CHENNAI: The last time that a high-profile rape-murder case managed to move the needle was probably the one that happened in New Delhi at the end of 2012.
Since then, there have been many. There are at least two that are in headlines now. The case involving a trainee doctor at RG Kar Medical College and Hospital, a government-run institution in Kolkata, has made international news. In Bihar, a 14-year-old Dalit girl was gang raped and murdered after refusing a marriage proposal from the prime accused. As always, caste determines too much in this country. It isn’t only that the former case is more widely known. It is also how, even in the public response to it, divisions between people remain firm.
Why else did the women of the posh Hiranandani Gardens gated community in Mumbai bar the Bahujan women of the nearby Jai Bhim Nagar from participating in a protest about the Kolkata incident? It is very difficult to not see the obvious: that some people, and therefore some crimes, are more important than others — to the public, to the media, to the law. Personal and collective emotions may be intense, but an intersectional feminist approach is absent.
The institutional culpability of the medical college is one of the key elements of the outcry this time, and rightly so. In 2016, the rape and murder — and the truly inhumane cover-up of the same — of a Dalit student at the Jain Adarsh Teacher Training Institute for Girls in Rajasthan was an institutional issue too.
The way it was almost summarily ignored, even though it deserved nationwide coverage and outrage too, says one thing very loudly. Perhaps such comparisons make (some of) you uncomfortable. In which case, fine, let’s stick to what infuriates you, galvanises you, but doesn’t make (some of) you uncomfortable.
What happened to the trainee doctor, whom everyone in this country now knows about, should not happen to anyone at all. But rape — with or without murder — happens all the time. India averages 90 a day, according to the statistics. Will this case, and the protests that have arisen from it — including a nationwide one-day strike by medical professionals — move the needle further?
That depends. What happened after 2012? Perhaps words like “rape”, “sexual assault” and “consent” ceased to be beyond the ambit of polite conversation, and indeed became acknowledged as necessary. Laws did change, but they certainly haven’t deterred similar crimes — widely-reported, under-reported as well as completely unreported, in both senses of the term, as they never entered the system as survivors and victims did not, or could not, take the incident to authorities.
But much happens in the space between discourse and legal ramification. Call it praxis, ordinary life, real change or noticeable progress. When it comes to this, over and over, we fail. Collectively.
Sexual assault and murder are on the far end of a spectrum that begins with garden variety bigotry or discrimination, folded indistinguishably into the fabric of Indian society.
There’s no recourse but to unravel that fabric, rethink it and reweave it. This will be the work of many hands, and requires patience and unlearning — and lots of discomfort.