Women and their struggles: Excessive focus on sexual crimes ignores everyday iniquities and indignities they face

Editor’s Note: The latest National Crime Records Bureau statistics show an 83% increase in crimes against women, with as many as 39 cases reported every hour across the country. There are several thousand more instances that go unreported. And yet, such felonious acts represent only a limited view of the manner in which women in this country must face brutality. In this series of reported pieces, Firstpost examines those societal forces that, while beyond the ambit of law, have the same deleterious effect on women as criminal acts. [caption id=“attachment_4929951” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Representational image. Agencies[/caption] Is this or is this not a country for women? What of the continuing acts of sexual assault committed with impunity day after day, particularly against India’s most vulnerable citizens: Dalit and Adivasi women? What of the impunity vested in various State actors, which emboldens them to commit vile sexual crimes in areas where their authority is unquestionable? To chart all that is wrong with the India in terms of a gender index that lists acts of sexual assault appears a staple of public discussions on women’s status. This is not surprising, for the subject lends itself to dramatic expressions of horror and besides plays into culture of prurient voyeurism: We are shocked by sexual crimes, but also follow them avidly with an attention that is unparalleled Yet, sexual crimes are not isolated events. They unfold in a social universe that is neither compassionate nor just. But this universe has become so normalised that we tend to overlook its workings, and how we engage with the latter. We are not moved as we ought to be by the casual cruelty and injustice of the caste system which underwrites not only State impunity with respect to vile crimes committed by its actors, but also civic impunity which permits the commission of such crimes. Nor do we take sufficient note of how this system is challenged by everyday struggles for dignity and justice, for comradeship and social affection that a range of civic persons, including women, carry through. With respect to the first, we perhaps do not recognise that reported instances of caste atrocity directed with particular venom at women from Dalit and other subaltern castes do not exhaust our capacity to do evil. The insistent denial of a woman’s personhood, and the refusal to acknowledge such personhood when it asserts itself are the very stuff of caste life. A casual phrase that characterises a woman and her caste as valueless, indifferent and sometimes disrespectful bodily deportment, which renders a woman as not worthy of respect, and habitual condescension that passes off as goodwill: These are equally expressions of social entitlement and authority and women as well as men have recourse to these. If public debates could focus on how this power is deployed and what this tells us about the people who deploy it, we might actually reveal a hitherto unknown capacity for shame and remorse. With respect to the second, it appears nothing short of a miracle that India’s poorest citizens keep its democracy alive through their faith in law and the courts, and the power of their protests. Across India, we see them fighting takeover of their lands, their common resources; for fair access to education which they view as a means of social change; and for social comradeship. The silent work of women in building support networks, locally and widely, to ensure that those fighting for justice are cared for, and to keep everyday life in place: We are witness to this time and again, but rarely do we consider this labour salient. Nor do we think about how many of us who identify as feminists or civil rights actors are drawn into democratic processes. It is the struggles of women from Dalit and Adivasi communities that continually renew the fragile lease of life granted to our democracy at the best of times. It is important therefore to not define women’s lives solely through the fact of their sexual vulnerability. This means that we systematically connect sexual vulnerability social and economic vulnerability and also understand how, equally, political vulnerability shapes women’s lives. One has only to think of communal violence, and the everyday forms of communal ‘othering’ that we see today, directed chiefly but not exclusively against Muslims, and which affects women’s lives in ways that we have not fully grasped yet. The recent debates over the triple talaq bill are a case in point: the contentious nature of discussions ought to have alerted us to the complex realities of Muslim women’s lives, as expressed in their own words. Their search for justice in the family has been a long one, and the bill coming at the time it did, and with the backing of political forces that are deeply inimical to the equality and justice claims of India’s minorities, has shown up various levels of injustice that require sustained critical and compassionate attention. Further, we need to perhaps understand better how lives actually fold, within contexts which appear to foreclose all choices for women. Take the case of trafficked women. Their lives cannot be merely read off their conditions of existence. The details of how they transact, bargain, negotiate their way through even relentlessly coarse and violent circumstances, often with dignity and grace, and even humour make for a different sort of feminist fable. And many such fables ask to be written. As for the economic everyday of women’s lives: It is not always an attractive subject for public discussion, unless we have ruin and devastation markers to guide our way through a very complex reality. Women as rational economic actors: this is not something we wish to reckon with, though banks and micro-credit financiers have long recognised this fact and worked it to their advantage. Likewise, we do not engage enough with women’s labouring lives: the diverse forms of labour and the equally diverse issues that women reckon with, from occupational safety, health hazards to struggles over time, wages, sexual harassment and balancing work at home and outside. If we are to look beyond the dramatic moments that mark women’s lives as tragic, and which we associate with sexual violence, we would be forced to take note of a fundamental reality: that women labour for the persistence of life. Take women’s lives in zones of trouble, of war and civil conflict. We know how women’s lives are rendered stressful and even desperate in these zones, given that they have to reckon with the regular presence of armed men on the streets as well as the possibility of them entering their homes. But we seldom realise that life, say, in Kashmir is not defined only by conflict. For, in the middle of conflict and death, women continue to be providers and care-givers, political actors and social welfare workers. Meanwhile, they also fall in love, or out of it, marry, happily or otherwise, labour, often in unpleasant conditions, make babies, build homes… And in the midst of political chaos and anomie, they have to reckon with routine misogyny and casual humiliation from within communities under siege, as is evident from the complex discussions of women’s rights in Meghalaya and Nagaland. For long, women’s movements have attempted to imagine a sisterhood that holds itself together because we are all ultimately vulnerable to assault: violence against women has been a call that has brought women from across India and different castes and classes together. But this coming together on account of society viewing us as disposable bodies is not nearly enough. For one, some of us are culpable of and complicit in this violence as is evident during caste and communal attacks, and for another, such a view does no justice to how women lead their lives, and keep together families and communities, and struggle to hold their own in all of this.