Women’s Rights in India on Women’s Day 2020
A year’s highlights in state atrocities and feminist resistances
Soon after coming to power in 2014, speaking at the launch of the Beti Bachao Beti Padhao scheme in 2015, Narendra Modi had said —
“I have come to you today with a pain in my heart. The world that speaks of humanity, in the same world, a girl child is killed in the mother’s womb.”
Modi was re-elected for a second term last year, 2019. Earlier this year, over 175 women’s organisations and feminists wrote an open letter to Modi during the Delhi Assembly elections, which stated —
“Vote for BJP or you will get raped! Is this your election message to Delhi’s women?… Is the BJP now openly endangering the lives of India’s women and children? This is what history will record and India will not forgive, Mr Prime Minister.
The man that speaks of beti bachao beti padhao, the same man, issues rape threats as part of his election campaign. While there is no moral justification for Modi to still be in power, the problem truly is bigger than one man’s doing. Focusing on one man hides the infrastructure of misogyny that he stands upon and that keeps him in place. Here I want to focus on the various institutional failures across all branches of the state’s machinery, from the parliament to the judiciary to law enforcement officers, that have contributed to the dismal state of women’s rights in the country today. The Indian state has not only remarkably failed to address violence against women in the past year, but has actively perpetrated it.
Here, then, I discuss some cases of sexual harassment and violence that came to light in the past year as perpetrated by state actors, to underscore the ubiquitousness of state-sanctioned gendered violence under the current regime. I show that even women-centric Bills that were passed in Parliament last year have hurt the cause of women’s rights. I explain how many of the schemes that were launched and funds that were set up by the state to address sexual violence have failed. In each instance, I highlight the role of women’s movements in the country in building feminist solidarities and putting up a powerful resistance to state atrocities. This post is about how the Indian state has perpetrated violence against women, and how women’s movements have responded in the past year.
Note: This is a partial account, not meant to be representative of every form or instance of violence in the past year in India. In the interest of keeping this post at a readable length, there are omissions present, and they should be attributed entirely to my own limited perspective.
Feminist solidarities
In their campaign for the Delhi 2020 elections, BJP ministers issued slogans and statements inciting violence against protesting women and issuing rape threats publicly — “People of Delhi will have to think and take a decision. They’ll enter your houses, rape your sisters and daughters, and kill them.” Women’s groups across the country organised mass protests, provided relief to victims of violence, and wrote an open letter to Modi in response. In the letter, they not only named BJP ministers responsible for inciting violence, but more importantly, emphasised upon and opposed the underlying threat of rape that the BJP campaign was premised upon.
Every time the Indian state has put women’s rights in violent danger, various women’s movements in the country have unfailingly voiced their dissent. Despite the various hierarchies, differences, and inequalities that have always existed within women’s movements in the country, various movements have come together on many occasions to speak as a united front over the past year.
Queer women who were part of the women’s movements in the 1990s would often hear statements such as “‘Our women will not be able to identify with groups whose names contain words like Lesbian and so we cannot march with them [on women’s day]”. After decades of solidarity-building, women across India marched together on the 4th of April, 2019 (Women’s March) aimed at “uniting voices of dissent against the targeted attacks on the Constitutional rights of women in India” under the banner “औरतें उट्ठी नहीं तो ज़ुल्म बढ़ता जायेगा” (If women don’t rise, atrocities against them will rise). Another national protest march by women, trans and queer communities against CAA, NPR, and NRC was organised on the 3rd of Jan, 2020, on the birth anniversary of Savitribai Phule, the mother of Indian feminism.
Women have been at the forefront of many movements last year, from demanding a reduction in fees at public universities, to demanding the rejection of the CAA and NRC, the latter being perhaps the longest mass sit-in protests by women that the Indian democracy has witnessed on a national scale. Shaheen Baghs were set up all across the country in resistance. Through the harsh cold of the freezing night, through the death of fellow protesters, women persisted. Many cities and towns organised their own protests. Artists traveled the country making protest street art. Musicians and dancers performed at protest sites. In Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh, there seems to be a reversal in gender roles — while women form the mass of the protest, leading it from the centre and on the stage, men stand on the edges, providing food and help to the women. Feminist solidarities have begun to be forged out of the atrocities that have been hurled by the state against women.
Supreme Injustice
One of the worst blows to women’s rights in the country last year was the sexual harassment case against the former Chief Justice of India, Ranjan Gogoi — a heart-breaking account of sexual harassment against a Dalit woman employee in his office. It was handled in a shamefully patriarchal manner from the start, with Gogoi constituting a special Bench and including himself on it to respond to and deny the harassment allegations. He also shamed the complainant, calling the case a conspiracy against the judiciary. Earlier this year, it came to light that the complainant was made to give a written assurance that she would not pursue the matter. A top functionary said “everything would be sorted out and they should not tarnish the image of the country by focussing attention on the case.” The crime was committed by one man, but it was the entire institution of the judiciary that let it go relatively uncontested.
The media too was largely silent about this case, and it received not even a fraction of the public attention that a similar case in the U.S. received around the same time. It was largely women who spoke up against this silence and travesty of justice. The Indian women’s movements have a long and powerful history of resisting violence against women by the state. In 1980, women protested outside the Supreme Court to demand that its judgment in the Mathura rape case (an incident of custodial rape of a young tribal girl in the accused were acquitted) be changed. Thirty-nine years have passed, and in 2019 during the Gogoi case, women were back before the Supreme Court in resistance. They demanded 1. a fair and independent inquiry in the case, 2. the setting up of a credible mechanism to deal with complaints of sexual harassment against judges in the higher judiciary, and 3. greater transparency and accountability of the judiciary. Women got illegally detained and risked going to jail for days in a row during these protests outside the Supreme Court. They suffered police brutality.
Women wrote an open letter in 1979 during the Mathura case stating that “what matters is a search for liberation from the colonial and male-dominated notions of what may constitute the element of consent, and the burden of proof, for rape which affect many Mathuras on the Indian countryside.” Many women’s organisations were formed directly in response to this case in the 1980s. Custodial rape was redefined in law as a result of their feminist efforts. Taking forward those efforts, women’s organisations wrote an open letter again in 2019, stating that “what is at stake is not only the rights of women but also the credibility of the Supreme Court.” Deeper conversations on laws pertaining sexual harassment at the workplace and judicial accountability have similarly started in response to this case. It is too early yet to say what changes they will bring, but history is on our side.
No mercy for (poorer) rapists
When we talk about delays in seeking justice in the judiciary, we attribute it to factors such as convicts filing late petitions. We take for granted the delays that arise due to institutional failures of the state to address sexual violence. In the case of rape and murder of a woman in Telangana last year, the Telangana Home Minister, Mohammad Mahmood Ali, blamed the victim for not calling the police. The Telangana police also allegedly did not immediately file the complaint (citing disputed jurisdiction), and then accused the victim of eloping, as the Telangana victim’s family reported to the National Commission for Women. Following this, the Telangana police shot the four accused rapists in an alleged encounter claiming that they were trying to escape. Continuing the struggle against custodial rape that feminists began in 1970s after the Mathura case, feminists now questioned and opposed the dubious circumstances of this alleged encounter, alleging it instead to be custodial murder.
The four convicted rapists in the Dec. 2012 Delhi gang-rape and murder case (“Nirbhaya”) were issued death warrants and are expected to be hung on March 20 this year. Many Ministers made public statements demanding that the rapists be publicly lynched (Jaya Bachchan, Samajwadi Party MP), castrated (P Wilson, DMK MP), and denied the provision of mercy petitions (Ram Nath Kovind, President of India). These same politicians were silent when it came to demanding punishment for Kuldeep Singh Sengar, a former BJP politician who was convicted for the rape of a minor in 2017 (Unnao case), and sentenced to life imprisonment last year.
Feminists around the country issued a joint statement last year, urging the President of India to commute the death sentence of the four convicts in the Dec. 2012 case to a lifetime in prison. Feminists have historically campaigned for the abolishment of capital punishment as it disincentivizes women from reporting. They argue that most instances of sexual violence against women and children are committed by persons they know — family, friends, or neighbours. In most such cases, grassroots social workers observe that a woman simply wants to be taken away from an abusive husband or father, so she and her children can go elsewhere and get on with their lives. What justice means for that woman in that situation is very complex, and it could mean different things for different people. But when the highest punishment that is available under the law is death, we ask women to choose between not complaining against rapists at all and killing them. Especially in cases where women have to report against their own family members, with the stigma and institutional barriers that already exist for women to report violence, the death penalty is counter-productive to women reporting rape.
Learning to dissent
Another space of state violence against women last year was educational universities. In late 2019, hundreds of Delhi police officers forcefully entered the Jamia Milia Islamia university during a peaceful student protest against the CAA, used lathis and tear gas on the students, and ransacked and attacked them in the university library and washrooms. More than a hundred students were detained. About two hundred students were injured. In another instance of police brutality at the same university this year, doctors claimed that more than 10 woman students were hit on their “private parts”. Similar instances of state violence took place at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Delhi during student protests for a decrease in fees. More than 50 masked people from the Right attacked the JNU campus with rods, sticks and acid. More than 39 students and teachers were injured. Protests broke out in response in various universities, most of them led by female students, many by Muslim female students.
How fragile must the Indian state be to be threatened by a few women with banners that it brings down the force of its entire machinery to stifle their voices? Violence is a cost. It requires effort. This outburst of violence over the past year by the Indian police reveals the effort that goes into maintaining a patriarchal social order.
Police do not belong in universities. When spaces of learning are attacked by the state, the most severely impacted are women. Many women struggle to even be permitted by their families to enrol for studying at the university-level, least of all be able to pay their exorbitant fees. So when universities become expensive, unsafe and violent, it is women who are the first to be made to drop out by their families.
Digital India
Conversations around #MeToo and LoSHA (List of Sexual Harassers in Academia) on sexual harassment in academia had already begun towards the end of 2017, and have over the years expanded to various other fields. Many powerful men have been named in the process. Nana Patekar. Alok Nath. Suhel Seth. Jatin Das. Kiran Nagarkar. Because in this post I focus on state-sanctioned violence, named among the political class was M.J. Akbar, former Minister of State for External Affairs. This year, Delhi High Court heard the criminal defamation charge that had been filed by Akbar in response to sexual harassment allegations by journalist Priya Ramani and several other of her colleagues during the #MeToo movement. Defamation cases have now become an easy channel for powerful men to silence sexual violence survivors. Senior advocate Rebecca John will argue on Ramani’s behalf this 17 March.
Last year, AAP hired Vijay Nair, former OML CEO, ahead of the Delhi assembly elections for their social media team. During #MeToo, Nair was accused of sexual harassment at the workplace while being CEO of OML — asking women to get into the bathtub with him, and for a massage. When asked by a journalist at Caravan about the hire, Atishi (AAP MLA, Delhi) said “Just a complaint is not enough, we have to carefully examine it based on the principle of natural justice.” Whether this examination has been done, and what has come of it, nobody knows.
While #MeToo was a way for women to use the platform of social media as a site of feminist resistance, the same platforms have also been a site of abuse for women (especially activists, journalists, and politicians) by IT Cells of political parties, in particular the BJP. A report released this year by Amnesty International found that 1 in every 7 tweets that mentioned women politicians in India was abusive, 1 in every 5 abusive tweets was sexist or misogynistic, and women politicians from political parties other than the BJP faced more abuse.
The Internet has also been a site of contestation of basic human rights last year — India shut down the internet more than 100 times in 2019. The Indian state’s Internet shutdown in Kashmir for months made it the longest shutdown ever in a democracy. We have been able to record the shocking scale of violence the state perpetrates against women in many parts of the country partly because of the ability to share information online. In a blackout, we cannot even begin to imagine the atrocities that have been committed in Kashmir and north-east India — the Internet is a forum of accountability. Speaking at the India Digital Summit, 2014, Modi had declared, “I dream of a Digital India where access to information knows no barriers.” How do Internet shutdowns fit into that dream?
Beyond digital development, the Indian state’s idea of development has displaced countless persons, livelihoods, and communities over the decades. Stark among the resistance to such development is the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), a social movement led by adivasis, farmers, and human rights activists against various large dam projects across river Narmada. Last year, NBA leader Medha Patkar went on a hunger strike for 9 days after the Gujarat government raised water levels at the Sardar Sarovar dam without rehabilitating the villagers living nearby.
“Protection” of Rights
Last year, the Indian Parliament passed various “Protection of Rights” Bills that the BJP claimed would benefit women and queer communities, but in reality, make matters far worse for them. In 2009, the Delhi High Court had passed a judgment decriminalising consensual homosexual activity between adults in private. In 2013, a Supreme Court judgment re-criminalised homosexual acts. Finally, in 2018, it was decriminalised again. In 2014, the Supreme Court had passed the progressive NALSA judgment that affirmed the right of all Indian citizens to self-identify their gender. In another backtracking, last year, the Indian Parliament passed the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019, that violates this right to self-determination of gender by requiring certificates of gender change to be produced to the District Magistrate.
Specific to violence, the Act punishes sexual violence against trans persons with lower sentences (from 6 months to 2 years, plus a fine) than equivalent sexual crimes against cisgender women. In keeping with the reality that trans women are women and the democratic notion that equivalent crimes should receive equivalent punishment, powerful campaigns were launched against the Act by trans activists. This included regular press conferences, protests, a petition to the President to not sign the Bill, and storming social media with advocacy around how the Act is harmful to the lives of trans communities.
In 2017, the Indian Supreme Court had deemed instant triple talaq (talaq-e-biddah) as unconstitutional. Following this, last year, the Parliament, through the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Bill, 2018, also declared the practice of triple talaq as illegal, making it a punishable act. During the public campaign against the criminalisation of triple talaq, women’s rights activists released a statement appealing to the Members of Rajya Sabha to “completely withdraw the Bill and significantly re-draft it in the interest of Muslim women.” Due to the less privileged socio-economic and cultural conditions of women, they often do not have the same access to education and jobs as men. Hence, the financial support from a woman’s marital home is often the only source of income for her to raise her children and run a home. Feminists argued that by putting the husband behind bars for triple talaq, he would be unable to pay for the woman’s maintenance and support the family. The Bill (now Act) is hence not in the best interests of Muslim women and does not strengthen their negotiating capacities. It is just another space in which the Indian state can now be violent towards Muslim men.
To the not-so-keen bypasser, these “Protection of Rights” Acts sound like they are intended to benefit marginalised communities. But persons from these same communities have led the opposition against the Acts, revealing their truly draconian impact on those intended to be protected by this legislation.
Schemes and Funds
The Modi government has also launched some women-centric schemes, their most popular one being the beti bachao beti padhao (BBBP) scheme, launched in 2015 for the survival, protection and education of the girl child. This is the scheme that most people on the Right point to when they make the case for how Modi has been good for women’s rights in India. By the start of 2019, the government had allocated Rs 648 crore for the scheme since its launch. Of this, it was found that at least 56% (about 364 crore) was spent on “media activities.” A majority of the resources under the BBBP scheme were focused on “building a perception of change rather than initiating measures for actual change on the ground.” That is exactly why so many people intuitively and strongly believe that the BJP has worked towards women’s progress. Though the ground reality remains that last year, it was reported that not a single girl was born in six months across 16 villages of the Uttarkashi district in Uttarakhand, with highly skewed sex ratio of birth in the other 66 villages of the district.
The utilisation of the Nirbhaya fund (which was set up in 2013 for the empowerment, safety and security of women and girl children) was less than 20% until last year. This year under the same fund, the State is installing CCTVs everywhere for the “safety of women,” who are historically already the most surveilled and controlled communities. There are CCTVs in public schools, and plans to introduce AI as a subject in school curriculums, but there are no sex education classes or sanitary pad machines in washrooms. The Indian state plans to address sexual violence by “tracking and monitoring” kids on camera. Many of the technological solutions supported by these funds are either dysfunctional (such as crisis helplines and One Stop Centres for medical, legal and psychological support to women affected by violence) or do not add up to a meaningful institutional support system for redressing cases of sexual violence (such as CCTVs and panic buttons).
The idea of using technology for development is deeply embedded in India’s post-colonial history, with the progress of science and technology historically being a national priority. But the state is yet to learn that technology cannot solve our social problems. Technology cannot fix what culture has broken.
She inspires us
A few days back, Modi tweeted that he would be giving his social media accounts over to “women who inspire us” for this Women’s Day (#SheInspiresUs). But which inspiring women will he hand it to? The protesting women of Shaheen Bagh who his Ministers have issued violent threats against? Gauri Lankesh who was killed by goons of the state for her powerful dissenting voice? Sudha Bharadwaj who has been framed and imprisoned for standing up for human rights? Thousands have died and millions continue to face violence every single day through this state’s actions. On Women’s Day, I don’t want Modi’s Twitter handle, I just want our women back.
I want public sex education about consent. Entry for women wherever the hell we please. Free or subsidised education. Free or subsidised sanitary napkins. Sensitivity and gender training for law enforcement officers. Structural changes and judicial reforms to make rape trials move faster. Marital rape to be criminalised. Survivors of sexual violence to be given meaningful rehabilitation and treated respectfully by lawyers and doctors. Testimonies of survivors to be believed and valued. Death penalty to be abolished. Police to be strictly kept out of educational universities. A credible mechanism to deal with complaints of sexual harassment against judges in the higher judiciary. Protection for women from defamation cases when they call out abusers. Men alleged through #MeToo to be investigated before being hired. Internet shut-downs to not be a state whim. And legislative bills, government schemes, and state funds that actually benefit women, not just claim to.
“I will do what I can and I will say what I should. These intolerant voices find strength in our silence. Let them learn to argue using words instead of threats.” — Gauri Lankesh
Ramachandra Guha writes (in 2007) in his book on the history of modern India that there have historically been four major ‘axes of conflict’ in the country — caste, language, religion, and class, in that order. Regarding gender, on the other hand, he mentions that “as an axis of discrimination, gender … has not so often expressed itself in open and collective protest.” This post has tried to highlight how in just the past one year, gender has expressed itself in open and collective protest. Given the increasing state atrocities against women and queer communities, gender has historically always expressed itself in open and collective protest. There have been fissures along the way, and struggles with solidarities, but that is true of any people’s movement in the history of the world. Gender’s expression and protest has however been given far lesser focus or been subject to selective amnesia when writing about India’s history. Today’s present will be tomorrow’s history. When historians of tomorrow look back upon this period of time in modern India, let it never again be said that women were not an organised, powerful movement to reckon with.
