Survival Of The Weakest
By Sukumaran C. V.
08 May, 2015
Countercurrents.org
Violence against women and violence against the Earth, legitimated and promoted by both patriarchal religion and science, are interconnected assaults rooted in the eroticization of domination. The gynocidal culture’s image of woman as object and victim is paralleled by contemporary representations that continually show the Earth as a toy, machine, or violated object, as well as by the religious and scientific ideology that legitimates the possession, contamination, and destruction of Mother Earth.—Jane Caputi.
CIVILIZED MAN SAYS: I am Self, I am Master, all the rest is Other—outside, below, underneath, subservient. I own, I use, I explore, I exploit, I control. What I do is what matters. “What I want” is what matter is for. I am that I am, and the rest is women and the wilderness, to be used as I see fit.—Christina M. Kennedy.
When in 2012 December, Nirbhaya was gang raped inside a running bus and thrown out and killed, the collective patriarchal and misogynistic psyche of the nation believed that it happened because the girl went out at night (that is a crime as far as girls are concerned), it happened because the girl was loitering around with her boyfriend (that also is a crime), it happened because the girl was asking for it by being outside at night!
At Moga in Panjab, the 14 year old girl was not going out at night. And she was not with her boyfriend. She was with her mother and she was travelling in broad daylight and yet she met with (more or less) the same fate of Nirbhaya! Now what will be the excuses of those men (and women) who share the patriarchal bias against the female? What stupid reasons can the male chauvinist culture of the nation put forward to blame the innocent girl?
When I see girls travelling by buses, Nirbhaya and the Moga girl come into my mind. When I see girls travelling by trains, the image of the hapless girl Soumya, who has been pushed out of the running train and raped while being unconscious (and killed), comes into my mind. When I see brave female journalists, the Shakti Mill gang rape incident comes into my mind. When I see girls outside their homes in the remote villages, the Badaun incident comes into my mind.
A democratic society should be one in which the weaker and weakest sections of the people are equally safe and secure as the strongest sections are. But in our country, the weaker sections, the Adivasis and the Dalits, always find themselves in the receiving end. If the nation wants to ‘develop’ and ‘progress’ their land is always snatched and they are always dispossessed and displaced. “Tribals make up just 8 percent of our population. Yet, they account for more than 40 percent of the displaced persons of all projects. And there would be an equally big number of dalits among the displaced.” (P. Sainath, Everybody loves a good drought)
Sainath continues: “Imagine the entire population of the continent of Australia turned out of their homes—eighteen million people losing their lands, evicted from their houses. Deprived of livelihood and income, they face penury. As their families split up and spread out, their community bonds crumble. Cut off from their most vital resources, those uprooted are then robbed of their history, traditions and culture. May be even forced to adopt an alien diet. Higher rates of disease and mortality pursue the dispossessed. So do lower rates of earnings and education. Also, growing joblessness, discrimination and inferior social status. Oddly it all happens in the name of development. And the victims are described as beneficiaries. Sounds too far-fetched even as fiction? It’s happened in India, where in the period 1951-90, over 21.6 million people suffered precisely that fate—displaced by just dams and canals alone. Add mining that has dispossessed 2.1 million people and you have the population of Canada. Further, industries, thermal plants and defence installations have thrown at least 2.4 million other human beings out of their homes. That’s around 26 million Indians.”
And when it comes to the weakest section—the females—the picture is so bleak that it frightens us. It is said that in every 20 minute a woman is raped in India! Nearly 20 years ago a feminist writer wrote that ‘it almost seems as if rape is the favourite pastime of the males of this country.’ (Saraswati Haider,
‘Bandit Queen and Woman Question’, Mainstream, March 23, 1996). It seems that even then the picture is not as bad as now.
The female can’t walk through our streets without being subjected to obscene comments and gestures. The female can’t travel by buses and trains without being groped and fumbled. The female can’t use the public space freely as almost all public space in this nation exclusively belongs to the males. The problem is, as the French feminist Simon de Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex (first published in 1949), that ‘humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being. Man can think of himself without woman. She can't think of herself without man. And she is simply what man decrees; thus she is called ‘the sex' by which is meant that she appears essentially to the male as a sexual being. For him she is sex—absolute sex, no less. She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential…. Legislators, priests, philosophers, writers and scientists have striven to show that the subordinate position of woman is willed in heaven and advantageous on earth. The religions invented by men reflect this wish for domination.’
In our country, the moment the female steps out of her home she is in an insecure and hostile sphere where anything unpleasant can happen to her. It seems that no girl in our country is able to walk through the streets without being heard the obscene comments of the males on her body parts.
While the sexual crimes against women are increasing day by day, the conviction rate is declining alarmingly and the culprits enjoy virtual impunity. This growing culture of impunity makes women helpless victims of sexual harassment. Our law enforcement agencies lack professionalism, and when it comes to the issue of lewd comments and harassment even the police take them for granted. Therefore society can't provide women absolute safety in public places by only addressing the issue as a law and order problem.
The attitude of perceiving woman as a sexual object is to be shattered. Our family set-up, our curricula, our visual media and our cinemas project woman not as an individual and a human being just as man is, but as an object created for man and inferior to man. Lewd comments and sexual harassment start from our schools in the form of eve-teasing, and when the eve- teasers grow up, it becomes sexual harassment. In our society the girls are trained to be submissive and to “suffer silently” the dirty behaviour of the other sex, while the boys are trained to be aggressive and their aggressiveness is praised even when it violates the freedom of a girl to walk freely through the street.
The only crime in which the victim is accused of the responsibility of the crime is sexual harassment or rape. The victim is told that it happened because she wore tight jeans and top or revealing clothes or she was tempting others to be sexually assaulted or raped!! If all the women start wearing burkha, Patriarchy will still continue its practice of raping women and then the excuse suggested may be that it happens because of the anatomy of women.
The basic problem is, as the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, who wrote the epoch-making play A Doll's House, which came as a thunderbolt to the male-centric social and moral ethos of Europe, says: “A woman cannot be herself in the society of present day, which is an exclusively masculine society, with laws framed by men and with a judicial system that judges feminine conduct from a masculine point of view.” It should be remembered that Ibsen wrote the above quoted sentence in the notes he made for the play in 1878. How contemporaneous the sentence seems in the present day Indian socio-cultural background!
In our country, girls and women fear to travel by bus or by train, they are afraid to be in public places. The prejudice (and attack) against women starts from the womb itself. The foetus is killed, if it is female. Without shattering the typical patriarchal mindset of perceiving woman as a sexual object created for man, we can't create a social milieu which is completely free of sexual violence. Woman should be projected as an individual just like man is. Or else the survival of the female in this country is in grave danger.
P.S.: The ultimate solution to end rape is to make the society a gender egalitarian one. Meanwhile, it doesn't mean that the molesters and the rapists can go scot-free. While the crime rate against woman is increasing so fast, the conviction rate goes at a snail's space. It certainly encourages the males to indulge in violence against girls and woman. And even if convicted; within years, the convicts come out and harass the victims as it happened in Delhi. (In 2007, a young man raped and killed a 6 year old girl, cut her body into pieces and threw them into the public toilets in Delhi. In 2013, the court found out that the culprit was a ‘juvenile' at the time of committing the crime and let him free as he has already been in prison for more than five years. Immediately after coming out of the prison, the ‘juvenile' went to the home of his victim and threatened her parents that he would do the same thing to their younger daughter too!)
I really don’t understand the logic behind considering the rapist as juvenile. Stringent punishment should be meted out to the rapists, whether they are ‘juveniles’ or not, because rape is a kind of murder, more heinous than murder itself. As a group of French feminists in their statement against rape declared:
“Rape is legally recognized as a crime with physical aspects only, namely, the penetration of the vagina by the penis against the will of the victim. In effect, however, the real crime is the annihilation by the man of the woman as a human being.” (Quoted by Saraswati Haider in her article ‘Bandit Queen and Woman Question’, Mainstream, March 23, 1996).
Sukumaran C. V. is a former JNU student now working as clerk in the Kerala State Government service. Email id: [email protected]
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