Rape happens in Bharat
January 14th, 2013
Bharat is coming out with its usual do’s and don’ts for womenfolk that have always been there and enforced strictly but the world of ours that works next to the men late nights, can probably do nothing but wonder when this Bharat will disappear. Since those professing to be representing true Indian values in their khaki shorts and baton in early morning sermons and even those who are in power in the “real” Bharat, will probably continue to support rapists by being logical about criminals. Their logical thinking, though, fails them when it to comes to why terrorists in Kashmir or the Naxals behave in a particular way. Bharat to me is a misnomer. We were never a one country. We protect our women but we rape women of other communities whether it is in a communal riot or in a crackdown by security forces or in a big city where nobody knows you. Besides, rape happens only in ‘Bharat’. Pick up the two greatest Hindu mythologies. One is about abduction of Sita and the other an attempt to molest Draupadi and then to avenge these, both these texts have long-drawn battles. The abduction and the attempt to molest were both acts of punishment, one meted by Ravana to avenge the insult his sister was heaped upon by Laxman, and the other by the Kauravs for Draupadi who made fun of her husband’s cousins, just as a BJP minister in Madhya Pradesh says women who cross “moral limits” should be punished. In other religious texts like Durga Saptashati, the women power is about Devi who kills the evil. Primarily, most Hindu texts are about violence though they always have a larger message about goodness and how good wins over evil. So, when RSS’s Bhagwat, representing this Bharat, uses the Higgs Theory to explain rape, and Asaram Bapu says the Delhi gang rape victim should have called the rapists brother, one was trying to be logical and the other just reaffirming the age-old myth that brothers are meant to protect girls since, after all, it is Krishna who helps Draupadi when her five warrior husbands are gambling with cousins. What they fail to acknowledge is that rape is a crime that happens even at home and in small town Bharat. Fathers and brothers also rape and kill girls. Hinduism maybe the only other religion, besides Christianity, where a woman is worshipped. But Sita, the Goddess, sacrificed herself to convince her husband, an ideal king, of her “purity”. Draupadi who actually went through an attempted molestation is not a God to the Hindus but a wife who provokes her five husbands to fight a war against cousins. All religious texts are written by men and these were good men living in Bharat, but as an aunt who was a Hindi teacher told me, recently even texts of Tulsidas and Kabir have lines prejudicial to women. It is the Indian ethos that teaches you to treat men as protectors and women as taryacharit (one who is difficult to gauge, loosely unreliable thinking and character). It is the language that Indians speak that has a translation for prostitutes in feminine but not in masculine. This is not to say that the liberal and educated Bharat, so-called India, is not a misogynist. There is a senior Union minister loved for his liberal thinking who allegedly acted fresh with a lady bureaucrat some years back but all he has got is promotion. There is an additional secretary in the government of India who explained rape many years ago as a crime which resulted from women going to the field to relieve themselves and is highly sexist in his remarks even now. There are journalists young and old who think some women colleagues get news not because they are hardworking and have good conversational skills but because men like them. Bharat has still not learnt to treat women as equals. It is comfortable treating a woman as a mother, sister, wife, and in adverse circumstances as Kali or Durga, Goddess representing the violent face of a woman killing the demons. It is this Bharat that insults, rapes and kills women. |