People's Democracy

THE barbarism and special targeting of women and children during the state-sponsored genocide in Gujarat has shocked everyone, and there have been numerous protests on Gujarat. Yet one can also say that it has not shocked everyone because the government in power continues to remain in power despite all that has happened to women and children among others.

One always imagines that plight of innocent children and raped women would hurt the sensibility of every decent person, and that cruelties such as have been perpetrated cannot be condoned by human beings anywhere in the world, whatever the political set up, leave alone in any democratic system. Yet women and children continue to be sufferers and special targets in situations of war, military action and social conflict. Theirs are also among the most prominent voices of peace and courage as many studies have shown. Aggressors therefore, claim their revenge by specially targeting women.

Gujarat is no different in that sense, although there is a need to look at what happened in the context of the worldview represented by the RSS and the specific social situation of the non-western world, as well as societies where religious fundamentalisms and parochialism have not been overcome despite political independence and modernity, and where forces of religious fundamentalism find support from the world of liberalisers and globalisers.

Women and children here are property as well as symbols of izzat (honour) in a far more acute sense than in the western world today, where despite gross inequalities there are numerous gains of the democratic and feminist movements that simply cannot be snatched away from women, whatever the regime. This is not the case in societies such as ours. The special mix of globalisation and fundamentalism allows and sanctions unimaginable cruelties because it desensitises, isolates and alienates even as it gives new life to parochial and imagined religious identities.

Through valourising and justifying these actions as part of ‘natural justice’ and ‘rightful revenge’, the Hindutva forces recreate their own version of history and strengthen their moblisation for the Hindu Rashtra, grounds for which is being prepared by them through assiduous propaganda in RSS shakhas and the fabricated history in Vidya Bharti school texts since independence.

The Hindu woman must be revenged for the imagined atrocities of the Muslim aggressors of the past by mass rape of the Muslim woman today. The Muslim must be humiliated and ‘his’ ‘honour’ must be ‘grounded to dust’ (mitti main mila dena) to avenge the gory past of unending Muslim invasions and destruction of temples conjured up by the Hindutva ideologues. He must be made to feel helpless and castrated through attacks on his women, just as attacks and rapes of dalits are meant to show dalits ‘their place’ in the social order. As pointed out in The Survivors Speak (report of a women’s fact finding team), in every instance of large scale mob violence against the community in general, there was a regular pattern of violence against women.

Not surprisingly, the ‘revenge’ was triggered by the deliberate planting of a falsehood in the Gujarati paper Sandesh that Hindu women had been raped and mutilated and must be avenged. "Avenge your women" became the call for genocide through pamphlets distributed all over the state. "Are you men or women?" shrieked the Sangh Parivar through these pamphlets, and actually sent bangles to villages where the killings were not taking off. As stories spread further details were added such as that the breasts of the Hindu women were cut off, burning rods shoved into their vaginas, and that they had died while they were being raped (Marie Marcel Thekaekara of the women’s team summarising the findings in The Hindu, May 12, 2002). This set the pattern for what was done to Muslim women through out the carnage.

The details are horrific and painful, and much worse than portrayed in the media. The report and the testimonies of the survivors are enough to make one’s hair stand on end, and to warn us of what is in store for women in the projected Hindu Rashtra. The BJP government has expressed no remorse, and Advani is on record warning the Opposition that "Godhra and cross border terrorism are more important" and of greater concern than what happened in Gujarat. It is important to remember that the entire carnage, including the rape, killings and destitution of women, is all justified as natural reaction and rightful revenge, and has been done in the name of religion and creation of the Hindu Rashtra.

These attacks serve other needs well. Through these attacks there is an attempt to create large numbers of women who become unacceptable in their own families and also the society at large due to the social stigma and taboos regarding rape in our societies. The social distance between Hindu and Muslim families is achieved at a stroke, and conditions for this distance are assured through the stigmas attached as well as the guilt and complicity in the matter bound to be experienced by Hindu women sooner or later given the large scale of the crimes. Such distance further helps in creating a distinction between the adarsh parivar of the Hindus and the ‘polluted’ parivar of the Muslim, where the male has not been able to ensure the sanctity of the family.

The manner in which the National Commission of Women has sidestepped the real issue of the state complicity in the crimes and the Sangh Parivar affiliated women’s groups have maintained a studied silence is indicative of how right wing sectarian politics divides women and makes them an accomplice in their own subjugation. In many areas women have named the BJP MLA, Maya Kodnani, as leading mobs that killed and raped women when the women’s fact finding team talked to her she expressed utter indifference and feigned ignorance. Scores of middle class women participated in the looting, many more egged on the mobs, and very many more today think the Muslims had it coming to them and have themselves to blame, though there are stories of courage and humanity when women protected other women.

The cruelty and violence inflicted during the Gujarat carnage are integral to Hindutva politics. Muslim women have been seen as ‘enemy’, as those who have no place in this country, and as people not worthy of human treatment. The huge scale of the crimes have been perpetrated under the very eyes, the supervision and connivance of a democratically elected government in a federal polity where the central government has full powers to intervene under Article 356—except that our defense minister says the matter is not too important, and the home minister says other things are more important, and central and state governments that refuse accountability. Atrocities that should never be committed anywhere on any enemy population have been perpetrated on our own countrymen and women, our own citizens, in full public view, and there seems adequate sanction for it to embolden the government to adopt a cavalier attitude to the crimes. This is the real danger –when crimes assume proportions in which a huge non-cadre population is made an accomplice.

Majority of the women raped were killed and do not live to tell their stories. The same may be said of children who witnessed unspeakable horrors, often the rapes and killings of their entire families before they were themselves killed. Many, however, live to tell the story. Cruelties of the perpetrators of the crimes, and utter despair have given them unexpected courage. They have named specific leaders of the Bajrang Dal, the VHP and the BJP as those directing and inciting ‘mobs’. They have spoken of how the police not merely stood passive, but on many occasions participated in the mass murders. They mention instances of women and children being shot point blank in the head by the police when appealed to for help. Theirs are profiles in courage.

They face intimidation and threats to withdraw charges and specific names. They have overcome all inhibitions to tell of rape. They have overcome fear, after being violated again and again, to yet venture to the police stations along with NGO workers and other women, to try and get their charges filed. Many of them did that when they could barely walk they were such bad shapes. Many of them had surfaced in the relief camps after weeks, left for dead, almost naked and unable to fend for themselves. As Barkha Dutt tells it, "Ironically, in camp after camp, we found that the traditional shroud of secrecy and shame that normally shadows rape survivors was completely missing…sexual abuse this time had been so public and so widespread, it had taken the form of Everywoman’s narrative…" The police refuses to file cases without medical examination reports. No woman can comply with it in this situation of helplessness, homelessness, curfew bound cities and police hostility. Police is further refusing to take complaints that contain individual names, and all complaints are being filed against "mobs" and faceless criminals. Often they say two FIRs cannot be filed for one incident, for which some amorphous complaint has already been made, and so on. The government machinery is making sure that the Hindutva storm troopers are not booked.

Women’s organisations all over the country have shown solidarity and determination to fight for them. The Muslim community, and specifically Muslim men, have stood by their women, most women being accompanied by male members of their family when they come for complaints. In this hour of crisis they have risen above accepted notions of social stigma and taboos. In extraordinary dark times they have shown extraordinary courage and a ray of light, from which we can all derive strength and hope.