Incredible India And The Ever Increasing Number Of ‘Mistakes'
By Sukumaran C. V.
09 June, 2014
Countercurrents.org
In April this year, Mulayam Singh Yadav, who remote controls UP through his son the puppet CM, remarked that boys are boys and rape is only a mistake committed by them. He made this insensitive and highly misogynistic remark at an election rally, referring to the capital punishment awarded to the accused of the Shakti Mill gang rape case.
If this is the attitude of the politicians about rape—the most atrocious and heinous crime among the humans—before long the word rape may be replaced with the word mistake in our criminal procedure code, as the word rape outrages the modesty of the rapist (Oh! Sorry, the ‘mistakist') and hurt his sentiments. If a girl is raped in future, we will read: “A girl is ‘mitaked' and the ‘mistakist' is innocent as the girl provoked him with her exposing dress.” That is Incredible India.
Two cousins—a 12 year old girl and a 14 year old girl—went to the fields adjacent to their home at night to relieve themselves of the call of nature. They were ‘mistaked' and killed and their bodied were hanged on a tree. And people talk about the lack of toilets and the need to stop open defecation. I am ashamed of you, Incredible India!
Open defecation is not can't be the reason of and pretext for rape, the dress of the female is not and can't be the reason of and the pretext for rape, and the female's going out alone is not and can't be the reason of and pretext for rape. The reason is the patriarchal and misogynistic attitude entrenched in our collective psyche which thinks that boys are boys and they commit mistakes (rapes).
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!
If you wonder whether rape is a ‘juvenile' act, I will tell you that rape is only a mistake and mistakes are committed by ‘juveniles' and nobody is going to punish them for their mistakes and the mistakes will keep ever increasing. That is Incredible India.
In the 2011 census of India, the number of girls to every 1000 boys in the 0-6 age group is 914. In the 2001 census it was 927. It simply means that if the sex of the foetus is female, it is aborted. If a girl wants to live in India, she has to overpower a lot of hurdles starting from the very beginning—the inception!
If the female foetus is fortunate enough to escape the sex-selective abortion, she is born only to discover a plethora of discriminations and dangers for being a girl. There are laws against female foeticide, but the number of girls is decreasing. There are laws against dowry, but the practice of extracting dowry and the dowry related untoward incidents are increasing. There are laws against sexual assault or rape, but the heinous crime is increasing alarmingly. See the table below. The figures are taken from the latest data of National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB)—Crime in India 2012: Statistics.
Table 1
Year |
2005 |
2006 |
2007 |
2008 |
2009 |
2010 |
2011 |
2012 |
Rape |
18359 |
19348 |
20737 |
21467 |
21397 |
22172 |
24206 |
24923 |
K&A total |
22832 |
23991 |
27561 |
20261 |
33860 |
38440 |
44664 |
47592 |
K&A of Women and girls |
15750 |
17414 |
20416 |
22939 |
25741 |
29795 |
35565 |
38262 |
Of the national total of 47592 kidnapping and abduction (K&A), 38262 victims are women and girls!
The figures clearly indicate that there is no point of making laws, if our basic attitude stands unchanged. It seems that our culture is dangerously misogynistic. In our Vedas , Puranas , and Ithihasas we can see a strong thread of misogyny and eulogy to everything that is masculine go hand in hand. In the Rig Veda , the earliest known religious text in the world, there are a number of verses like the following ones:
‘ Bestow upon us Indra, wealth comprising worthy male offspring ' (Mandala 8, Anuvaka 2, Sukta 7, Verse 33).
‘ Agni, bestow upon the pious donour, infinite riches and food with male progeny ' (M. 8, A. 6, S.1, V. 15).
‘ Indra, the all-knower,…may he guard our son, our last son and middle son ' (A.7, S.1, V.13)
There is not even a single invoking for female offspring in the entire Rig Veda and there is no prayer for the safety of the daughters. No god is asked to guard them! It is a wonder how the females survived.
Today we are in the 21 st century and have great technological developments, but mentally we haven't moved even a single step further from the Rig Vedic age as far as the attitude to daughters are concerned and the technological sophistication is used to entrench the gender bias.
Jane Austen, who achieved an even level of perfection as a novelist as no other English novelist ever has achieved, writes in her novel Persuasion which was published in 1818:
Captain Harville: …But all histories are against you (women), all stories, prose and verse. I don't think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon women's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs all talk of woman's fickleness.
Ann Elliot: …no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.
A hundred and thirty years later; Simon de Beauvoir, the French feminist, in her groundbreaking study of woman— The Second Sex — wrote 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. He is the subject, the Absolute—She is the Other.
Today the humankind is in a new century and in a new millennium, but still woman can't be the subject, the essential; she is still seen as a mere sexual being and humanity is still male. There are many religions in our world and there has never had scarcity of reasons for these religions to differ and quarrel and spill human blood. But on the subject of the status of woman in the society these religions don't have the slightest difference of opinion. Every religion considers woman as a mere sexual being, believes and teaches that she is inferior to man, and she is meant for man. No religion allows her to be the subject, to have her own identity/personality independent of man.
The Koran says that woman is the agricultural land of man and men can go to their fields of agriculture according to their own convenience (Koran: Sura 2-223). Christianity has always been successful to establish the notion of woman being the repository of every sin. In the field of misogynistic literature Christianity has explored and exhausted the utmost boundaries of imagination.
The Bible says:
“Every man praying or prophesying, having his head covered, dishonoureth his head.
But if the woman be not covered, let her also be shorn: but if it be a shame for a woman to be shorn or shaven, let her be covered.
For a man indeed ought not to cover his head, forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man.
For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man.
Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man. "
(Corinthians-I, Chapter11 verses 4, 5, 7, 8 and 9)
Ours is a world that is controlled by Man. Man created God in his image, Man invented religions to safeguard his interests and the gods and religions invented by Man legitimized his control over woman and Nature. As Beauvoir says:
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.
This age-old patriarchal cultural indoctrination still continues intact in our socio-political set up. Therefore eave-teasing, domestic violence against women and the notion that females are mere objects created for the pleasure of males are taken for granted in our socio-cultural milieu. Education should help to abolish the existing misogynistic and patriarchal ideas and practices. But our schooling, instead of challenging the prevailing gender inequity and helping to create an atmosphere which doesn't reinforce identities as males and females among children, reinforces gender inequity through its curriculum, teacher attitude and pedagogic practice.
The NCRB data for each year shows a steady increase of crimes against women and the percentage change in the crimes in which the majority of the victims are girls and women is so glaring that it will frighten us. According to the ‘Snapshots (1953-2011)' of the NCRB's Crime in India: 2011 Statistics, the percentage change of rape is 873.3 over 1971 (The Bureau ‘started collecting data on rape since 1971 only') and that of kidnapping and abduction is 749.0 over 1953. The percentage change of no other major crime head goes beyond 300.
[While murder has increased by 240.1% (from 9,802 in 1953 to 33,335 in 2010), robbery by 178.3% (from 8,407 in 1953 to 23,393 in 2010), and riots by 229.1% (from 20,529 in 1953 to 67571 in 2010), rape has increased by 791.5% (from 2487 in 1971to 22,172 in 2010) and kidnapping and abduction by 630.7% (from 5261 in 1953 to 38,440 in 2010)].
Of all the crimes committed in Kerala in 2010, rape was far ahead of other crimes! Apart from God's Own Country, this shameful record was shared by Goa, Sikkim, Tripura Madhya Pradesh and the Andamans. See the table below (Source of the Table is Crime in India 2010 Statistic of NCRB)
Table 2
The States in which the number of rapes is far ahead than all other crimes in 2010.
State |
Murder |
Attempt to murder |
Kidnapping & Abduction |
Decoity |
Rape |
Kerala |
363 |
361 |
261 |
74 |
634 |
Goa |
35 |
27 |
35 |
2 |
36 |
Sikkim |
17 |
6 |
6 |
1 |
18 |
Tripura |
150 |
63 |
114 |
16 |
238 |
MP |
2423 |
2277 |
1187 |
110 |
3135 |
A&N Islands |
9 |
7 |
10 |
1 |
24 |
A country's well-being depends on the safety and security its farmers and women enjoy. India miserably fails in this count. In our country an average of 16,057 farmers committed suicide every year between 1995 and 2010 (a total of 2, 56,913 according to the NCRB data). It means that India's agricultural sector has been in great distress since 1995 and the woes of our farmers still go unaddressed and unmitigated. The farm suicide rate in India does indicate that something has terribly gone wrong in our economic policies. The Rural Affairs Editor of The Hindu , P. Sainath says that ‘the largest wave of recorded suicides in human history has occurred in this country in the past sixteen years.' (“Of luxury cars and lowly tractors”, The Hindu , December 28, 2010). In another article (“Corporate socialism's 2G orgy” The Hindu , March 7, 2011) he writes: “In six years from 2005-6, the Government of India wrote off corporate income tax worth Rs.3,74,937 crore. While writing off this gigantic sum for corporates, Pranab Mukherjee's latest budget slashes thousands of crores from agriculture.” It is high time we rectified the wrongs our neo-liberal policy makers have committed and are committing to satisfy the corporate greed. Deserting the interests of the farmers for the sake of corporate interests is suicidal for a country like India. But the messiah of development from Gujarat who is at the helm now is not going to reverse the corporate servile policies the Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh governments have followed, because he is the ‘warrior' of the corporate giants and he has won the elections by the help of the corporate funding and propaganda. The so called landslide victory of the fascist ideology over democracy could be possible only by manipulating electoral democracy with the help of corporate media manipulation.
And the growth rate of crimes against women and girls shows how terrible our socio-cultural rot is. If the statistics of rape increased from 2487 in 1971to 24,923 in 201 2 it means India is not progressing as a civilized nation. We were certainly more educated in 2012than we were in 1971. Why doesn't our education play a decreasing role in the field of crimes related to girls and women? The more we get educated the more insecure our women become! Our family set-up, our curricula, our visual media and our cinemas project woman not as an individual and 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 eave-teasing, and when the eave- teasers grow up, the eave-teasing grows up into sexual harassment. In our society the girls are trained to be submissive and to ‘suffer silently' the dirty behavior 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.
Does it mean that the prevailing system of education in our country have no role in making people humane and committed to the welfare of society as a whole? Then it needs a complete overhaul. (The educational standard of Kerala is far higher than it was in 1971, but the number of the heinous crime called rape committed in Kearla in 2012 was 1019. The number was 33 in 1971!!)
No other crime can be considered as heinous as rape is. But in our country 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 dress or she was tempting to be harassed or raped!!
In our country, girls and women fear to travel by bus, they fear to travel by train, they are afraid to be in public places. The prejudice against (and attack on) 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.
The ultimate solution to end rape is to make the society a gender egalitarian one. It doesn't mean that the molesters and the rapists or ‘mistakists' 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 and in the case of Sonali Mukherjee . Stringent punishment including capital punishment should be meted out to the rapists, 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.”
Sukumaran C. V. is a former JNU student and his articles on gender, communalism and environmental degradation are published in The Hindu. Email: [email protected]
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