Betis
As Bombs – Exploding
The Borders Of Caste And Community
By Kavita Krishnan
12 April, 2007
Countercurrents.org
In every house there
is a live bomb that can erupt at any time. Do you know who that is?
Daughters are the honour of the family and the community, and to protect
that is our Hindu duty and Hindu culture... . Come, and let's unite
to save bombs... I don't believe in love marriage. We have to marry
within our own community. These girls go to college, make friends with
some lafanga [loafer], roam with them on their bikes, fall in love,
and then run off and get married…We bring them back and convince
them that they are ruining their future. They stay with me for a while
and then return to their parents." - Babu Bajrangi,
Frontline, Dec 16-29 2006
Bajrangi
is the VHP leader who gained notoriety recently for being the unofficial
censor for the film Parzania in Ahmedabad. Less known in the fact that
he boasts of having 'rescued' (kidnapped) no less than 918 women from
his Kadwa Patel community who eloped to marry men outside the community
– 70% of whom were Muslim or Christian men, and the rest were
from other sub-castes.
The Gujarat genocide was
marked by the rape of Muslim women and mutilation of their bodies by
the Sangh Parivar. Such rapes were celebrated as acts of nationalism.
Bajrangi's acts of 'rescue' of Hindu women from marriages with 'other'
men are also projected as acts of nationalism. The borders of caste
and (religious) community need to be policed for infiltration from the
enemy with as much vigilant surveillance as the borders of the nation.
In fact, the border of each community (and family within it) is the
border of nation in microcosm. The difference is that the borders of
the family and community are lined with explosive from within. They
are forever vulnerable because the sexuality of their own daughters
has the potential to explode those boundaries and call into question
the very foundation of racial purity on which the cultural nationalism
of the Hindu Rashtra rests.
There are many who hold Hindutva's
violent codes to be a kind of Talibanic aberration and appeal to Hindus
to distinguish it from the essentially liberal soul of Hinduism. See
for instance Sitaram Yechury's piece written in the wake of the Babri
Masjid demolition, titled Pseudo-Hinduism Exposed: The Reality of the
Saffron Brigade's Myths. This piece explicitly contrasts liberal Hinduism
to the impostor – 'pseudo-Hinduism' or Hindutva. Typically, this
piece attributes India's democracy to the choice in favour of secular
democracy made by its Hindu majority and contrasts it with intolerant
Islamic theocracies (implying that those theocracies are attributable
to the choice made by intolerant Islamic majority?). As an extension
of this thesis, Yechury observes, "The rabid intolerance of other
religions (in Islamic theocracies) is matched by ruthlessly suppressive
laws that deny elementary democratic rights especially to women."
The implication is that India in contrast assures those democratic rights
to its women.
But it would be a mistake
to imagine that this aspect of Hindutva – Bajrangi's brand of
violent policing of women, or the Bajrang Dal's threat issued a few
years back, that Hindu women who married Muslims would have their noses
cut off, or its periodic threats against women wearing jeans or couples
celebrating Valentine's Day – marks a rupture with a gentler and
more benign Hinduism. Communal fascism of the Hindutva variety draws
sustenance from the widely prevailing anxiety of Hindu caste communities
about breaching of patriarchal codes, caste and community boundaries
– and the resultant threat to property relations and status. These
anxieties are not the unique preserve of 'backward' rural communities;
Prem Chowdhry shows us how modern phenomena like granting of legal inheritance
rights to women and the social consequences of urbanisation in Haryana
intensify these anxieties and the resultant violence against those who
disobey marriage codes. ('Enforcing Cultural Codes: Gender and Violence
in Northern India', A Question of Silence: The Sexual Economies of Modern
India, ed. Mary John and Janaki Nair, 1998)
Uma Chakravarti has remarked
how brahminical patriarchy has for long regarded women of upper castes
as 'gateways' or points of breach into the caste system – requiring
careful surveillance to preserve upper caste purity – and this
"obsessive concern with policing female sexuality" has become
a stubborn feature across caste groups (Uma Chakravarti, Gendering Caste:
Through a Feminist Lens, 2003, pp 35-36). She notes that there is "widespread
'consent', in the sense that Gramsci outlines it, within civil society
to regard choice, particularly when articulated by a woman as disruptive
of the whole social order...and 'with free choice of partners involving
women, the whole social fabric seems to suffer a terrible tear'."
(Chakravarti, pp152-53) It is the existence of such consent for obsessive
control of women's sexual choice, such widespread fear of a 'terrible'
tear inflicted by women's free choice, that sustains and 'naturalises'
Bajrangi's mass abduction spree as a patriotic act. Bajrangi's mass
abductions are able to masquerade as a grotesque version of a more common
ideology and practice of 'guardianship' (brother as guardian of sister's
honour) celebrated by popular cinema and serials and normalised by the
festival of Raksha Bandhan. Adult women are legally beyond the scope
and control of 'guardianship'. Yet the ideology of guardianship (closely
tied up with control of female sexuality, reproduction and labour) and
its twin, the ideology that makes women the repositories of izzat or
honour of the community/nation is perpetuated. The 'honour' killings
decreed by caste panchayats for lovers who transgress codes of caste
and community and Bajrangi's abductions thus breathe the same ideological
oxygen.
This leads us to ask: can
Left movements and women's movements challenge communal fascist violence
against women without also challenging the ideology of guardianship
and izzat? In the case of agrarian labour communities, usually dalit
or extremely backward, there is tremendous resistance to the sexual
exploitation of women by upper caste men, and Chakravarti notes that
the "issue of izzat is central to peasant movements in Bihar under
various Marxist-Leninist formations and in dalit movements" (Chakravarti,
p 169). While resistance to sexual violence will continue to be a powerful
mobilisational issue, these movements need to be alert to the dangers
of the connotations and implications of izzat. These movements must
guard against bearing the baggage of resentment against the upper caste
taunts that lower caste women have no izzat to begin with or that lower
caste men are 'unable' to 'protect' 'their' women. In other words, such
radical political mobilisation must assert the autonomy and freedom
of women who are dalit agrarian labourers – and must guard against
framing the struggle in terms of asserting the 'ability' of lower caste
men to 'protect' the 'izzat' of women and of their community. This means
asserting the sexual freedom and autonomy of women within the community
as much as against the oppressor without.
We need to recognise the
links between Babu Bajrangi's assaults on women's freedom, and those
structures and practices that we tend to take as normative, natural
and acceptable – such as the practice of arranging marriages within
one's caste and community, disapproving of independent relationships
forged by one's sisters or daughters, holding oneself to be the 'guardian'
of one's sisters or daughters, and so on. Often, as long as overt coercion
or violence is not involved, we tend to view anxiety about controlling
sexual behaviour of daughters, as quite natural. Women's movements and
Left movements must confront and challenge the ideology of guardianship
and izzat even where overt coercion is not flaunted – as part
of their struggle against the structures of class and caste, and against
communal fascism.
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