Asaram Bapu reportedly said that the 23-year-old victim was 'as guilty as her rapists
Uproar as guru claims Delhi rape victim was partly to blame
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/uproar-as-guru-claims-delhi-rape-victim-was-partly-to-blame-8443327.html
Spiritual
leader not alone in condemning actions of Indian women as crisis grows
Tuesday 08 January 2013
Andrew Buncombe An Indian spiritual leader has sparked outcry by claiming the student raped and murdered in Delhi was partly responsible for what happened and should have pleaded with her attackers to leave her alone – the latest in a series of controversial comments campaigners say highlight a mindset within the heartland of India that permits such assaults to take place.
Speaking to followers in Rajasthan, Asaram Bapu, a self-styled guru, reportedly said the 23-year-old was “as guilty as her rapists”. He claimed: “The five or six drunken men were not the only ones guilty. The girl was also responsible... she should have called the culprits ‘brothers’ and begged them to stop.”
Mr Asaram has little international profile but he is far from an inconsequential figure. His comments echo those from a series of religious leaders and provincial politicians who wield significant influence in India, particularly in rural areas. While large groups of students gather in the city night after night calling for the attack to be a watershed in the way Indian society treats its women, there is an equally vocal and powerful lobby that believes it is women who need to change.
Despite this, Mr Asaram’s comments have been widely condemned, not least by the family of the student who was killed. “It is an absolutely illogical statement,” the woman’s brother told the Press Trust of India at the family home in Uttar Pradesh. “We had immense respect for Asaram Bapu and also have many books related to him but as soon as we get back to Delhi we will put them on [the] fire.”
Dr Ranjana Kumari, director of the Centre for Social Research, a Delhi-based NGO, said the comments were indicative of attitudes in much of the country. “His is the deep-seated mentality which creates a culture and traditions that are oppressive to women. Now it’s coming into the open in a brazen way,” she said.
The comments of Mr Asaram followed remarks by male religious and political leaders that have created turmoil in the aftermath of the fatal attack. Indeed, there have been so many that one Indian newspaper, the Hindustan Times, featured a selection of them this week under the headline, “Most outrageous remarks on rape”.
Among the most controversial was the comment by a provincial minister from Chhattisgarh, Nanki Ram Kanwar, who said sexual assaults on women were taking place because “women’s stars are not in their favour”. He made the remark blaming astrology after allegations emerged that 11 tribal girls had been raped by a teacher in the state.
Another high-profile figure to create an outcry was Mohan Bhagwat, head of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a right-wing Hindu organisation that has links to India’s main opposition party, who suggested sexual assaults were caused by Western influences and did not happen in the “villages and forests of the country”.
Today, another political leader, Abu Azmi, said women were being attacked because they were wearing fewer clothes. “Women should not venture out with men who are not relatives,” said Mr Azmi, a politician from Maharashtra and a leader of the Samajwadi Party. “Incidents [such as the Delhi gang-rape] happen due to influence of Western culture,” he added.
According to data released by the National Crime Records Bureau, 24,206 rape cases were registered in India in 2011. Last week, it emerged that Indian politicians facing sexual assault charges could be suspended from office if the country’s highest court supports a petition submitted by activists. Six state politicians are facing rape prosecutions and two national politicians face other charges of crimes against women, Jagdeep Chhokar, an official with the Association for Democratic Reforms, said.
Aware of the mounting public anger, the major political parties have condemned the comments of Mr Asaram. But he has refused to back down and instead blamed the media. “The media has created a controversy but what did I say that was wrong?” he said. “One dog barked and [the media] joined in. Dogs will bark but they can’t harm an elephant’s dignity.”
Police have got the wrong men, says lawyer
A lawyer who says he has been retained to represent three of the suspects accused of brutally gang-raping a woman in Delhi has claimed they will plead not guilty and will tell the court the police have detained the wrong men.
Mohan Lal Sharma said he had been contacted by relatives to represent Ram Singh, Mukesh Singh and Akshay Thakur. He forwarded to The Independent legal documents that appeared to show the men had granted him the power of attorney.
“I believe they will be saying in court that they are not guilty,” said Mr Sharma. “I believe they are not the persons who did the rape.”
Man’s world
http://www.frontlineonnet.com/stories/20130125300102600.htm
AJOY ASHIRWAD MAHAPRASHASTA
The changing nature of public spaces where feudal
patriarchal norms are firmly entrenched makes women random objects of
hostility.
It is important to understand the conditions in which crimes against women happen. Feminists and political theorists believe that feudal patriarchal norms are so firmly entrenched in Indian society that any assertive and independent creation of space by women is violently resisted. Rape and other forms of violence against women are only forms of this structural violence. With modernity ushering in greater access for women to commercial and public spaces, these independent spaces, too, have become the site for a crisis of Indian masculinity, which is used to women being homemakers. Says advocate Ratna Kapur: “Over the past several decades, women’s rights have proliferated and they [women] are claiming their subjectivity, asserting their identity as women as opposed to being someone’s wife, daughter or sister. And with the opening up of the market, women are more visible in the workplace. That they are entering male bastions of power has challenged the sense of superiority and entitlement of the traditional Indian male.”
Feminists believe that this subconscious sense of displacement has made even modernist men uncomfortable as they themselves are born into traditional Indian families that are fed on ideas that differentiate sexes by patriarchal virtues. “Sex is considered a fact—one is born with either male or female genitalia. Gender is considered a social construct —it grants meaning to the fact of sex. Conversely, it could be said that only after specific meanings came to be attached to the sexes did sex differences become pertinent,” says V. Geetha, a gender theorist based in Chennai.
According to the British political scientist Andrew Heywood, patriarchal ideas blur the distinction between sex and gender and assume that all socio-economic and political distinctions between men and women are rooted in biology or anatomy. Physical strength, thus, becomes the most important distinction between the sexes in defining modes of production. And actions like rape, which involve physical overpowering, are considered by men as the ultimate subjugation and humiliation of women.
Rape, therefore, has to be seen within the algorithm of power that the institution of family perpetuates at the first level. Even in modernist discourse, the family is never conceptualised without a man as its head. The protectionist responses in the current debate about rape must be seen in this context. “The continuum between the family (the place of safety for women, the home where one is taken care of) and rape has to be stressed: both are fantasies of control, of doing whatever it takes to keep women in their place, wherever that place is. The elaborate everyday control of women’s lives by families and institutions (both will find increased legitimacy because of the rape) is as systematic, planned and violent as this rape was.... We need to stress the continuum between people who rape, people who judge those who get raped, and people who try to protect the women in their lives from getting raped by imposing structures of control. The portrayals of the rape of women allow for those men who want to understand themselves as protectors or avengers to do so, they allow for patriarchal structures of control to strengthen themselves and, crucially, they create women as the ‘legitimate’ subjects of rape,” writes Akshi Singh in an article titled “We are all part of the rape culture”.
The French historian Michel Foucault highlights sexuality as a construct and presents its genealogical history. For him, sexuality is a mode by which one understands the exercise of power and how a certain kind of ‘sexual’ subjectivity encourages the disciplinary mode of power. By crafting a certain kind of imaginary for the female body and its sexual desires, the woman is absorbed into the normative structure of society that is defined by patriarchy. Patriarchy is an endemic historical and cultural practice that exerts an all-encompassing hegemony. It assumes the male as the norm and the female as the other.
This is adequately reflected in India’s villages. It is fairly well known how zamindars and upper-caste men, the patriarchs of a village economy, routinely abuse Dalit and poor women and how at the same time they impose a strict code of sexual and domestic ethics for women of their own households. The ever-expanding mega-cities of India also reflect similar dynamics. The importance attached to a woman’s chastity is measured in sexual terms and not in any other way. Therefore, a rape survivor is automatically treated as the victim or lacking in propriety and is often socially ostracised. At the same time, the rapist is perceived as an embodiment of virility.
Normative structures
Many academics have, time and again, pointed out that feudal sanction to the sexual abuse of women is reified through religious practice and rituals. Various religious texts have openly stated ways to establish supremacy over women in circumstances where they assert their independence. The contemporary polity of the Hindu right-wing in India also perpetuates normative structures. The moral and cultural policing that is a significant part of the Sangh Parivar’s politics seeks to revive the ‘Indian’ ethos that is being “threatened by Western influences”. Within this understanding, women are abused if they do not dress “appropriately” or if they marry or fall in love by choice. At the time of communal riots, women’s bodies are the most important area of contestation; hence the high number of rapes during times of conflicts such as these.
Purushottam Agarwal, a professor in Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, writes: “Rape, even in an individual context, is not just a matter of sexual lust. In a collective context, rape becomes an explicitly political act, and in the context of an organised aggression, it becomes a spectacular ritual, a ritual of victory—the defilement of the autonomous symbol of the honour of the enemy community.”
At the same time, Hindu women are extolled in the name of only goddesses, mythical mothers and sisters. Women figure as “medium” and “symbol” in Vinayak Damodar Savarkar’s writings. An area where the question of women significantly comes up in his writings is within the context of Hindu virtue.
Karen Gabriel, who teaches English in Delhi University, says: “The representation of women as only mothers and daughters or goddesses by the religious Right is often an important weapon to control women. This patriarchal language successfully domesticates women and binds them in familial or communal relations. The understanding operating here is at the heart of the khap mentality and seems to be that traditions of hatred towards women can only be neutralised through this language of familial and communal relations. But as we know, mothers and daughters are in fact routinely raped and killed. Besides, incest and sexual molestation within the family are widely prevalent.”
Patriarchy and Capitalism
The onset of liberalisation has not helped the larger cause of gender sensitivity in any way. Feminists point out that the greater public space created for middle-class women thanks to liberalisation policies, though projected as empowering, is used to couch the structural issues impending on Indian women. Karen Gabriel talks about the increasing trend of representing women in hyper-sexualised idioms: “The rising number of rapes and other forms of sexual violence on women cannot be separated from the change that the liberalisation policies brought about in representations of women in the public sphere. There is a substantial pornographisation of the media. The dominance of the visual media in the last two decades has, in fact, helped strengthen the already existing and potent cultures of misogyny in India. The increasing sexualisation and communalisation of a woman’s body in our cinema, advertisements, and television programmes needs to be situated within prevalent masculinist understandings of women, gender and sexuality.”
Not a single advertisement, in any way, approaches women as a non-sexual, non-saleable item, she adds. “Irrespective of what is being sold (say, a car), the woman is represented, first of all, as equivalent to the object on sale, and secondly as seducing a man into buying that item. The prospective buyer is intrinsically always a male. And that really reflects the fact that men worldwide own much more wealth than women do. The representation of women is usually sexed up and the women are usually shown to be size zero with inflated breasts and are often fair-skinned. Look at some of the Scandinavian countries; they have taken a policy decision to discourage the size zero body type for women and even size zero mannequins are being phased out there,” Karen Gabriel says. The recent cases of vengeful acid attacks that seek to de-beautify a woman’s face can be located in this understanding.
“In cinema and soap operas, women, if not heavily sexualised, are depicted as sexually vulnerable,” Karen Gabriel goes on to say. “The emergence of nationalistic cinema in the last two decades has represented the vulnerabilities of a community and a nation through the sexual vulnerability of a woman’s body. I mean, a woman could be vulnerable in many other ways. She might be Dalit, poor, or starving; she could be disabled. But her vulnerability is always represented as sexual in Indian cinema. Such an understanding is the result of the patriarchal thinking that men will have to control and protect women. It encourages the sense of ownership that men believe that they have over women’s bodies. Such representation treats women as the private property of men, or the community or even the nation.”
Rape, therefore, has to be understood within the masculinist functions of our economy. Rachana Johri of Ambedkar University, Delhi, says that rape is an expression of the extreme tyrant masculinity operating within patriarchal constructs. She says: “The phenomenon of rape needs to be understood further in psychoanalytical studies. But it definitely reflects the anxieties of men who have developed some sort of ambivalent relationship with women in a context of changing nature of public spaces. And all such processes make women random objects of hostility.”
It is, therefore, imperative to understand that demands for punishments like the death penalty and chemical castration and using the language of protection will not only diffuse society’s need to understand masculine notions of power, but also perpetuate them.
