CHENNAI: A foreign travel blogger who had camped overnight with her partner in Dumka, Jharkhand, was sexually assaulted by a group of men recently. Her partner was beaten. Seven arrests have been made at the time of this writing, with a further four assailants identified. The couple, who have a large social media following, initially posted about their ordeal online — sparking international as well as nationwide awareness of the incident. The post has since been deleted, understandably.
For many in India, the words “gang rape” immediately call to mind a brutal incident in Delhi in December 2012 in which a young woman who was given the moniker Nirbhaya died from her wounds. That was a watershed incident in terms of the swelling of public fury as expressed by mass protests, and resulting impacts on both laws as well as how the press handles cases of rape. It can be argued that there was some destigmatisin as well as some sensitisation about the topic itself. That doesn’t mean that deeper change has occurred. Well, maybe it has — but the change isn’t for the better. India, fourteen years later, is a country of more muzzled opinions, more monolithic perspectives, and less freedom and justice on many parameters.
Nowhere is this more telling than in how Rekha Sharma, chairperson of the National Commission of Women, took umbrage at US political journalist David Josef Volodzko’s social media post about “the level of sexual aggression [he] witnessed while living in India for several years”. Sharma responded: “Did you ever report the incident to police? If not, then you are totally an irresponsible person. Writing only on social media and defaming whole country is not good choice” (sic).
Volodzko said nothing that millions of women in India, myself included, know to be true –— and indeed say all the time, both publicly and privately. It is also egregious that Sharma brought in reporting to the police as some standard of authenticity — when she surely knows, as all people who work with gender do, that sexual assault is under-reported and that the institution of the police is mistrusted with good reason.
To claim that India is safe for women is nothing short of gaslighting, and to have someone with the authority vested by the NCW do so is just one more heart-sickening normality in India. Sharma’s statement rings of the deeply oppressive notion that protecting an image, be it of a family or a nation, is more important than protecting any actual people involved.
A tourist didn’t get assaulted one night in Jharkhand in a vacuum. Even if one only became conscious of sexual violence as a serious issue post-Nirbhaya, the number of terrible incidents that have made it to the headlines since, and knowing that these are the tip of the iceberg, should be enough to know better. Sharma’s sentiments are familiar — women’s internalised misogyny props up patriarchal violence and legitimises it, and that’s where we are again. She doesn’t speak for all of us, of course, but the problem is: the burgeoning of silencing, and silencing methods in India today means that not many of us still speak at all.
Sharanya Manivannan
@she_of_the_sea
The columnist is a writer and illustrator