Implosion (21 page)

All the protesters – from the women at India Gate and the Hazare crowds to politicians and villagers who blocked industrial projects in West Bengal and Orissa – were demanding something better from modern India after more than two decades of economic development and six decades of post-independence democratic rule. The same message had been carried in November 2007 when 25,000 landless workers marched 320 km to Delhi to highlight their plight as real estate and other developments swept away their traditional agricultural jobs, often forcibly acquiring their land.
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Members of the Gujjar pastoral tribe from Rajasthan, who had marched on Delhi a few months earlier, were asking for official tribal status and public sector job reservations because they felt left out of the growing riches around them. Such rural-based protests, however, rarely aroused more than passing interest in Delhi unless they involved massive violence and killings, or Naxalite activity.

The November 2007 march coincided with a big
Fortune
magazine Global Forum conference, in which a few hundred international businessmen were secluded in the old-style elegance of Delhi’s Imperial Hotel. This prompted Jo Johnson, then the
FT’
s South Asia correspondent (later a Conservative member of parliament in the UK and policy adviser to David Cameron, the prime minister), to write about what the top executives would have seen if they had ventured out of their secluded surroundings: ‘From the stunted and wasted frames of the landless, they would have observed how malnutrition rates, already higher than in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, are rising in many places, as wages lag behind soaring food prices. They would have learnt how the 120m families, who depend on the land for subsistence agriculture, generating no marketable surplus from one season to the next, live in terror of expropriation by state governments operating land scams in the name of development.’
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The common thread in all these protests related to the fact that, while life has been transformed in many ways for the elite and a growing middle class, many things have not changed. Villagers are being left behind as urbanization sweeps through their fields, making real estate profits for speculators, and tribals are losing out as mining companies dig in their remote forest and mountain habitats. Society is still male dominated, defying the economic and social changes of the past 20 years that have transformed many women’s potential careers and lifestyles. Women are also frequently treated with disdain – especially by the police, as was evident with the gang rape and its aftermath.

In none of these instances had the government and other authorities performed adequately. There had been a failure both to transform the police into well-trained and socially responsible guardians of the law, and to revamp and speed up a legal system where cases can last for 20 years or more. It was a mark of official indifference that six years after the 2007 march, politicians were still squabbling about rewriting laws contained in a 1894 Act and curbing government powers to take over land compulsorily without adequate compensation for existing landholders.

Punishment

Even more frightening for the officials who sat huddled, wondering what to do, in the prime minister’s office and ministry of home affairs on Raisina Hill that week in December 2012 was the realization that the anti-rape protests were entirely spontaneous and (despite the gradual involvement of some women’s organizations) had no leader like Hazare, Kejriwal and their hangers-on to mobilize meetings and media hype. There was no one they could either pillory or engage in negotiations, as they had done with Hazare. Hosing and chasing the crowds away was therefore a quick and easy solution, followed by gesture politics that included a flood of sympathetic statements and public appearances from hitherto invisible, silent and often contemptuous politicians and police, plus a security clampdown in the centre of the capital that closed many roads.

The government set up what turned out to be one of the fastest ever committees of inquiry under a distinguished judge, J.S.Verma, a former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, to recommend amendments to the criminal law that would lead to quicker trials and stiffer punishments for sexual assault against women. The Committee submitted its report on 23 January 2013,
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and the government set up fast-track courts and introduced a temporary ordinance which introduced the death penalty for rape that led to death or left a victim in a coma. This was much tougher than the previous seven to ten years’ imprisonment. The minimum sentence was doubled from ten to 20 years, with a maximum of life without parole, for rape of a minor as well as rape by policemen or others in authority, and gang rape. Public demands for the death penalty were met when the ordinance was replaced by new laws in April 2013 providing for execution of repeat offenders – with imprisonment for between 20 years and life before that.
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That led to four of Jyoti Pandey’s rapists being sentenced to death.

Stiffer penalties for police were also included in the new laws, which was significant because the police rarely helped victims, and were sometimes themselves involved in rapes. At the end of 2012, there were, for example, reports of a policeman and his nephew raping a young woman who wanted to be recruited into the force, and of a 17-year-old girl in Punjab committing suicide because she was being harassed after it had taken her 14 days to persuade police to accept her gang-rape accusation. A friend of mine wrote on Facebook
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about how he and a woman lawyer living in west Delhi took an eight-year-old girl to the police with her semiliterate, frightened dhobi (laundryman) father, who lived nearby. The father kept repeating ‘Meri beti ke saath kuch ladkon nein bura kiya’ (some boys have done something bad to my daughter). The police atfirst were sympathetic, but after a day or two said: ‘When both her parents are at work, she crosses two roads and the train tracks to move around with boys of another locality. She is a very bad character, and if any boy does anything to her, she totally deserves it’. The girl was only eight.

Repressed Patriarchal Society

The women’s protest movement, unlike the earlier corruption demonstrations, was genuinely spontaneous and was significant because women suddenly found that, for thefirst time in their lives, they could come out openly and talk about assaults that they had previously kept quiet about. An astonishing number of women have stories of being seriously harassed and attacked, often on buses where eve-teasing (men touching women provocatively) had turned into something more insistent and aggressive. Other stories are of rape nearer home. Statistics indicate that victims’ relatives and neighbours are often the attackers. Police records show that in as many as 96 per cent of the cases men known to the victim were responsible for the rape.
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Bollywood films increasingly encourage frustrated men to assume their victims are available by depicting women provocatively, glorifying instant sex rather than relationships. The easy accessibility of pornographic material on the internet
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and mobile phones is likely to have done even more than films to reduce respect for women and increase the desires and frustrations of young men who have been brought up in a basically repressed society.

India’s patriarchal traditions, which have created a society where women have been dominated by men who show them little respect, were on display in reactions to the outcry over the gang rape. Illustrating the lack of concern about rape, political parties gave tickets in the 2009 general election to six candidates who had declared that they had been charged with rape, and 34 other candidates who declared that they had been charged with crimes against women.
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In traditional male-dominated rural societies, and in the recently urbanized north Indian states of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, local clan-based councils of male elders called khap panchayats rarely side with rape victims. When a spate of rapes happened in Haryana, a khap panchayat said the solution was for the young to get married, without any minimum age limit, so that their ‘sexual desires find safe outlets’. Often young girls who belong to the Dalit community (‘untouchables’ in the caste system) are raped in a form of lower-caste oppression. Panchayats sometimes suggest a victim should marry the rapist because, so the argument goes, no other man in the locality will have her. Women are blamed for being provocative, or the intercourse is dubbed consensual – a line often taken by the police. Women can also be subjected to a humiliating and irrelevant ‘fingers test’
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to assess sexual activity, which defence lawyers then use to argue that rape has not occurred because such activity has been frequent and consensual. It was only in 2013 that the Supreme Court asked the government to change medical procedures.
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Patriarchal and macho attitudes have been exacerbated by rapid economic change. Women have in the past 20 years or so become free and able to develop professional and other careers where they progress rapidly, often outclassing men in their adaptability and lack of status-consciousness and other hang-ups. This, of course, has happened in many countries in the past 50 to 100 years, but in India it has been enormously faster and also more controversial because of traditional male attitudes that are evident across classes and castes, but are perhaps harshest in villages where these traditions are strong. Women are becoming economically equal with men, and are showing new independence in their careers, frequently outclassing male colleagues, and have more liberated private lives, especially in urban areas. Unemployment among poorly educated young men, who cannot find suitable semi-skilled jobs and have nothing to occupy their time, adds to the problem. There is a ‘crisis of masculinity because women are doing well, and there is a vast pool of less educated and unemployed males who get little respect even at home,’ says Ravinder Kaur, a sociologist at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi.
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Khap panchayats produce clan-based, chauvinistic and often violent reactions to social issues such as mixed-caste marriages, especially in Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, where the khap leaders are anxious to maintain their social importance in a rapidly modernizing environment. They cause ‘honour killings’ that are carried out by families or neighbours of young people who have broken what they see as binding codes of behaviour. Two widows who were said to be in a lesbian relationship were beaten to death in Haryana by a 23-year-old nephew of one of the women, who was a convicted rapist. There are stories of murder and of police not protecting eloping couples.
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In 2011, family members of an 18-year-old girl who had married into a lower caste dragged her out of her in-laws’ home and set her on fire in Andhra Pradesh. In 2010, an Indian man killed his step-daughter in Punjab because she was in love with a Belgium-based lower-caste boy. A couple were electrocuted to death in Delhi because the boy belonged to a different caste.
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That ‘such irrational diktats and barbaric decisions (like urging the murder of violators of marriage norms) are taken within less than 100 km of Delhi has only made for the worst publicity’, says Bhupendra Yadav, a historian.
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The publicity, however, rarely moves beyond the shock and horror of discovering such attitudes exist within sight of the shiny office blocks of Delhi’s satellite cities that house multinational companies. It fails to recognize the massive social changes that have taken place around cities such as Delhi, where social tensions and clashes created by a rapidly modernizing India are most stark.

Hazare’s Movement

A groundswell of public opinion verging on anger against corrupt politicians and other officials led, in the spring of 2011, to mass protests across the country in support of a hunger strike by Hazare, who dressed evocatively with a pointed white cap, crisp white kurta and spectacles, reminiscent in some ways of Mahatma Gandhi. He was demanding legislation to create the Lok Pal, which had been on successive governments’ legislative agendas since the late 1960s but had been continually delayed by objections from MPs and others who did not want their businesses and connections to be liable to investigations.

The government initially reacted dismissively and clumsily to the protests, but eventually caved in when it realized their strength and half-heartedly agreed to set up a joint drafting committee with the social activists to prepare fresh legislation.
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Government and opposition politicians were scared of what might emerge and were anxious to undermine Hazare’s authority and popularity. They assumed that, if they stalled for long enough during the summer months, they would eventually be able to ignore most of his demands. The assumption was that he would not be able to rebuild nationwide support five or six months later because, judging by previous experience, protestors’ enthusiasm and energy would be dissipated and would not easily be revived. This seriously underestimated the strength of middle-class opinion driving the protests. This was not a frenetic rabble, brought onto the streets by vested interests but a young middle-class revolt that had a life of its own, separate from the ambitions of attention seekers who thronged around Hazare, including Baba Ramdev, a colourful black-bearded, saffron-robed and politically ambitious guru of dubious respectability.

The drafters failed to reach an agreement and Hazare revived his movement in June 2011, threatening a new hunger strike. In a panic, the government stupidly put him in jail when he failed to agree to terms for the length of his fast and accompanying mass protests. It then quickly reversed that decision and tried to release him, but he mocked the authorities by continuing to refuse food in jail until terms were agreed for a 15-day public fast. (Sonia Gandhi was ill in the US at this time, having had, it was widely assumed, an operation for cancer, and her absence contributed to the government’s ineptitude).