Wrong to erase role of caste in Hathras rape case

The Dalit woman who was allegedly tortured and gang raped by four Thakur men in Hathras, Uttar Pradesh, fought for her life for two whole weeks before succumbing to her injuries in Safdarjung Hospital. However, the assault on her body continues even after her death. The horrific manner in which the UP police robbed her family of the right to cremate her body deserves the highest condemnation but what is even worse is the narrative spun by people who attempt to frame the incident only as gender-based violence, and not as a caste atrocity.

Samajwadi Party leader Ram Gopal Yadav’s statement to ANI draws attention to the caste dynamics at play in this context.“The prime accused will walk free because he belongs to the chief minister’s caste,” he was quoted as saying. He has categorically mentioned that “the UP Police will file whatever it will be asked to” because the cops might face consequences from not following orders. He also claimed that the rape victim’s body was not handed over to the family as part of a larger plan to “prove that the girl was not raped.”

Role of caste in violence against women

What makes highly educated and well-networked people, many of whom call themselves feminists, deny this clear connection between violence against women and caste hierarchies? Even before the term ‘intersectionality’ became part of the development sector lexicon in India, it was understood that Dalit women are marginalised on account of both caste and gender. Only those who have not faced discrimination because of their caste location might have the audacity to suggest that the caste of the Hathras rape victim had no role to play in the brutalisation that she experienced.

On September 30, Kiruba Munusamy, Advocate at the Supreme Court of India, and founder of Legal Initiative for Equality, tweeted: “Don’t you see your #EnoughIsEnough debates or Nirbhaya Funds aren’t stopping sexual violence? Because the root cause is caste that you don’t talk about. It’s the oppressive misogynistic Indian-Hindu culture embedded in the caste, social and gender hierarchies you don’t give up.” It is easy to make broad sweeping generalisations about violence against women but they do not hold much value if they leave caste atrocities out of the analysis.

Those who are oblivious to the ways in which patriarchy is enabled by casteism must look carefully at the history of the women’s empowerment discourse in India. The Vishaka guidelines laid down by the Supreme Court of India in 1997, which paved the way for The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act in 2013, owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to the courage and labour of social worker Bhanwari Devi, the Kumhar woman from Rajasthan who stood up against the upper caste Gujjar men who gang raped her in 1992.

In a new book titled, Sex and the Supreme Court: How the Law is Upholding the Dignity of the Indian Citizen (2020), edited by Saurabh Kirpal, Namita Bhandare has written an essay titled, ‘The Beast in Our Midst: How India’s MeToo Movement Broke the Silence on Workplace Sexual Harassment’. She points out how Bhanwari Devi was also punished by the very system she approached for justice. Bhandare writes: “When judgement was pronounced three years later, in November 1995, by a judge of the District and Sessions court, he ruled: ‘Since the offenders were upper caste men and included a Brahmin, the rape could not have taken place.’ For the judge it was unthinkable that upper caste men could have touched a lower caste woman.”

Erasure of caste a wilful act

If upper caste women are now able to speak out against sexual harassment at the workplace, and be heard, a lot of that has been made possible by women who dared to point out the deep entanglements between caste atrocities and gender-based violence. Disregarding this reality is a wilful act of erasure. Bhandare’s essay also highlights the work of another Dalit woman, Raya Sarkar, who published the List of Sexual Harassers in Academia (LoSHA) in 2017 to name and shame teachers at Indian universities who were alleged to have sexually harassed or assaulted students. It is no surprise that, on account of Sarkar’s caste location, her work has been discredited by many upper caste feminists.

The unwillingness to engage with caste discrimination is not unique to the women’s movement in India. It is wired into the queer rights movement as well. Social justice for all is not possible if upper caste activists, scholars, journalists and leaders of non-profit organisations want all the gains only for people within their own caste networks. This complicity is made evident in this brief excerpt from a poem titled ‘Rape Nation’, written and tweeted by poet, translator and novelist Meena Kandasamy in response to the police brutality in Hathras.

This has happened before, this will happen again.

Sanatana, the only law of the land that’s in force,

Sanatana, where nothing, nothing ever will change.

Always, always a victim-blaming slut-template,

a rapist-shielding police-state, a caste-denying fourth estate.

(Chintan Girish Modi is a writer, educator and researcher who tweets @chintan_connect)

The views expressed above are the author’s own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.