and sexual assault. After decades, young women and men, who had never before participated in demonstrations, came out on the streets because they could relate to what happened to the woman. For women, young and old, the fear of being sexually assaulted is a daily reality. They are accustomed to avoiding dark and lonely places, and to assuming that danger lurks in public spaces. They are acutely aware of how this leads to a loss of mobility.

The public outrage and the demonstrations could have been handled with greater sensitivity by the government. Instead, its obduracy escalated them, egged on by obsessive media coverage on twenty-four-hour television news channels. Instead of listening to what these young people were demanding, the authorities tried to close down the demonstrations, even using water cannons in the chill of a Delhi winter. Finally, when none of this could still the anger, on 22 December 2012, the government conceded by setting up a committee headed by a retired Supreme Court judge, the late Justice J. S. Verma, to look at the rape laws.

The Justice Verma committee, unlike others of its ilk, managed to produce a remarkable report within one month. It contained detailed recommendations about changes in the law relating to rape and sexual assault. More importantly, the report went beyond changes in the law. It addressed many other aspects that contribute to an environment where public spaces become unsafe for women. For instance, it recommended that stalking be deemed a crime. At the same time, it also acknowledged that the majority of crimes take place within homes and urged that the question of marital rape as a crime be revisited.

Sadly, typical of all governments, the Verma Committee recommendations were only accepted in part. Nevertheless, some fairly significant changes were made in the rape laws through the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013. The suggestion about stalking, for instance, was accepted.

One questionable addition initiated by the government in the amended law was the introduction of the death penalty for particularly brutal rapes. This was a recommendation that the Verma Committee did not make. To quote from the report:

In our considered view, taking into account the views expressed on the subject by an overwhelming majority of scholars, leaders of women’s organizations, and other stakeholders, there is a strong submission that the seeking of death penalty would be a regressive step in the field of sentencing and reformation.

Instead, the committee recommended that in cases of aggravated sexual assault, the convict should be sentenced to a life of rigorous imprisonment. The report stated that this would be ‘in the larger interests of society, and having regard to the current thinking in favour of abolition of the death penalty, and also to avoid the argument of any sentencing arbitrariness, we are not inclined to recommend the death penalty’.

The government did not heed the central message of the Verma Committee that the death penalty does not necessarily act as a deterrent against crimes, but could result in arbitrariness in sentencing. Instead, it chose a populist response to the cries of ‘death to the rapists’ that echoed during the street demonstrations following the Delhi gang rape. Yet again, an important opportunity to discuss the pros and cons of capital punishment for rape, and other crimes, was set aside.

When governments accede to such bloodthirsty cries that are not only medieval but also deficient in logic, they perpetuate a culture of violence and revenge… This is because the philosophy that justifies death to rapists can turn around and justify violent punishment for women who are seen to transgress.

The response of the government, and the media, to the 2012 Delhi gang rape also exemplified the bias in popular understanding about violence against women. The six men who were eventually apprehended (they included one who was a minor), and convicted in a fast track court, were poor, mostly unemployed or underemployed young men living in urban poor settlements. It was convenient then to conclude that middle-class women are threatened by the presence of such men in the public space while obfuscating the larger reality that the majority of incidents of sexual assault and rape occur either within homes, or by men known to the women survivors. But the former was a more comfortable narrative to perpetuate, something the media, especially television, propounded.

The government too chose the easy path of making some changes in the law, including the introduction of the death penalty, while ignoring the substantive recommendations of the Verma Committee that addressed all aspects of violence against women.

It also failed to address the process of getting justice where most cases falter. In the Delhi case, because of public pressure, a fast track court gave a verdict in record time. By 13 March 2013, less than three months after the rape and from the time the men were apprehended, a lower court had awarded the death penalty to four men (the fifth, the driver, had allegedly committed suicide in jail while the minor was given three years in a reform institution). But as poor women who summon up the courage to file such cases know, the justice system wears them out to the point that they eventually give up altogether.

In several ways, these two stories, separated by a dozen years, represent the continuum of violence that women in India face in cities, towns and villages almost on a daily basis. Women are raped, beaten, murdered, deformed through acid attacks, burned alive and hounded out of their homes. The motives for these crimes vary. But most of them are rooted in concepts of male privilege and entitlement and in our rigidly patriarchal family structure. And power. Even men who are otherwise powerless know that they can wield power over women in this way. In turn, women internalize concepts of purity and shame. It is also this shame, and self-blame, that prevents them from reporting such crimes and fighting back…

According to the 2016 NCRB report on crime in India, 94.6 per cent of reported rapes are by people known to the survivors. This makes the reporting of such crimes even more difficult, indeed impossible. In any case, these figures are only of rapes that are reported. The majority would never reach a police station, leave alone a court.

(Extract taken with permission from Aleph Book Company)