Questions Aruna Shanbaug and Nirbhaya would have asked had they lived
Jurisprudence
is a theory of the relation between the lives of citizens and the law of the
land. And so the ideal jurisprudence for India’s women would be one that treats
our actual lived experiences of violation on par with men’s, while interpreting
the laws and deciding culpability. Obviously this is yet to happen . The long
vegetative existence of Aruna and Nirbhaya, both victims of most brutal rape, and
the trials conducted thereafter, reveal that in the eyes of our civil society
and law, the male view on the issue of crimes against women still remains the
sole objective standard in police stations and courts of law.
Even after
the recent amendments, when deliberating over issues of sexual access to women
and their consent, the courts appear to be guided often by accepted family and
kinship rules and traditional sexual mores laid down over centuries by men. So even
under the law the final articulation of what is deemed a violent encounter and
invasion of an unwilling female victim’s body by a man (whether inside or
outside the home), will keep women’s epistemy out and confirm the cultural
sanctions that make such crimes possible . The violated victim’s life
circumstances and her experience of the actual sexual encounter may vary vastly
from the male version being debated, but more often than not it will go
unrecorded and remain invisible in the case diaries written by policemen sharing
their cultural values with the civil society.
In the case
of Aruna Shanbaug’s rape by a ward boy (who strangled her with a dog chain
before raping her anally and leaving her brain dead) the matter was first
deliberated upon internally by males in authority, who were wary of the nature
of the crime stigmatizing the institution. It was finally reported to the
police as a brutal physical attack and theft of jewellery by the accused and
argued in the courts of law along those lines alone. Since according to the
then prevalent version of the Rape laws forced anal sex did not qualify as
rape, the perp was finally awarded sentences based on the charges of attack and
theft filed by the Hospital . Having served the term he was for long
untraceable, and we are told will remain free because he can not be tried twice
for the same crime, and besides, as one of Marlowe’s characters said, the wench
is dead . Aruna, abandoned by her family
and fiancé, spent the remaining 42 years of her life in a hospital room in deep
coma . Pinky Virani, a feisty journalist who
recorded her sordid story and meaningless vegetative life in detail,
petitioned the court for allowing her painful life to be terminated on
compassionate grounds. The request was turned down. Nirbhaya was supported by
her family but died shortly after being assaulted and the jury is still out on
a juvenile rapist from the gang that assaulted her.
It is true no
law gives a right to males to rape females. No law gives the right to males to
rape their wives or daughters or daughters in law either. But gang rapes and incest
happen and despite a noticeable increase in all such cases , the state has yet
to have a law that can systematically intervene or spell out clear terms for
barring a proven perpetrators’ authority and access to females. One can say there
is no law to silence the victims. It is not necessary, since attackers have
already taken care to silence them physically or by repeated verbal threats. Even
after a few women and girls survive to tell the tale, many are first silenced their
own families, fearful of a bad name. At the Thanas where the local police will
first blame the victim taking her as one with a questionable character, they
are again deprived of the right to assert their version as being the true one.
And if they cross this hurdle, many can be rendered speechless in courts that
push her to use an unspeakable vocabulary and describe what was done to her while
the audiences titter again and again.
After such
repeated humiliations how can a woman assert her right to be heard on par with
the rapist ?
You get the
picture.
The family remains
the first and the biggest bulwark against an impartial hearing of crimes
against women . And home is where most
sexual crimes are committed by men who are mostly known to the victims. Even
after the family chooses to support the victim and seeks out help, sexist quips
from political and religious leaders begin to be hurled at her . They stigmatize
and question the victims’s character and life style without ever having met
her, and imply that it is not the men but young women’s increased social visibility
and mobility and their promiscuous lives that are to be blamed. Taken together in
the context of other laws pertaining to sexual misconduct, (including the
obscenity and the abortion laws) these retrograde views blaming the victims of rape,
sex trafficking and domestic violence, one realizes how little about sexual
crimes against women is defined and adjudicated, using the victims’ own experience
and her rights as a human being.
It is time
those endless debates, beloved of prime time TV shows between conservatives and
liberals, artists and philistines, virgins and whores, forces of oppression and
liberation, rage and tolerance, are superseded once and for all, by a political
abolistionist debate : are women equal as human beings or not ? It is only then
that one can expect work to begin on the crafting of a feminist theory of state
.
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