As a third-year student at Jindal Global Law
School, I have lived in Sonipat, Haryana for the better part of three years. If
I’m being honest, I have lived on a huge, well-guarded campus with
air-conditioned rooms and fancy buildings, and the most dangerous thing I’ve
faced is those enormous beetles that fly around in the summer. I’ve had a
highly privileged existence, in a bubble in Sonipat for the past three years.
So I’m not going to purport to entirely understand the circumstances that
caused the riots that spread across parts of Haryana, including Sonipat, in
late February.
What I can tell you is that those riots were
the result of protests held by members of the Jat community who sought OBC
status from the State government. What I will comment on, however, is the
violence that occurred during these riots – in particular, violence against
women and the reactions (especially of members of the Jindal student community)
to it. Violence is something that is rarely condoned officially, but which is
often used as a tool in political protests to achieve certain ends. And that is
exactly the problem over here – the senselessness and intensity of violence
against women is doubly purposeless, as it achieves absolutely nothing with
relation to the purpose of the riots.
It was a discussion about said violence that
prompted me to write this article. On the timeline of our Student Council’s
Facebook page, a spirited discussion began in the comments section of a link
that had been posted, which detailed the alleged rape of women on the National
Highway by protestors during the riots. According to numerous reports, the
women had been dragged out of their vehicles and raped, and their clothes
thrown away, leaving them naked and afraid. The High Court of the State had
taken cognizance of these reports, and had requested the police to probe the
matter.
The discussion took a different direction from
what I had expected, with several students who belonged to the Jat community
immediately taking pains to comment that either the women were lying and the
reports were fabricated to affect public opinion, or that the rapists were not
from the Jat community and had committed the act in order to defame the said
community. That pained and surprised me. Here, we had reports of violent sexual
assaults taking place – and so many people’s first reaction was to deny that
their community was involved, and to cast aspersions on the rape victims
itself. These same people, whose student lives were dedicated to essentially
understanding and upholding the law, were so willing to bypass the orders of
the High Court of the land, or to cast aspersions on the rationale behind that
decision.
I didn’t think that this was a discussion of
caste or community in the slightest; the perpetrators of the violence were
unimportant, in so far as their caste identity was concerned. I was more
concerned with the victims; with the fact that rape culture was so pervasive
that people were more willing to disbelieve the stories of victims and numerous
eyewitnesses, in order to preserve their idea of the functioning of their
community. Rape culture is so deeply ingrained that intelligent students spent
a great deal of time demonizing the feminists who were willing to listen to
these women, and protesting that members of their community could not possibly
be involved. Even if these women were not lying about the rape itself, they
were most certainly lying about the identity of the perpetrators.
I, and numerous others tried to argue the point
online, stating that the caste of the protestors was irrelevant. We laid
emphasis on the fact that treating violence against women as collateral damage
during civil or political unrest was trivializing the act of rape itself. The
argument descended into a one that denigrated rape victims itself – portraying
them as women who were prone to lying, and who conveniently use the backdrop of
the riots to settle family scores. The fact that one of the accused (along with
seven others) was said to be the brother-in-law of one of the victims was used
as evidence of this. Somehow, the word of several community leaders who stated
that their men would not commit such crimes, was considered the gospel truth.
See, this big-shot said that no one was involved – let’s believe him because it
suits our narrative, completely ignoring the fact that he has vested interests
and could also have been completely unaware of the violence, since the protests
spanned many districts and hundreds of thousands of protestors.
This is when such discussions can no longer be
considered an effective use of the right to freedom of speech and expression.
The comments thread on the article, and on many others that reported rapes, was
a sad reflection of the internal thought process of a large portion of our
population. When reports of rape against women come into the public eye, people
rush to remove the blame from themselves – either men in general, or persons of
a particular community, who want to deflect the backlash from themselves. There
is not a thought spared for these women; all the sympathy is directed towards
the poor men who “might” be falsely accused. The example of the riots is just
one instance that exemplifies the patriarchal attitudes that perpetuate rape
culture.
The subsequent derailment of the post – which
could have been a productive discussion on the use of rape as a tool of
subjugation and show of power during times of unrest, and the fact that people
were okay with using such tools. Instead it descended into a game of
“Dodge-the-Blame/Blame-the-Victim”, and several people, including women,
indulged in this. Whether it was internalized misogyny or a deeply ingrained
sense of caste-based identity, I am unsure; what I do know is that this is
deeply problematic and that we need to change.
Madhavi Achaiah is a student at Jindal Global Law School
As a third-year student at Jindal Global Law School, I have lived in Sonipat, Haryana for the better part of three years. If I’m being...
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