Women’s fury starts to challenge India’s patriarchal mindset

A year ago, India was shaken by a pent-up female fury demanding action against sexual harassment at the hands of male colleagues, both superior as well as subordinate, as well as strangers. A simmering cauldron of rage and resentment has lingered both against official apathy and India's reigning patriarchal mindset.

In December, a young student was gang-raped. The question that young men and women asked themselves as she lay in hospital was what crime she had committed to have been meted out such horrifying punishment. After her death, the rousing of a collective conscience led to the setting up of fast-track courts to look into sexual offences against women, a gesture that had been waiting an eternity to happen.

The five men who had raped her were the first to be found guilty in that court, with the special prosecutor marshalling evidence as varied as injuries from teeth marks to the weapons used to assault her and her male friend on that bus.

Then the Indian parliament passed into law a bill on sexual harassment in the workplace that had been on hold since the supreme court issued guidelines for the redressal of sexual offences in 1997, following the rape of a Rajasthan social worker, Bhanwari Devi, in 1992.

In the last weeks and months, it seems as if a dam has broken, with women standing up to be counted. They have come out into the open, throwing away the veil of stigma and social shame that communities in South Asia usually attach to the victim, and have pointed a direct accusing finger at their aggressors. At last, it seems, the ancient codes that governed India and that gave the male child, the male adolescent and the male adult primacy of place in the rites of passage through life, could be weakening.

The attack has been led from the front by a young woman journalist in the prominent magazine Tehelka, accusing her boss of attempting to rape her in a lift in Goa, where celebrities from around the world had gathered to discuss and debate their work. The sensational accusation has transfixed India, a measure of the national interest.

The incident is not isolated. A couple of months ago, a young girl was raped inside an abandoned compound in Mumbai, where she and a photographer were reconnoitring for a fashion shoot. She lived to report her aggressors to the police. A few weeks ago, a student from a college of law in Kolkata blogged about being sexually harassed by a recently retired supreme court judge with whom she had been interning. Last week, a student from Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University complained that an official from the Indian film festival in Goa had made sexual advances, although she had repeatedly rejected him.

And it now seems that a young female architect in Gujarat in 2009 had extensive surveillance conducted on her by none other than a former minister in the Gujarat government and close confidante of BJP prime ministerial candidate and Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi, allegedly because the “sahib” or “big boss” was “enamoured” of the girl.

Indians are now wondering how the law against sexual harassment in the workplace, having been passed only earlier this year, will be implemented in each of these cases. Indeed, will it be implemented at all, or will the aggressors be allowed to get away with their crimes? Unlike the Delhi and Mumbai gang rape aggressors, who were poor and thuggish and had lived in slums all their lives, the Tehelka editor is very much part of Delhi’s elite and the Gujarat chief minister may even become prime minister. In fact, the last two cases have already acquired serious political colour, with the editor seen to be pro-Congress.

At the time of going to press, the young girl accusing her former boss at Tehelka of rape has made her statement in front of a magistrate. She says she wants justice because her “bodily integrity” has been violated, a statement thousands of other Indian women are looking at with awe and wonderment.

Incredibly, the press attention is beginning to take effect. None other than the supreme court has finally set up a unit to look into cases of sexual harassment inside its own court.

But how long will it be before the press moves on to the next story, to the next campaign, to the next blockbuster event? Can the media actually help change India’s patriarchal mindset or is it simply shining the light on the grime, provoking social institutions to begin the long haul of educating its population in a much more gender-sensitive way?

In a country where some of the most powerful leaders across the political spectrum are women, it would be natural to ask why more fundamental gender-based change has not occurred so far.

As always, there are several answers to the question, but surely one has to do with the fact that India’s male politicians have so far successfully resisted a quota for women in politics – while agreeing to quotas for several backward castes, Dalits and minority groups like Christians and Muslims.

Since sexual harassment, as it is widely acknowledged, is about power, as is politics, perhaps it is time for the twain to meet. An expansion of female power will dramatically alter the fundamentals of India as women insist that money should be better spent on health, education and the improvement of socio-economic indicators.

The journey is long and hard, but at least the fight has begun.

Jyoti Malhotra is a political and foreign affairs analyst based in Delhi

On Twitter: @jomalhotra