Rape
cultures in India
-“We
must then equally resist the politics, which institutes public amnesia about
these voices of suffering.”
Baxi
analyses how the rape culture in India is formed and fostered. She first looks
into the planning and administration of the city, pointing out that the city has
been planned in a way to give access to heterosexual men to rape. The
streetlights don’t work, the pavements and hoardings obstruct the victim from
escaping. Even the policing is of women’s bodies, clothes and character and not
of men actions.
Moving objects like cars,
buses, etc are seen as places to sexualise and exploit women’s bodies. The
private buses used in porn propagate the very idea and the men consuming this
are subtly reinforced with its sexualisation and hence turn it into a sport to
be comfortable with.
After the 2013 Delhi gangrape,
politicians asked, why was she out so late at night with a boy? Why didn’t the
parents know? (careless parenting of women lead to such incidences!) Why do
women wear revealing clothes if they don’t won’t to provoke men? Et al.
The right wing politicians
demanded the hanging of the rapists either unaware or ignoring purposefully
that their Hindu nationalism is built on subjugation of lower caste women. The
rape was politicised for their benefit, not the benefit of women. The argument that
rape is worse than death throws the survivors under the bus, as if it is them
who should be ashamed of what happened to them. It also links the concept of
honour to sex and not just rape, it is something to be protected until one is
married.
The judiciary is no better,
it doesn’t have any proper framework in place for aggravated sexual assaults.
Rape for most part is sex because their concept of consensual sex has a
normalised level of violence involved in it and only when that particular level
of violence is breached it is to be constituted as rape. The marches only happen
when its level is beyond our mere sensibilities!
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