There’s a new game that’s all the rage on Facebook these days. It’s called Angry Brides. Just three months into inception and its already got close to five lakh gamers, 70 per cent of them women. Here’s why. Prospective brides get to bash up dowry-demanding grooms and win points for it. The brides (as in players) have to strike the dodging grooms with a weapon of choice — a pot, a pan, a ladle, a rolling pin, a broom, a slipper and a shoe. Each of these grooms comes with a heavy price tag; each blow decreases the groom’s price and adds that money to the player’s Anti-Dowry Fund. This money is then used to amass more artillery and level up. The game’s home page shows an eight-armed woman, in what appears to be a reference to Goddess Durga, holding weapons ready for use. A caption below reads: “A woman will give you strength, care and all the love you need… NOT dowry.”
If only it were that simple in the real world. If only life could imitate digital art. For unlike the virtual world, it is the bride who takes the hit in the real world. It is she who suffers at the hands of greedy grooms and greedier in-laws and is forced to return to her parents’ home. That’s if she’s lucky to get away alive, when not, she is simply doused with kerosene and burnt to death.
Not just dowry-related atrocities but domestic violence, molestation and rape, abduction, sexual harassment and gender discrimination are the other grim realities thatwomen have to grapple with every day. Pick up the newspaper on any given day, and you are bound to come across at least five such cases making headlines. A female foeticide in a remote Rajasthan village, an honour killing in the rural hinterland of Haryana, a minor molested in an urban slum, a BPO employee raped in the middle of the night on her way back from work, a bride burned for not getting enough or even more dowry, a separated mother denied her child’s custody, a widow shunned by her
own relatives — the list is long and unsparing.
According to the latest figures available with the National Crimes Records Bureau (NCRB), the total number of crimes against women was 2,13,585 in 2010. Of these, as many as 94,041 were of cruelty by husband and relatives; 29,795 were kidnapping and abduction; 22,172 were rape; 40,613 were molestation; 9,961 were sexual harassment and 8,391 were dowry cases. Which means that on a single day, as many as 585 crimes against women were committed across the country.
If this tally isn’t staggering enough, these figures only show the reported cases, the thousands that go unreported have not even been factored in. To add insult to injury, the conviction rate for reported cases is as low as 33 per cent in dowry harassment, 28 per cent in rape and 19 per cent in domestic violence.
LEGAL LACUNAE
Constitutionally speaking, there are enough laws in the land upholding the equality of women, but there are also enough loopholes for men to get around those laws. The reasons for low conviction rates in our country are primarily socio-economic, says lawyer and human rights activist Vrinda Grover. “Even if they do manage to report abuse and initiate a case, it is tough for women to sustain long trials because of factors like intimidation, social pressure and lack of resources,” she says. The problem with our system is that we are unable to provide legal aid or adequate witness and victim protection, Grover adds.
Rashmi Anand (see box) is a case in point. When her husband threatened to drag the case through court for the next 20 years, she had no choice but to agree to an out-of-court settlement where she got no alimony or maintenance even though she was a housewife and her children were given a paltry sum as security for their future. Had she fought her case in court, there may have been a chance of her getting a better deal in the end, but it would have taken her as many as 20 years if not more to get that, she says. Plus where would she have found the money to support herself and her children and to pay the lawyer’s fees? “By agreeing to a mutual settlement, I bought peace for myself and my children,” she adds.
Anand was lucky. She managed to get out of a bad marriage. Not so Divya, 22, who was harassed by her in-laws for dowry and for not producing a male child. When she filed her complaint, Divya was clear she wanted a divorce, her stridhan back and maintenance for her child. Two years down the line, the case was still stuck in court, her resources and her patience had run out and “everyone” decided it was best she get back with her husband.
Many times, our judiciary fails our women as well, especially in cases of domestic violence, which account for nearly 45 per cent of crimes against women. As Grover adds: “The law mandates the right of every woman to lead a violence-free life. I have seen in many domestic violence cases that the courts try to persuade the couple to stay together at all costs. The objective is to keep the marriage intact, the family should be kept together — that the marriage is built on a battered woman’s body does not seem to bother anyone. Unless this mindset is changed, women are less likely to get justice within our legal framework.”
That is exactly what happened to Savita Nautiyal, 34, of Allahabad. Her husband had deserted her for another woman, but since he had not remarried, she could not furnish enough proof of his infidelity. Nor could she produce any concrete evidence of the physical and mental cruelty meted out by him. The court then advised Nautiyal to withdraw her case and mend fences with her husband for the sake of their two young children.
MORE PITFALLS
The inadequacy of our legal system also shows up in the fact that though there were various laws on crimes such as rape, abduction and murder, there was nothing to protect women from domestic violence, which constitutes such a large chunk. It was only as recently as 2005 that the government woke up to this reality and moved to enact the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act (PWDVA). Finally, Indian women can seek police protection and legal redressal on grounds of physical and mental cruelty meted out to them by their husbands and other family members.
Police protection is not easy to come by, though. Police stations are rampant with instances of victims being further demeaned by apathetic and insensitive policemen who have little respect for a woman’s rights and dignities. A case in point is the rape of a minor in February, where the Noida police not only publicly disclosed the girl’s name but her father’s name and address at a packed press conference. In cases of sexual assault, Section 228-A of the Indian Penal Code deems disclosure of identity of a victim a punishable offence. The IPC section guarantees anonymity to women who complain of rape. This encourages a rape victim to complain against her attacker without facing public humiliation. Try telling that to the blabbering police officer who probably wasn’t even aware of such a clause.
If a serious assault like rape is mishandled thus, the situation in cases of domestic violence is even worse. The problem is that most policemen receive little or no training on how work with such victims. As a result, they frequently do not respond to such cases and usually try to discourage women from making formal complaints. “There’s enough serious crime happening across the country, our police force is ill-equipped to handle that. Cases of domestic violence therefore tend to be treated a bit casually,” admits a senior male police officer on condition of anonymity. Clearly, a woman has to be murdered at the hands of her in-laws for her situation to be termed “serious”.
Says Suman Nalwa, DCP of the Crimes Against Women Cell in Nanakpura, New Delhi: “Many times when a woman approaches a thana in her neighbourhood to report domestic violence, the attitude of the policemen there is to abdicate responsibility.” Without giving her a proper hearing, they will quickly direct her to the women’s cell, washing their hands off the problem. Even though gender sensitisation sessions are said to be regularly conducted at thanas across the country, this mindset of the policeman shows little or no signs of change.
Ruchira Gupta, convenor of Apne Aap, an organisation that works at rehabilitating sex workers says that at least other women get some sort of hearing, but sex workers are denied even that. Dismissed as a scourge on society, police apathy, coupled with police autocracy, is what they have to face every day. “The police have to understand that prostitution is a crime against women too. The woman is the victim here, not the criminal. They have to understand that it is the pimp and the customer who are the perpetrators, not the sex worker. When raids take place and arrests happen, it is usually the women who get arrested while the men are simply detained for a while and then let off.” SOCIOLOGICAL SCENARIO
Let’s go back to the original Alpha Male, the king of kings, Maryada Purshottam Rama. He may have loved his wife, but he loved his so-called honour more. He may have crossed the ocean to rescue Sita from her abductor but she first needed to go through an agni pariksha before being accepted back into the family fold. If this wasn’t humiliation enough, she was banished from the kingdom soon after because a washerman questioned her virtuosity. Men have continued to control women’s destinies ever since and hundreds of years of such conditioning has caused women to be the weaker sex, still struggling to find an equal voice.
Most societies across the world are patriachal and disrespectful of their women, and India is no exception, points out Padma Velaskar, professor of Sociology at the Tata Institute of Social Studies, Mumbai. “In fact its civilisational achievements notwithstanding, our country’s cultural practices encompass some of the harshest strictures and sanctions against women. The caste system with its strong notions of honour and dishonour, respect and disrespect, superiority and inferiority, purity and pollution is inextricably linked to Indian patriarchy. Not merely disrespect, but an overall derogation and devaluation of women stems from this caste patriarchal order and is legitimised by it,” she says. Historically, we have on the one hand the false glorification of upper caste women which makes their domestic oppression and devaluation invisible and unspeakable. On the other hand, society sees nothing wrong in the public humiliation through sexual and physical abuse of lower caste women,
Velaskar adds.
Susan Visvanathan, professor of sociology at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, feels that lower class men have greater respect for women primarily because they are wage-earners as labourers or crafts people. When the city shreds them of their traditional workspaces, the levels of violence are immediately visible. This is a result of hunger and alcoholism which is often inter-related. Upper class women may be better off financially, but they take benign neglect in their stride and make sense of their own fate vis a vis their relationships within the family. Abuse of upper class women when they are young and separated from their families is now visible because tradition does not recognise their role as wage-earners, and does not respect their right to safe spaces. Which is why their exploitation occurs at the workplace or at the transport stand or anywhere they are, from any person who sees them as a possible victim.
Since the sex ratio is now problematised for Haryana and Punjab, it is possible that predatory qualities will surface regardless of class circumstances of either predator or victim, feels Visvanathan. The reason why stringent punishments are not forthcoming is because the victim is always first interrogated regarding her behaviour, and since traditionally women are supposed to secret themselves, the real story of their troubles rarely gets told.
The practice of dowry has contributed majorly to the disrespect of women down the years. As Visvanathan explains, dowry devalues the work of women as members of the household into which they are married. It is suggested that they will have to buy their way into a family because they are a burden to the family into which they are married, and the dowry gives them status without control over resources. In such cases, dowry is equivalent to groom price. Further, adds Visvanathan: “It is believed that stridhan is a form of pre-mortem inheritance so that a daughter will have no claim over her father’s property once she is married. Claim to property is always the most tenuous of areas of jurisprudence and the identity of women is woven into it in terms of good conduct clauses at every point, whether in relation to her natal family or her conjugal family.”
The case of Geetanjali Pathak, 26, comes to mind here. The daughter of a very prominent and wealthy doctor from Lucknow, she got married to the son of her father’s colleague in February 2008. The wedding was a grand affair, with expensive gifts lavished on her in-laws, including jewellery worth `28 lakh, cash worth `10 lakh and a luxury car. When her father died two years later, her husband asked for an equal share in the property that was to be divided among her three brothers. The brothers refused, saying that her share amounted to the cash and jewellery that had already been given to her at the time of her marriage. Besides, she had already signed a document waiving her rights over her parental property. Geetanjali was thrown out of her house in the middle of the night and has since been staying with her mother. Unwilling to initiate proceedings in court for fear of a scandal, Geetajali’s family has held several rounds of negotiations with her in-laws, seeking divorce by mutual consent. The issue is stuck over the question of cash and jewellery. “They insist no dowry was given, no gifts were exchanged,” she says.
PSYCHOLOGICAL PARAMETERS
The single-most important cause of violence against women is the culturally ingrained, accepted and perpetuated thought pattern of male dominance in society. It results in depriving the girl child of basic equality in terms of nutrition, healthcare needs and education, says senior consultant psychiatrist, Dr Anandi Lal.
Dr Lal, who also heads the Department of Psychiatry and Allied Psychological Services, Pushpanjali Crosslay Hospital, Ghaziabad, says the most important consequence of violence is immense psychological distress in the victims. This takes the form of low self-esteem, sleep disturbances, eating disorders, emotional distress, depression, and deliberate self-harm attempts. In younger victims, this can take the form of increased substance abuse and risky
sexual behaviour.
Apart from significant psychological trauma, violence against women is associated with increased physical health problems like headaches, back pain, abdominal pain, fibromyalgia, gastrointestinal disorders and poor overall health. Another set of problems associated with sexual violence is unintended pregnancies as well as sexually transmitted infections, including HIV. Intimate partner violence in pregnancy also increases the likelihood of miscarriage, stillbirth, pre-term delivery and low birth weight, adds Dr Lal.
Besides, growing up in a home where violence against the lady of the house is the norm, damages the physical and psychosocial development of a child. Younger children exhibit irritability, sleep disturbance and emotional distress in the form of temper tantrums. In school-going children it shows up as poor concentration in studies leading to decline in academic performance and maladjusted behaviour with peers. Older children tend towards delinquent behaviour, substance abuse, depression, psychosomatic illnesses and suicidal tendencies.
Counsellor and psychotherapist Nivedita Singh, founder-director of ANSRRS INDIA, points out that disrespect for women cuts across all classes. The issue is more of under-reporting among the lower classes and non-reporting among the educated. In both cases, most of the abuse occurs in private with the home being the most dangerous. Other than physical and verbal, a lot of abuse is emotional where women are constantly invalidated, labelled, ridiculed, judged, blamed and their contributions minimised. Mindsets have to change, both social and individual, says Singh, adding that this gendered mindset is not confined to men alone, but is a complementary process whereby on one hand it influences and encourages men to aggress, and on the other hand positions women into silent submission. This mindset has to be broken and mutual respect and equality of status have to become a way of being rather than mere rhetoric.
According to Singh, the treatment protocol should integrate a psycho-educational intervention promoting change for batterers and a psychotherapeutic intervention facilitating healing for domestic abuse survivors. “We need to facilitate healing through counselling, support group meetings and other empowerment programmes.” It must also be noted that the intervention for abuse therapy is different from marital therapy. It is specifically designed to interrupt or break the cycle of domestic abuse and heal the injuries caused by intimate partner violence. Unlike traditional marital therapy, each person engages in the therapeutic process individually, and also with their partner, she explains.
Singh cites the case of an urban, upwardly mobile couple, Rohit, 42, an entrepreneur and Rhea, 37, a software professional. They had been married for 12 years and his wife now wanted a divorce. She said he had been emotionally and physically abusive all along but now the children were getting affected as well. She approached Singh’s centre because before taking the final step of filing for divorce, as she wanted to give Rohit a chance to undergo therapy and see if the situation could be salvaged.
During the therapy, Singh discovered that Rohit’s business was failing because of which he suffered from moderate depression and impaired self-worth. He had to undergo around 12 psychotherapy sessions to deal with his inadequacies and insecurities. Separately, Rhea too was counselled on ways to address her psychological scars and emotional pain. A combined marital therapy followed where the couple was taught effective ways to resolve conflict and rebuild their
troubled marriage.
Singh believes that changes cannot happen in our social system overnight and concerted efforts have to be made towards creating awareness, educating women through building insights into their strengths, maximising their potential through information-sharing about their rights and choices, facilitating a building of skills through assertiveness training along with providing support and empathy — all this is bound to make a difference, both at the individual and the social level. Jyotsana Chatterjee of the Joint Women’s Programme makes a fair point when she says that the women’s question is not a question to be addressed by women alone. One cannot help but agree with her when she says: “The struggle for women’s rights has to be fought by both men and women, only then will we be able to move towards a just and equal society.”
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FROM VICTIM TO VICTOR
Rashmi’s story is that of survival and hope. At the age of 35, after having suffered about 10 years of a violently abusive marriage, she walked out of her home in 2002 with two small children — a nine-year-old daughter and a five-year-old son.
Rashmi says she was so emotionally and economically dependent on her husband — a wealthy lawyer — that she continued to stay with him even after he beat her and threw her down the stairs during her second pregnancy, causing her to nearly lose her baby.
She suffered silently till one day she saw the toll it was taking on her children. “My daughter had become quiet and withdrawn and my son had stopped speaking altogether. That’s when I decided this could not go on any more, I needed leave in order to give them a better life.” It was only after she was safely out of his reach that she told him she wasn’t coming back and wanted a divorce. Enraged, her husband warned her: “I will drag you through the courts for the next 20 years till you come crawling back to me.”
It was then that Rashmi approached the Crimes Against Women Cell in Nanakpura, Delhi. Her husband and mother-in-law were summoned and he agreed to give her a divorce under mutual consent with the condition that there would be no alimony and a small sum set aside for her children. “I signed away every right, I just wanted peace… and time to heal myself and my children,” she says. Ten years on, Rashmi’s daughter now studies in a prestigious college, and her son is a settled, well-adjusted student of Class X. “I’m truly proud of my children for having come through the way they have after all that they have seen,” she says. As for Rashmi, she finds joy in writing — she’s penned four books — and works at shelter homes for abused, abandoned and destitute women. She also drops by every Thursday at the Nanakpura thana to counsel women like herself. “I want to make sure that no woman suffers the way I did,” says Rashmi, who’s most recent book is Room 103 Nanakpura Thana, co-authored with DCP Suman Nalwa, which talks about their work with victims who come for guidance and emotional succour.
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THE TIME HAS COME
I grew up witnessing the abuse and bias faced by my mother, an Anglo-Indian Christian who suffered through two horrible marriages to Hindu husbands. What I witnessed over those formative years made me decide I would be a woman in heart and soul.
When I wrote my Ramayana Series, I sought to reclaim the true history of Indian women. My Sita was not just my Sita, I believe she was the real Sita: powerful, confident, a princess who had to have been trained in the arts of war as all women of royal families were in those days, a proud wife who stood up to her husband.
Valmiki described Sita from a man’s point of view, Tulsidas from a Brahmin man’s point of view. My Sita was a woman seen from a human point of view. In my Mahabharata, Krishnaa is the true hero of the epic, because that was her given birth-name, not Draupadi. She is without divine powers or gifts or even weapons, yet she stands up to a sabha of powerful god-like men and delivers a great message on dharma and morality.
My attempt is to tip the scales back. As a radical feminist and firm believer in Fourth-Wave Feminism, my Kali Quartet takes this approach one step further to envisage an entire epic where women are the only protagonists, reclaiming the world for themselves. Sita and Krishnaa’s time has to come.
Now is that time.
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CASES THAT SHOOK THE NATION
THE SOUMYA OUTRAGE
Raped and killed in Thrissur; Feb 2011
Soumya was alone in the women’s compartment of a passenger train when she was pushed out by a one-armed man. The man, arrested soon after the crime, then brutally raped Soumya. Her injuries were so severe that Soumya died a few days after remaining in a vegetative state. The rapist was found to be a habitual offender and sentenced to death by a fast track court.
CRIME AND APATHY IN ODISHA
Brutalised and allegedly raped, Puri district; Nov 2011
The daughter of a daily wager, Babina was found unconscious in a state of undress outside Pipili village in Puri district in November last year. Allegations, accusations and inept policemen added up to make it one of the most controversial cases ever in Odisha. Local politics also got a star billing in the sordid drama. It took the intervention of the high court to get her treatment. (On left is a picture of Governor MC Bhanadare visiting a comatose Babina at SCBMH, Cuttack.) Rape or gangrape, neighbour or politician, Babina is in hell for no fault of her own.
GURGAON MALL STAFFER’S HELL
Abducted, raped; March 2012
A woman working at a pub in Sahara Mall was abducted from a major road by a bunch of drunken men last month. They took her to a nearby flat and raped her. Confident of getting away with it, they even dropped her later at a Metro station. Under pressure of public indignation and horror, the police cracked the case soon enough, arresting five of the accused in the case. All are unemployed young men from a village in Haryana’s interior. Two accused are at large.
THE ARYA SHOCKER
Raped and killed in T’puram; March 2012
This 15-year-old Keralite was studying in her home when an autorickshaw driver entered it by force using the pretext of asking for a screwdriver. He wanted to rob Arya, but the attempt mutated into rape, the violence of the crime killing her. The killer was held soon after.
THE HONOUR HORROR
Killed by parents, Mandya; Nov 2011
Boy meets girl. They fall in love. Then the girl’s parents murder their daughter. This is the story from Karnataka no one wants to talk about. Suvarna, a 22-year-old upper caste woman, was in love with Govindaraju, a Dalit. Her enraged parents fixed her marriage with another man. When Suvarna called Govindaraju over, they were caught. Suvarna was then hanged by her parents at Govindaraju’s house.
