Let there be no mothers/Let there be no wives/Let there be no daughters/And there will be no crimes, read Anubha Sharma to a hall packed with students like her, all rapt with attention. A student of Indraprastha College, New Delhi’s oldest women’s college, Sharma wrote the poem, later published by the Indian daily the Hindu, out of frustration after a long argument with her father on the parameters of safety for women.
Recently, she, along with some of her teachers and many of her fellow students, held an impassioned discussion of the infraction of their personal freedom in the aftermath of the horrific Delhi gang rape. Last month, the crime galvanized an entire nation into a flurry of protests, in which Indraprastha students, who hail from all over the country, zealously participated. For weeks, teachers and students camped out in protest venues, marched, and submitted memorandums to government authorities to make the city a safer place for its women.
But even at this female-centric institution, students’ day-to-day freedoms have shrunk since the 16 December attack. Curfew for students living in the campus dormitories has been brought forward an hour to 9.30 PM, and girls are now required to seek permission from the college administration before going out with friends, and provide details of the friends they are going out with. These measures, the girls were unanimous in saying at the meeting, pose a serious threat to their personal freedom. “Every time incidents of sexual assault or molestation happens in any part of the country, we girls face more and more restrictions,” one student said during the discussion. “Why should we pay for the crimes men commit? Lock the men up. We are not the culprits!”
They are not, but in the labyrinth of India’s complicated patriarchy, women are not just victims, but scapegoats. Every time there is a rape— and there have been at least ten more gruesome rapes reported in the past month, including that of a seven-year-old girl in Goa— kneejerk reactions from family members and political leaders alike places the onus on women by imposing restrictions on the way they move and how they dress. Indian media recently reported that the government of the northern state of Uttarakhand passed an order stopping women from working beyond 1800 hours in both private and government jobs. The regressive edict, conceived by the state government as a way to curb crimes against women, was widely opposed by women’s rights activists and the political opposition, leading the state’s chief minister to deny that such an order had ever, in fact, been passed.
It was not an isolated transgression. Earlier, the Delhi police had issued a list of dos and don’ts for women in the capital to stay safe, including not boarding empty buses and going straight home after school/college. The government of the union territory of Puducherry came up with the bizarre solution of putting girls in overcoats, a move that was strongly opposed by students all over the country and the civil society prompting the government to backtrack. In Haryana state, khap panchayats, the all powerful and all-male informal village councils, have made suggestions that girls should be married off sooner, or not be allowed to use mobile phones. These retro diktats, made both before and after the 16 December crime, have many here worried that hard-earned freedom of Indian women is on the line. “It’s not just fear about safety. It is an excuse to impose lots of patriarchal strictures,” says Kavita Krishnan, secretary of the All India Progressive Women’s Association. “It becomes a mask for anxiety about your daughter’s sexuality or a control of her sexuality. That anxiety has no simple solution.”
Women, too, are imposing stricter limits on themselves, as they find themselves looking over their shoulders a little too often in the wake of the 16 December incident. Many women say they have started dressing more conservatively in response to a society that has repeatedly advised them to be invisible in order to be safe from sexual predators. “Whatever ten steps we had advanced, this incident has put us back by at least twenty more steps,” says Tulip, a 27-year-old publishing professional who lives in New Delhi. Tulip, who has led a blithe life in the capital for the last couple of years, sharing a flat with a few other girlfriends, says she suddenly feels trapped. Her parents, who live in the Himalayan town of Dehradun, get frazzled when she goes out in the evenings. On their advice, Tulip had taken to dress more plainly so as not to attract undue attention. “One section of society will certainly ask for more restrictions,” says social activist Aruna Roy. “But if the country shifts back to any regressive position it will be fought tooth and nail by many of us.”
Girls like Tulip and Anubha Sharma, the student poet, have showed up by the thousands to protest venues in the past month with placards that loudly proclaimed their opposition to these patriarchal decrees. They have walked the roads at night to reclaim the streets back for themselves (photo). They have fought with their parents and family members to reclaim their independence. Many activists believe that it is this assertion of freedom at home that prompted such a tremendous social reaction in the public sphere. “I don’t think that all the reaction was due to the fear of sexual violence,” Krishnan says. “The reaction is also to the assertion of freedom. When woman starts demanding freedom and rights, that’s where the discomfort begins.”
This discomfort has led to an increased policing of women in the Indian society in the wake of the Delhi gang rape. But the Delhi rape and its fallout has also brought out the steel in Indian women, whose voice of protest this time around has been persistently irrepressible. On a recent afternoon, as the discussion was winding up at Indraprastha College, a group of young girls in their early twenties debated passionately what they could do to counteract the force of this repression. Long-term change might be still awhile away, but the unwavering voice of youth, this time around, might just hasten it. “You will have to give space to the hundreds and thousands of young voices that is the future of India, who have clearly stated that they want justice and freedom, they do not want the clock set back,” says Roy. “Today the middle classes have broken their silence and that gives us hope that there will be no going back to repressive times. We women will continue to fight together in solidarity as we always have.”
Rico says he's still incredulous that, in a supposedly-civilized society like India, these attitudes still prevail...
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