Where women bore the brunt - By Raka Roy


Among the women surviving in relief camps are many who have suffered the most bestial forms of sexual violence — including rape, gang rape, mass rape, stripping, insertion of objects into their body, and molestations. A majority of rape victims have been burnt alive. — Citizens' Initiative, ``The Survivors Speak,'' April 16, 2002.

General Westmoreland, commander of all U.S. troops in the war against Vietnam, once infamously claimed that the enormous loss of life suffered by the Vietnamese was not really comparable to the deaths of Americans because ``Orientals attach less value to life than Westerners''. A seven-year-old boy said to a friend of mine the other day ``There are so many Muslims in India, so what if some of them die.'' How did he learn the lesson so quickly? At how young an age do we realise that some people are more human than others that they deserve to die less frequently, to be mourned and glorified in their deaths, while others don't? When do we learn that We belong to those who deserve to live and They don't?

It is not easy to rape a woman, to burn her, or to cut her foetus out of her body. It requires some effort. But in February this year, this effort was successfully and collectively achieved in Ahmedabad, as we learn from the report of the Citizen's Initiative fact-finding team of women. The report makes it clear that young Muslim girls, pregnant women, women with new-born babies were chased, caught, raped, cut, pierced, stabbed, and burnt. How did this come to pass? How did groups of men come to believe that such deeds could and should be done? Let us examine the steps.

First, you must have a people that are considered inferior by another people. It is achieved by years of hard ideological work, to turn the population into the deadly Other. This Other has no feelings, cannot be trusted, is dirty, deserves to be punished, and is not as human as We are.

Where does the creation of the inferior other in India begin? Does it begin with the organising principle of Hindu society caste? So successful has this principle of inherent and dehumanising inequality been that it appears to be rooted in our collective memory. Or does it begin with the servant in the middle class home who exists to meet the needs of a middle class child. It comes easily to us to slap someone we disagree with, to abuse those who are younger or lower on the totem pole than us, to consider outrageous any claim of a subordinate to humanity.

But the creation of populations of the ``other'' is only the beginning. The second step is the belief that women are not only inferior but also woman's sexuality has to be patrolled so that it is legitimately accessible to some men and inaccessible to others. Witness the spate of murders of women who dare marry outside their community. Young girls and boys learn early that a woman's body is to be monitored, controlled by, and accessible to a chosen few. A girl, in particular, learns quickly that her parents' honour and happiness is contingent on her conformity to appropriate dress and behavioural codes. But sometimes she realises too late that her body may be torn apart and destroyed because she has dared to love another human being without permission. A woman's body ultimately belongs to her community not to herself.

After we have learnt how to consider those who are not Us different and inferior, and we have learnt about the need to control and punish women, we must then take the third step and identify the target population and it's women. Well that is easily done in this case. As Urvashi Butalia,

Ritu Menon and Kamala Bhasin have shown, the Us and Them feelings of communities during Partition created protected and protectable women on one side and unprotected and rapable women on the other side. The populations were identified at Partition and then stored in the collective memory to be whipped into frenzy when necessary. The violence was kept alive by stories, jokes, implicit rules, and writings that swirled underground in the darkness of both Hindu and Muslim subconscious, until they dared to emerge in the public eye. Now, as the Sangh Parivar reigns, these feelings and hatreds are acceptable public discourse, particularly for the majority Hindu community. So Varsha Bhosle writes mockingly of ``Mosies'' in her unspeakable column in Rediff, and becomes a folk hero. To the West's focus on the figure of the dangerous Arab, we in India, delightedly throw in our prejudices. Muslims have always been different, their women are both deeply oppressed and licentious, and the men sexually depraved and cruel. Didn't you know?

For communal rapes on a mass scale we need still other conditions, the most important of which is a complicit state. This means we must have police who laugh or join in, leaders who blatantly discriminate and lie, and courts, which do not prosecute. The first and second conditions have been successfully achieved. The police at worst abetted the violence, or refused to lodge FIRs, and at best did nothing. Every government official who stood up against the violence has been harassed or transferred. The BJP MLA of one of the worst-hit areas of Ahmedabad explained away the violence by referring to the ``natural'' hatred (ghrina) of Hindus for Muslims, the Chief Minister of Gujarat similarly referred to the ``natural and justified anger'' of the people of his State, while the Prime Minister focussed his criticisms on the ``trouble-making Muslims''. The extent of the courts' complicity is still to be seen.

The final ingredient of this ghoulish recipe is essential — a nation full of people to either secretly gloat that these ghastly acts occurred, or even worse, to pretend it didn't happen. Equally complicit are those who shudder delicately that these things could happen in ``our country'', and assign blame to a group of people, that scapegoat of the upper classes, the ``anti-social element''. Not Us.

When all of these are in place, why then, we will have created not one rapist but a nation full of them.

(The writer is Associate Professor of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley.)

These are the accounts of some of the women out of thousands, who chose to spoke. They were just like you and me. Mother's and Sisters of people, just like you and me. Living in a society and feeling secure amidst their people until the catastrophe struck. Passing their lives without hurting anyone , Just like you and me. So where did they go wrong? Any suggestions? Are there any lessons to be learnt?

Reader's Comment:  WHERE are the deaf, dumb and blind crusaders of human rights who cannot act against criminals who openly persecute womenfolk, be it in Gujarat, Afghanistan and recently in Pakistan as well?
For years, these human-rights advocates have been busy concocting stories about the discrimination of women under Taleban regime. they fraudulently mobilised all resources of the world to eliminate them. The Taleban have actually been ensuring the safety and honour of all residents irrespective of gender, language, nationality and religion. The only problem with them was that they refused to be Uncle Sam's stooges. Did we ever hear of people belonging to the religious minorities being killed during the Taleban era?

Violence, coercion, corruption and exploitation of human rights have been rampant ever since the US and its allies waged aggression in the name of a 'war against terror'. How long will mankind continue to suffer? And how long will it continue to condone such exploitation?

Even critics of the Taleban government now realise that the establishment of a peaceful society demands Taleban-styled honest rulers to ensure justice, equality and tranquillity among people, which neither Bush nor his minions like Musharraf and Karzai can deliver. - Khalid Saleh, Doha, Qatar

   Question: I believe that a rape victim has to provide two male witnesses to prove that she was raped. How is it possible that she can do that?

   Answer: Muslim jurists are generally of the opinion that to evidence a case of rape, the victim has to provide four (not two) witnesses to prove the case. The basis of the Jurist's opinion is the Qur'anic directive regarding the evidence required to start any legal proceedings against persons who have been accused of fornication.
However, a close look at the related verse of the Qur'an shows that it neither relates to the required evidence for rape cases nor for that of ordinary cases of fornication. On the contrary, it relates to the particular situation in which a person, who is generally known to be chaste and pious, is accused of fornication. For this particular case, the Qur'an says:
Those who accuse chaste women of fornication and then do not provide four witnesses [to evidence their accusation] strike them with eighty strips and do not accept their witness ever after. (Al-Noor 24: 4)
Keeping the stresses of the words of the referred verse in perspective, it is quite clear that the verse does not relate to the evidence required to prove a case of rape. On the contrary, it actually relates to protecting chaste women (as well as men) from false accusations of fornication. In other words, the verse is not prescribing the minimum number of witnesses to prove a case of rape or fornication; it is actually prescribing the minimum number of witnesses, which must be present and willing to testify against those accused of fornication, to initiate any court proceedings or to admit a case against such accused. This is quite clear from the fact that in the absence of the prescribed number of witnesses, the verse prescribes a severe punishment for the person/persons making the accusation.
Thus, according to my understanding of the related verse, the referred opinion of the Muslim jurists is not very accurate.
Furthermore, even if it is accepted that the verse prescribes the number of witnesses to prove a case of fornication, as has generally been derived by the Muslim jurists, it would still not be correct, in my opinion, to draw an analogy between rape and fornication, especially in the case of the requirement of witnesses. I am sure you would agree with me that nothing, besides the fact that both the crimes relate to sex, is common between rape and fornication. It is obvious that in the case of fornication, there is, generally, no aggrieved party, which may be termed as a complainant (in its literal sense). On the contrary, a case of fornication is, generally, initiated with an accusation on two persons (a man and a woman), who have willingly (with mutual consent) indulged in an act considered to be a crime in the Islamic Shari`ah. The reason for this peculiar position of fornication is that - in contrast to other crimes like theft, murder, robbery and even rape - fornication is a crime in which neither of the parties directly involved in it assumes the role of a complainant. The complainant, in the case of fornication, is generally a third party, not directly involved in the crime (which may, therefore, be more accurately termed as an 'accuser'). The position of a rape victim is, obviously, not comparable to that of one of the two (or more) parties to fornication. I, therefore, do not agree with the opinion of the majority of the Muslim jurists, who have drawn an analogy between a rape victim and a party to fornication and, therefore, are of the opinion that the evidence required to prove a case of rape is the same as the one required in proving a case of fornication[1].
In my opinion, the Shari`ah has not given any strict guidelines or rules regarding how to prove a case of rape, just as no strict and universal guidelines and rules have been given by the Shari`ah regarding the methods of proving any other crime. The reason for this silence of the Shari`ah, in the referred case, is quite obvious. We know that the methods employed in evidencing crimes greatly rely upon the human developments in the field of forensics and other investigative disciplines. Thus, the methods that can so easily be employed in the modern day were more or less unimaginable just a few years ago. Had the Shari`ah prescribed any rules regarding the methods of proving a crime, such methods would have become redundant with any developments in the field of forensics and other investigative disciplines. In view of the above explanation, it is my opinion that the case of rape, as any other crime, except an accusation of fornication, does not require the complainant to provide a given number of witnesses, for the initiation of any legal proceedings. On the contrary, when a victim of rape - which is actually an aggrieved party in a crime rather than a party to it - brings her complaint to an authority, it is not merely an accusation, on the contrary, it is in fact a complaint of an injustice that she has suffered at the hands of the accused. In such a case, the legal authority, if it is satisfied[2] of the complainant's appeal, may initiate any legal proceedings against the accused even if the complainant does not have any witnesses to prove her claim. The case shall, subsequently, be decided on the basis of all such evidence, which is considered admissible by the competent legal authority. Query answered by : Shk Moiz Amjad