Implosion: India’s Tryst with Reality

by John Elliott

  When it became clear that NewsX’s trestle table and equipment were not a safe haven, I turned and ran with the crowds till the police, lashing at anyone they could reach, caught up with me. It was then safer to turn and walk towards the charge, rather than to appear to be running away – which I did, with my hands half-raised, saying ‘press, press’. The police dodged round me, swiping their sticks against those in their way. They continued irrationally to beat individuals, including women, who were leaving the surrounding area – a verbal instruction to go would have been enough. Tear gas shells could be heard going off nearby to deal with other demonstrators.

  Brutal policing is commonplace in India, but that evening was significant because it was such an outrageously crude and vicious way to try to end the focal point of six days of countrywide mass protests that had been sparked by the gang rape and battering of a 23-year-old paramedical student. Driven around Delhi in a curtained bus, the student had been dumped with a male friend, virtually naked, on a dirt track beside a busy highway to the city’s airport. This provoked a national outcry and intense international and local media attention that generated continuing coverage of atrocities against women for months. The student – called Nirbhaya (fearless) and Braveheart by the media before her name, Jyoti Singh Pandey, was revealed2 – died on 29 December of multiple organ failure in a Singapore hospital. Three days earlier, she had been controversially flown there – a journey of 2,500 miles – after intelligence agencies apparently advised the government that there could be a massive public backlash if her seemingly inevitable death happened in India under the questionable care of Delhi doctors.

  The day before I was caught in the police charge, thousands of demonstrators had staged unprecedented mass protests and had reached the gates of Rashtrapati Bhavan, the presidential palace on Raisina Hill that marks the other end of the grand processional Raj Path from India Gate. Tear gas shells werefired in the afternoon on the Sunday, and troublemakers in the crowd managed to advance a few yards along Rajpath, smashing police barricades, pelting stones and pushing back a paramilitary force several lines deep. Later the rioters lit bonfires with wooden media observation towers and fencing and smashed metal barricades. This enlarged the area engulfed with violence, but the incidents were isolated, and involved just a few dozen of the several thousand people there who were basically peaceful protestors and sympathetic spectators.

  A Frightened Government

  The unnecessary water cannon and lathi-charging – and sending Jyoti Pandey to die in Singapore – were the actions of a frightened government after three years of growing street protests and unrest. This came around the time that the Arab Spring uprisings were evicting regimes in Tunisia, Egypt and other Middle East (West Asia) countries. There was, of course, no risk of India’s government being unseated, but ministers and officials were becoming aware that the complaints had a wider base than the immediate cases of rape and widespread, endemic male cruelty towards women.

  The middle class was beginning to demand a voice that had not been heard before. There had been mass middle-class demonstrations against corruption in the previous 18 months, led by the veteran and publicity-savvy social activist, 74-year-old Kisan Baburao ‘Anna’ Hazare and Arvind Kejriwal, the politically ambitious anticorruption campaigner who became the chief minister of Delhi in December 2013. These protests also carried a wider message that the tide was turning, particularly among young people in their 20s and 30s, against both rampant graft and poor governance. For decades, people had tolerated petty corruption in their daily lives, paying for minor government services. But in 2011, the protests erupted over delays in the creation of a Lok Pal, an anti-corruption ombudsman, at a time when the government was blatantly corrupt to an extent not seen before, condoned by an apparently ‘clean’ prime minister and Sonia Gandhi.

  The motivation of the crowds was to target an indifferent and inactive government, a desperately slow legal system that failed to administer justice, and inhumanly violent police and security forces that mostly saw it as their job to beat, hurt and exploit the weak and defenceless, including women, instead of protecting them. The social media played a key role in the protests, providing unorganized angry middle-class people with the opportunity to air views that previously would not have been heard. Television channels escalated the protests with round-the-clock and overhyped coverage of seemingly endless discussion groups and on-the-spot interviews. I saw TV interviewers from leading channels virtually screaming into their cameras at India Gate as if they were in the middle of a war zone, whereas they were mostly surrounded by quiet, curious crowds. As with the Hazare anti-corruption movement, the women’s rape protests would never have been so large were it not for television, plus the social media and, of course, mobile phone text messaging – a potent weapon in a country with nearly 900m mobile subscribers.

  The government had certainly got the message from the women’s demonstrations that some display of change was required. No doubt spurred by the imminence of a general election, due in just over a year (April–May 2014), it showed media-oriented and overhyped concern.3 In a public relations splurge of insensitive symbolism, Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh went to Delhi airport around 3.30 a.m. on a Sunday morning to meet Pandey’s body with her family when she was flown back from Singapore. Two other political leaders went to the heavily guarded private cremation – one was Sheila Dikshit, the Delhi chief minister who, with assembly elections approaching, was trying to improve her image after playing politics over poor police handling of the issue. She had even been booed when she visited the protestors. Sonia Gandhi unusually led from the front, reflecting the nation’s horror and grief, despite her own poor health.

  Five weeks after the rape, Pranab Mukherjee, the country’s president, said in his eve of Republic Day address: ‘The brutal rape and murder of a young woman, a woman who was a symbol of all that new India strives to be, has left our hearts empty and our minds in turmoil. We lost more than a valuable life; we lost a dream. If today young Indians feel outraged, can we blame our youth?’4 A week later, in early February, continuing what had become a rather crude media blitzkrieg, Sonia Gandhi again went to visit the family of the gang-rape victim and took Rahul Gandhi, who characteristically had been virtually invisible during the mass protests but was by then slightly more active because he had become the Congress vice-president.

  Wave of Protests

  These were the latest – and socially and politically the most significant – of a wave of protests that had swept India in recent years. They were historically important because they brought middle class and professional people out onto the streets, whereas earlier protests had mostly involved the rural poor opposing the conversion of agricultural and tribal land for industrial, mining and real estate development.

  All the protesters – from the women at India Gate and the Hazare crowds to politicians and villagers who blocked industrial projects in West Bengal and Orissa – were demanding something better from modern India after more than two decades of economic development and six decades of post-independence democratic rule. The same message had been carried in November 2007 when 25,000 landless workers marched 320 km to Delhi to highlight their plight as real estate and other developments swept away their traditional agricultural jobs, often forcibly acquiring their land.5 Members of the Gujjar pastoral tribe from Rajasthan, who had marched on Delhi a few months earlier, were asking for official tribal status and public sector job reservations because they felt left out of the growing riches around them. Such rural-based protests, however, rarely aroused more than passing interest in Delhi unless they involved massive violence and killings, or Naxalite activity.

  The November 2007 march coincided with a big Fortune magazine Global Forum conference, in which a few hundred international businessmen were secluded in the old-style elegance of Delhi’s Imperial Hotel. This prompted Jo Johnson, then the FT’ s South Asia correspondent (later a Conservative member of parliament in the UK and policy advi
ser to David Cameron, the prime minister), to write about what the top executives would have seen if they had ventured out of their secluded surroundings: ‘From the stunted and wasted frames of the landless, they would have observed how malnutrition rates, already higher than in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, are rising in many places, as wages lag behind soaring food prices. They would have learnt how the 120m families, who depend on the land for subsistence agriculture, generating no marketable surplus from one season to the next, live in terror of expropriation by state governments operating land scams in the name of development.’6

  The common thread in all these protests related to the fact that, while life has been transformed in many ways for the elite and a growing middle class, many things have not changed. Villagers are being left behind as urbanization sweeps through their fields, making real estate profits for speculators, and tribals are losing out as mining companies dig in their remote forest and mountain habitats. Society is still male dominated, defying the economic and social changes of the past 20 years that have transformed many women’s potential careers and lifestyles. Women are also frequently treated with disdain – especially by the police, as was evident with the gang rape and its aftermath.

  In none of these instances had the government and other authorities performed adequately. There had been a failure both to transform the police into well-trained and socially responsible guardians of the law, and to revamp and speed up a legal system where cases can last for 20 years or more. It was a mark of official indifference that six years after the 2007 march, politicians were still squabbling about rewriting laws contained in a 1894 Act and curbing government powers to take over land compulsorily without adequate compensation for existing landholders.

  Punishment

  Even more frightening for the officials who sat huddled, wondering what to do, in the prime minister’s office and ministry of home affairs on Raisina Hill that week in December 2012 was the realization that the anti-rape protests were entirely spontaneous and (despite the gradual involvement of some women’s organizations) had no leader like Hazare, Kejriwal and their hangers-on to mobilize meetings and media hype. There was no one they could either pillory or engage in negotiations, as they had done with Hazare. Hosing and chasing the crowds away was therefore a quick and easy solution, followed by gesture politics that included a flood of sympathetic statements and public appearances from hitherto invisible, silent and often contemptuous politicians and police, plus a security clampdown in the centre of the capital that closed many roads.

  The government set up what turned out to be one of the fastest ever committees of inquiry under a distinguished judge, J.S.Verma, a former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, to recommend amendments to the criminal law that would lead to quicker trials and stiffer punishments for sexual assault against women. The Committee submitted its report on 23 January 2013,7 and the government set up fast-track courts and introduced a temporary ordinance which introduced the death penalty for rape that led to death or left a victim in a coma. This was much tougher than the previous seven to ten years’ imprisonment. The minimum sentence was doubled from ten to 20 years, with a maximum of life without parole, for rape of a minor as well as rape by policemen or others in authority, and gang rape. Public demands for the death penalty were met when the ordinance was replaced by new laws in April 2013 providing for execution of repeat offenders – with imprisonment for between 20 years and life before that.8 That led to four of Jyoti Pandey’s rapists being sentenced to death.

  Stiffer penalties for police were also included in the new laws, which was significant because the police rarely helped victims, and were sometimes themselves involved in rapes. At the end of 2012, there were, for example, reports of a policeman and his nephew raping a young woman who wanted to be recruited into the force, and of a 17-year-old girl in Punjab committing suicide because she was being harassed after it had taken her 14 days to persuade police to accept her gang-rape accusation. A friend of mine wrote on Facebook9 about how he and a woman lawyer living in west Delhi took an eight-year-old girl to the police with her semiliterate, frightened dhobi (laundryman) father, who lived nearby. The father kept repeating ‘Meri beti ke saath kuch ladkon nein bura kiya’ (some boys have done something bad to my daughter). The police atfirst were sympathetic, but after a day or two said: ‘When both her parents are at work, she crosses two roads and the train tracks to move around with boys of another locality. She is a very bad character, and if any boy does anything to her, she totally deserves it’. The girl was only eight.

  Repressed Patriarchal Society

  The women’s protest movement, unlike the earlier corruption demonstrations, was genuinely spontaneous and was significant because women suddenly found that, for thefirst time in their lives, they could come out openly and talk about assaults that they had previously kept quiet about. An astonishing number of women have stories of being seriously harassed and attacked, often on buses where eve-teasing (men touching women provocatively) had turned into something more insistent and aggressive. Other stories are of rape nearer home. Statistics indicate that victims’ relatives and neighbours are often the attackers. Police records show that in as many as 96 per cent of the cases men known to the victim were responsible for the rape.10

  Bollywood films increasingly encourage frustrated men to assume their victims are available by depicting women provocatively, glorifying instant sex rather than relationships. The easy accessibility of pornographic material on the internet11 and mobile phones is likely to have done even more than films to reduce respect for women and increase the desires and frustrations of young men who have been brought up in a basically repressed society.

  India’s patriarchal traditions, which have created a society where women have been dominated by men who show them little respect, were on display in reactions to the outcry over the gang rape. Illustrating the lack of concern about rape, political parties gave tickets in the 2009 general election to six candidates who had declared that they had been charged with rape, and 34 other candidates who declared that they had been charged with crimes against women.12 In traditional male-dominated rural societies, and in the recently urbanized north Indian states of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, local clan-based councils of male elders called khap panchayats rarely side with rape victims. When a spate of rapes happened in Haryana, a khap panchayat said the solution was for the young to get married, without any minimum age limit, so that their ‘sexual desires find safe outlets’. Often young girls who belong to the Dalit community (‘untouchables’ in the caste system) are raped in a form of lower-caste oppression. Panchayats sometimes suggest a victim should marry the rapist because, so the argument goes, no other man in the locality will have her. Women are blamed for being provocative, or the intercourse is dubbed consensual – a line often taken by the police. Women can also be subjected to a humiliating and irrelevant ‘fingers test’13 to assess sexual activity, which defence lawyers then use to argue that rape has not occurred because such activity has been frequent and consensual. It was only in 2013 that the Supreme Court asked the government to change medical procedures.14

  Patriarchal and macho attitudes have been exacerbated by rapid economic change. Women have in the past 20 years or so become free and able to develop professional and other careers where they progress rapidly, often outclassing men in their adaptability and lack of status-consciousness and other hang-ups. This, of course, has happened in many countries in the past 50 to 100 years, but in India it has been enormously faster and also more controversial because of traditional male attitudes that are evident across classes and castes, but are perhaps harshest in villages where these traditions are strong. Women are becoming economically equal with men, and are showing new independence in their careers, frequently outclassing male colleagues, and have more liberated private lives, especially in urban areas. Unemployment among poorly educated young men, who cannot find suitable semi-skilled jobs and have nothing to occupy their time, adds to the proble
m. There is a ‘crisis of masculinity because women are doing well, and there is a vast pool of less educated and unemployed males who get little respect even at home,’ says Ravinder Kaur, a sociologist at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi.15

  Khap panchayats produce clan-based, chauvinistic and often violent reactions to social issues such as mixed-caste marriages, especially in Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, where the khap leaders are anxious to maintain their social importance in a rapidly modernizing environment. They cause ‘honour killings’ that are carried out by families or neighbours of young people who have broken what they see as binding codes of behaviour. Two widows who were said to be in a lesbian relationship were beaten to death in Haryana by a 23-year-old nephew of one of the women, who was a convicted rapist. There are stories of murder and of police not protecting eloping couples.16 In 2011, family members of an 18-year-old girl who had married into a lower caste dragged her out of her in-laws’ home and set her on fire in Andhra Pradesh. In 2010, an Indian man killed his step-daughter in Punjab because she was in love with a Belgium-based lower-caste boy. A couple were electrocuted to death in Delhi because the boy belonged to a different caste.17 That ‘such irrational diktats and barbaric decisions (like urging the murder of violators of marriage norms) are taken within less than 100 km of Delhi has only made for the worst publicity’, says Bhupendra Yadav, a historian.18