December 10, 2013

INDIA'S RAPE PROBLEM, AND HOW MEN SEE IT

[These presumptions and ways of talking about women can be found up and down Delhi’s class ladder. Consider the recent case of Tarun Tejpal, a muckraking crusader and newspaper editor who resigned after being accused of sexually assaulting a female subordinate. What the woman detailed in leaked correspondence as the forcible removal of her underwear and physical penetration was described by Mr. Tejpal as “drunken banter” — banter, like tango, being a thing that takes two.]

By Anand Giridharadas

NEW DELHI — “By force, it never happens,” Dharampal Singh Yadav declared of rape. He was standing with a gaggle of men at a barber stall outside the Sarojini Nagar market. Most of the men agreed.
One year ago, a fatal gang rape, in which a group of men on a bus repeatedly attacked a young physiotherapy student and shredded her internally with an iron rod, smeared this city’s name. That case and others stirred much national soul-searching. But the idea of rape as a physical impossibility is one of many myths about sexual violence that remain in common circulation among men in India. So is the notion that women are simultaneously victims and perpetrators of the rapes they endure.
“If anyone tried to rape my daughter, she would beat them with a shoe,” Mr. Yadav, a clerk in the market, said of his 15-year-old. “There’s no way any man could rape her.”
Just to be safe, though, Mr. Yadav, 45, has removed her from school back in their village. Otherwise, he said, how could he know what she was doing?
These presumptions and ways of talking about women can be found up and down Delhi’s class ladder. Consider the recent case of Tarun Tejpal, a muckraking crusader and newspaper editor who resigned after being accused of sexually assaulting a female subordinate. What the woman detailed in leaked correspondence as the forcible removal of her underwear and physical penetration was described by Mr. Tejpal as “drunken banter” — banter, like tango, being a thing that takes two.
To talk of rape with so many of Delhi’s men is to discover a chasm between the world of their minds, flush with medieval ideas of womankind, and the world of the modernizing megacity in which they find themselves. In fact, many men — including those at the barber stall that day — attribute the rape problem to vertiginous social change that has created new temptations at a faster rate than the new habits to cope with them.
The barber put it simply: Rape isn’t a man’s fault. “It’s the fault of the times,” he said.
He said that rape was the result of poor choices made by women. “Wearing the wrong kind of clothes, eating the wrong kind of food, going to the wrong kind of places,” he said.
It is a familiar notion, here and elsewhere, that women entrance men into rape by wearing particularly cute skirts. Men will be men, the argument goes, which apparently means that men will be rapists. The barber gave a metaphor: “Where there’s a candle and a fire together, the candle will melt.” He added: “The fire is always the girl. The candle is the boy.”
A young boy of 10 named Durgesh was standing around, waiting on his father’s haircut. His face wore sadness, and it emerged that his sister, Ratna, was locked in juvenile jail. She, too, was cast as modernity’s victim. She got a job, which led to taking a loan, which led to buying a cellphone, which led to plans with strange friends, which led to alcohol, which led to sniffing intoxicants on fabric, which led to jail.
When Ratna gets out next year, Durgesh wants her rusticated to the family’s ancestral village, in the state of Uttar Pradesh. “Otherwise,” he said, “she’ll get spoiled again.”
As the men spoke, a bit of feminism flared. Mr. Yadav was talking about removing his daughter from school when a male passer-by, wearing a sweater inscribed with the words “Two plus three equals 5,” burst forth, exclaiming: “That is not right!”
But Mr. Yadav barreled on. What really happens, he said, is that women trade sex for money to acquire nice clothes. When their mothers find out and confront them, they call what happened rape, to protect their honor.
“If the parents have only 10 rupees, and your daughter is wearing 100-rupee clothes, where is she getting those clothes?” Mr. Yadav said. Many of the men nodded. He wasn’t alone in assuming that most women are a couple of coveted outfits away from prostitution.
The man in the mathematical sweater was persuaded. “Who am I to judge?” he said now. He who had stood up for women just as quickly stood down.
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[Salma Khan, 26, who was one of the many women browsing in a local market, said she has keenly followed the politics of Juhapura ever since she moved into the neighborhood in 2003 from the Old City area of Ahmedabad. “I have an opinion on everything and everyone, but how does it matter? No one wants to hear us,” she said, her eyes welling up.]
AHMEDABAD, Gujarat — On a hot October morning, an intense discussion was waging between three women in a nondescript beauty salon in the Juhapura locality of Ahmedabad, the city’s largest Muslim ghetto.
While the most common topics of discussion in a beauty salon are fashion, cosmetics and men, here the women were discussing national politics, particularly the prospects of Gujarat’s chief minister, Narendra Modi of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P.
“Modi should become India’s prime minister; let’s see what road the country takes then. Others will understand the pain we felt,” said Sageera Sheikh, 42, her eyes closed as her face was covered with a walnut scrub.
“What!” exclaimed Tasneem Aslam, 30, whose feet were soaking in warm water, just before her pedicure. “No way! I think the country should understand that he is a tyrant and won’t stop at anything to get his way.”
“Why are you all getting so emotional?” said 18-year-old Zeesha Khan, who was only 7 in 2002, when over 1,000 people, most of them Muslims, were killed during riots while Mr. Modi was in power. “How does it matter who becomes the prime minister? Our state of affairs will remain the same.”
It’s a discussion that can be heard in many places in urban India, but for the women of Juhapura, this sort of informal participation in the political process is rare, as they have very few places where they can freely exchange their thoughts on non-household issues in their area. These opportunities for discussions are limited partly because of cultural pressure on women to avoid political topics, but also because the densely packed neighborhood simply has no room for their debates.
Many of the women who live here chafe at the constraints on their voices and the lack of outside interest, especially from politicians and lawmakers, in this Muslim neighborhood, which is walled off from the rest of Ahmedabad and bisected by a national highway.
Salma Khan, 26, who was one of the many women browsing in a local market, said she has keenly followed the politics of Juhapura ever since she moved into the neighborhood in 2003 from the Old City area of Ahmedabad. “I have an opinion on everything and everyone, but how does it matter? No one wants to hear us,” she said, her eyes welling up.
Juhapura used to be a desolate neighborhood in a western suburb of Ahmedabad, constructed for the victims of the 1973 flood in Gujarat’s capital. But after the 2002 riots in the state, Muslims from across Ahmedabad moved to Juhapura, which had become a Muslim neighborhood by then, changing it to an urbanized ghetto of almost 400,000 people, as big as about 10 football fields put together.
Away from the national highway, tiny houses, crammed up against each other, line the narrow, muddy streets of the second-biggest Muslim locality in India by population, after the old city of Hyderabad.
Twelve-feet-high walls surround Juhapura on all sides, defining its informal border. This border ensures that the interaction of people of Juhapura with the Hindu parts of Ahmedabad is limited. Some men step out for work and travel about seven or eight kilometers, or four or five miles, to the old part of Ahmedabad, which still houses a sizable Muslim population.
Since most women in Juhapura don’t work, they are confined within the walls of the ghetto.
“We live in this strange island, within Ahmedabad, and have little interaction with the outside world,” said Shakeera Imam, 56, another shopper at the market.
As such, politicians see no need to try to woo voters from this area – very few campaigners come out to Juhapura during election season. Several women said they don’t bother to vote at all now.
“Our level of disillusionment is quite high as you can imagine,” said Mrs. Imam. “We can never vote for the B.J.P. because of what they did to us in 2002. And we don’t want to vote for the Congress because they take us for granted. They know we do not have a choice but to vote for them. Gujarat has only two major parties, unfortunately.”
The women of Juhapura said they would welcome more public spaces, like parks or community halls, where they could speak freely about politics and other matters, but it’s a very low priority considering that the ghetto lacks basic government services like water and electricity, even though it is under the administration of the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation.
The crowded market serves as a more common venue for free-flowing female discussions. After the women finish their household chores at around noon, many step out into the market, where mobile stalls of vegetables, fruits, cheap clothes and plastic utensils are set up.
Here, some women chat with their friends and neighbors, mostly about their families. But on one visit, it took only a little effort to instigate a discussion on the availability of water in Juhapura, and the women who were busy shopping immediately stopped what they were doing so that they could chime in.
“Why does Juhapura not get enough water?” asked a young woman in a gray burqa, who asked to remain anonymous because she feared she would get in trouble for her question, which she then answered herself: “It is because the government has systematically kept this neighborhood from availing even the basic facilities.”
She added, indignantly, “If they don’t want us Muslims, why do they collect tax from us?”
As the women talked about politics, Shazia, 8, who was shopping with her mother, Zahra Mirza, was eyeing the colorful clothes on display. The girl, who was born in Juhapura, admitted she didn’t understand most of what was being said around her. “However, I know about the toofan,” she says. Toofan, meaning a powerful force of nature, is the euphemism that is commonly used for the religious riots of 2002.
The girl’s mother said that the main reason women are pressured to avoid all the political discussions in their house is to shield the children from uncomfortable subjects.
“I don’t think it is a nice idea to keep discussing uneasy topics like the riots,” said Mrs. Mirza. “In doing so, we might deepen the divide. And unfortunately for us, there is no political topic that excludes the riots.”
As the political discussion continued in the market, several men ventured in with their own opinions. When the women were asked why Juhapura was denied basic facilities, the men kept trying to answer the question for them, until a reporter explicitly asked them to stop.
A handful of educated women of the community are working to encourage women to speak up for themselves in the public domain, like Gulistan Bibi, a principal at a local primary school. She has been involved in social work for more than a decade, convening meetings at the Ahmedabad Muslim Women’s Association, a nonprofit based in Juhapura, and training women so that they can become self-employed.
“Everyone is scared to allow women to have their voice,” she said. “It will create fresh problems for the politicians if we begin protesting for our basic rights.”
The association has helped women like Tahira Shiekh become more aware of the world outside Juhapura’s walls. Mrs. Shiekh, 52, gets 1,500 rupees, or $25, every month from the association, with which she buys some thread and makes a living by sewing clothes.
She said she had no life beyond her husband and children, but she learned about next year’s national elections, the struggling Indian economy and Gujarat’s development outside Juhapura through some informal discussions at the women’s association.
However, when asked who she thought would be the next prime minister or anything about current events, she kept saying, “I don’t know.” At one point she suggested, “You should ask someone with more information or wait until my husband gets back.”
She didn’t have any confidence in her opinions, she said, because women like her didn’t feel free enough to venture out past Juhapura’s walls and had no exposure to the outside world.
“How will we shape our opinions? We have no opinions on any significant things,” she said.
Raksha Kumar is a freelance journalist based in Bangalore.