Who’s afraid of the I-word ? Aamir Khan

Let’s give Aamir Khan credit where credit is due. Child sex abuse (CSA) is no gasp-inducing revelation in India. But it’s not something any of us particularly want to dwell on, certainly not on a Sunday morning. But Aamir Khan forced us to take an unflinching look at what we would rather keep under covers. Well, almost unflinching. In the end, an entire programme on child sex abuse shied away from confronting the monstrous elephant in the room – incest. Yet how can you have a show on CSA and talk about the shaming, the silence and the stigma without explicitly facing the greatest betrayal of all – when the abuse is happening not just inside the home but being perpetrated by the very people who are meant to protect the child, the ones Aamir called “the bodyguards”? It is the ultimate abuse of power. [caption id=“attachment_308812” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“AFP”] [/caption] It is not that there is no data out there on incest. A report by the NGO RAHI (Recovering and Healing from Incest) suggests nearly three quarters of upper and middle-class women have been abused by a family member. Pinky Virani’s explosive book Bitter Chocolate has been around since 2000. I still see it everywhere, even on the shelves of airport bookstores. It has story after story of boys and girls abused and violated by uncles, aunts, cousins, grandparents and even parents. RAHI’s founder Anuja Gupta was on Satyamev Jayate this week. She steered the conversation close to that touchy territory when she told Aamir about a woman who came to the NGO because her father-in-law was molesting her little daughter. That could have been the perfect moment to confront the issue. Aamir empathised, looked suitably stricken and then moved the conversation along. The molesting dadaji became an aberration, a sick footnote to the topic. But he is not. “Incest is the most under-reported child rights and human rights violation in India,” writes Shoma A Chatterji in a prize-winning 2009  essay . She tells the story of Kishore Chauhan in Mumbai. He raped his daughter for nine years because a tantrik told him that could save his failing business. The mother knew but told the girl she needed to save the family from financial ruin. The tantrik raped the girl as well and she finally broke her silence when he turned on her younger sister. In 2008 the police nabbed Rajendra Yadav for molesting his 12-year-old niece. She had been living with him after her parents were killed in the 7/11 Mumbai blasts. Another father raped his daughter in the belief that sex with a virgin would cure him of an STD. It didn’t work and she got infected instead. Furious, he sold her to a brothel for Rs 500. Does the show avert its gaze from these stories because they are exceptions or because they would force us to confront a much more unpalatable truth about ourselves? They bring the issue literally too close to home. Aamir Khan proved this week that when push comes to shove, he is happy to eventually let us off the hook. Our greatest crime becomes one of omission – “we did not know.” We can live with that failure. The other failure, the crimes of commission, is much much harder to grapple with. So Padma Iyer, a mother comes on the show and pleads with the audience to “believe your child” something she regrets she had not done with her own son. He was being abused by her relative since he was seven until the age of 18. When he tried to tell her that he was experiencing rectal bleeding she told him he must have eaten too many mangoes in the summer. It was heartwarming to see the mother and the son together on the show but it left the uncomfortable question dangling. Is this just about not believing the child? Or are we culpable in other far more insidious ways? When sexual abuse happens in schools, the institutions are often slow to act. “Our school makes the Vatican look vigilant in these matters,” writes Lakshmi Chaudhry on Firstpost. That’s understandable – schools don’t want the bad publicity. But what about the parents? Chaudhry sums up a Times of India report:

Everyone knows what’s happening but keeps mum; parents don’t want their children to go through the legal process or endure the social stigma it brings; there is no non-bailable offence under which the perpetrator can be booked; and schools prefer to protect their brand rather than their students. The result: pedophiles enjoy lifelong immunity, free to abuse children over and over again.

That’s a point that bears emphasising - pedophiles enjoy lifelong immunity not just because the law is lacking or authorities drag their feet but because the parents push the abuse under the carpet. It’s not that Aamir is unaware of the parental silencing around the issue. That’s clear in his column in the Hindustan Times today even though he still never uses the i-word.

If a child does report sexual abuse, very often our first thought is — how can I take action against my own family member? Family ki izzat, hamari izzat mitti mein mil jaayegi, log kya kahenge, mere bachche ke saath aisa hua, toh is baat ko chhupao. Like Padma, first we refuse to admit the possibility of it happening, and then we try to hide it. And because we have hidden it, we are unable to take action on it. Through all of this, we are thinking of others, of society. But we forget to think about our child.

Is Aamir  willing to risk making those same parents squirm on national television? They are the ones sitting in his audience in the studio and in homes across India. That’s the  missed opportunity of Satyamev Jayate. It’s not any great show of courage to condemn female foeticide or child sex abuse as evil. Who would argue with that? The courage comes from pushing the envelope just a little further to the uncomfortable place where we have to take more responsibility . Aamir can push us there because he has the star power. And he showed he could do it with female foeticide. As Santosh Desai writes in Outlook:

It is Aamir’s ability to begin with an idea, execute it without compromise, and find ways to make it valuable to the consuming ecosystem that makes his effort so remarkable… He is able to protect the purity of his idea from what are touted as the deadening compulsions of the market ecosystem. He caters to the market by not pandering to it, but by sensing its unarticulated and barely discernible needs.

Aamir proved this week that there is always compromise, that the lines between catering to the market and pandering to it are not so sharply etched. I presume he and his producers fear the television market is not ready for the incest word, so that evil still dares not speak its name, even on an in-depth show about child sexual abuse. But here’s something for Aamir to think about. A colleague mentioned her niece had just given Pinky Virani’s Bitter Chocolate to her mother saying “It will be hard for you to read. But you should read it.” The mother did and passed it on to her mother with the same message. If middle class families in Chennai can do it, what holds back the makers of Satyamev Jayate?