The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, August 31, 2014
Crimes against women have become a popular talking point in India. They figure in the Prime Minister’s Independence Day speech. They find a mention in a statement by the Finance Minister about how the growing incidence of crimes against women is affecting tourism in India. And they are the focus of a plan by the ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, to win the 2017 Assembly elections in India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh, albeit with a twist.
Crimes against women have become a popular talking point in India. They figure in the Prime Minister’s Independence Day speech. They find a mention in a statement by the Finance Minister about how the growing incidence of crimes against women is affecting tourism in India. And they are the focus of a plan by the ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, to win the 2017 Assembly elections in India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh, albeit with a twist.
The BJP is concerned about crimes only against women of one community
(read Hindu) and has concluded, without any evidence, that the
perpetrators are all of another community (read Muslim), who are waging
something that exists only in the imagination of the Hindutva rightwing,
namely ‘Love Jihad’.
Where does all this leave Indian women, of whatever community? Should
they feel reassured, more secure, that the highest in the land are
concerned about their welfare? Or should they be afraid that this
concern is ultimately only instrumental, to push a political agenda, or
an economic one — such as making India a more attractive tourist
destination?
Whatever one concludes, it is evident that those making statements from
the top have little idea of what happens on the ground when women are
assaulted, and particularly when they pick up the courage to report the
crime and to fight the case through our courts.
August 22 was the first anniversary of a brutal gang rape in the heart
of Mumbai when a young woman journalist went on a work assignment to the
abandoned Shakti Mills compound. Her resilience and determination
played no small role in ensuring that the case was registered, the
perpetrators apprehended, charged and committed. But only now, a year
later, do we know the details of what she went through in the process of
seeking justice.
These facts are brought out in two important recent articles. One by Flavia Agnes, Audrey D’Mello and Persis Sidhva in Economic and Political Weekly of
July 19, 2014
(http://www.epw.in/insight/making-high-profile-rape-trial.html) informs
us in considerable detail about what happened before and during the
Shakti Mills trial. It exposes the insensitivity that infects the entire
system — from police to prosecution to the media — where the welfare of
the survivor seems to be the lowest priority. If the survivor did not
have the support of the Majlis Legal Centre, to which the authors of
this article belong, her fate would have been much worse. For instance,
it is they who insisted that her privacy should be protected from the
intrusive and persistent media when she entered and left the courtroom
during what was supposed to be an ‘in camera’ trial. The authors also
write about the mockery of the confidential nature of the trial when the
public prosecutor gave out all kinds of details of the trial to a
hungry media.
Even more disturbing is an article written for the web by a colleague of
the Shakti Mills gang rape survivor. Titled ‘That hashtag was my
colleague’ (https://in.news.yahoo.com/that-hashtag-was-my-colleague-060844991.html),
the article gives us a different insight into what happens in such a
situation, including the gross insensitivity of the media concerned only
about an ‘exclusive’.
What I found personally most disturbing was the description given in the
article about the Test Identification Parade (TIP). In popular TV crime
serials and films based on systems in the West, we see a one-way glass
between the survivor and the suspects. Each suspect carries a number and
the survivor is supposed to state the number of the person or persons
she considers responsible for the crime. In India, the system is truly
brutal. In one room, often without any women police, a rape survivor has
to face a line-up of men. She then has to walk up to the men she
identifies as the perpetrators of the crime, touch them on the shoulder
and then announce loudly what they did to her. One cannot even imagine
the trauma that a woman who has been brutalised must go through with
such a grotesque system in place.
There is much else in both articles that will disturb anyone concerned
about the issue. But what speaks loudest is the urgent need to address
these details of our criminal justice system so that women subjected to
sexual assault do not have to go through further assaults on their
selves in the process of seeking justice.
(To read the original, click here.)
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