Has rape outrage brought us to a dead end?

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We have seen this before – a surge of women, shaken by the rape and murder of a young woman, on a city’s streets.

In Delhi, 12 years ago, many women had turned up, in grief and shock at the gangrape of a young paramedic. Many were there to express their sense of injustice at the everyday sexism and injustice they encountered both at home and outside – and which had rarely found public space or expression. They were asking for a bekhauf azaadi.

In Kolkata, hundreds are similarly protesting, moved by the rape and murder of a doctor on August 9 in the RG Kar Medical College and government hospital where she worked, angered by the insensitivity of the principal of that medical college, who reportedly said “it was irresponsible of the girl to go to the seminar hall alone at night.”

There is something crushing about the thought that the 31-year-old was attacked as she slept, at her most vulnerable at the end of a long day. But do women have to die for society to feel anger at the sexual violence they face? Do their deaths matter more if they have been brutalised and savaged?

This is not a rhetorical question. One of the most distressing features of the social media mobilisation over the rape-murder of the doctor at RG Kar Medical College has been the surfeit of salacious detail – if not misinformation – about her injuries.

Multiple posts have circulated on our phones, claiming that “blood spilled from her eyes”, that her “pelvic girdle” and “hyoid bone” were broken, and that 150 gm of semen was found in her body – proof, the posts claimed, that she was assaulted by a disturbing number of men.

Rape is dehumanising, but the language being used to draw attention to this violence, its air of faux forensic certitude spiked with titillation, was equally degrading of the victim – and, as it turned out, did the dangerous work of mucking up fact and fiction.

Barring the injuries to her eyes, all of these claims have been debunked as false – but not before they raced through the internet’s chambers, collecting the currency of outrage and views, reducing her to a list of injuries. No less disrespectful were those who have put the doctor’s name and images out, for the internet to feast its eyes on.

A cycle of panic

Society chooses to engage with the reality of pervasive sexual violence on its own terms, according to its own algorithm. In a deeply patriarchal and casteist society, that means that only some women’s violation will matter. Only some women will elicit the anguish of the crowd.

The movement in response to the death of the 26-year-old paramedic in 2012 did break the silence over some types of sexual violence. The Justice Verma committee formed in the aftermath of the crime had used the indignation on the streets about rape by strangers to look inward, at the powers of the family and the state to oppress women. It led to changes in law, an expansion in the definition of rape and more accountability of the police when it came to filing rape complaints.

But the committee’s other recommendations – the criminalisation of marital rape and a review of the Armed Forces Special Power Act, a law that shielded soldiers accused of rape in India’s so-called disturbed areas – were canned.

Since then, there has often been an edge of moral panic to these outbursts of rage – and a cynical political use of sexual violence cases.

Politicians know that protests against sexual violence are potentially incendiary and can become a lightning rod for other discontents gathering against governments, something which might be playing out in Kolkata.

Unnerved, they have responded with either brutality – forcibly cremating a body or dragging Indian women wrestlers away from their protest site – or placated the fury of the crowd with the promise of harsher punishment. The calls for vigilante violence against those accused of raping a Hyderabad doctor rang out from Parliament, and was followed by their extra-judicial killing. West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee has demanded that the assailants be given death penalty “within a week”.

Not a state of emergency

This episodic outpouring of anger sometimes runs the risk of becoming distortionary.

In 2012, the gory details of how the 26-year-old was mauled in a moving bus ended up setting a disturbing standard, as many women’s activists have pointed out. The focus on brutality implies that women will struggle to be believed if they have no injuries to show for their assaults.

Perhaps, because the focus on their injuries can be interpreted to assure us that only monsters are to blame for the assault on women – and we do not then have to think of the misdemeanours by “respectable” men in our midst. Whether it is politicians like Brij Bhushan Singh running sports federations or godmen like Baba Ram Rahim assaulting their followers in their sealed enclaves or indeed husbands who rape their wives or liberal heroes accused of preying on women they work with.

It is not a coincidence that this discourse leads to calls for a matching masculine violence by the state. Middle-class WhatsApp groups I am part of were quick to express a yearning for the Yogi Adityanath or the Himanta Biswa Sarma brand of justice. The Assam chief minister, never to miss an opportunity, patted himself on the back while the Kolkata protests were on, for his record of “settling scores” immediately after a case of sexual violence. Five days after his tweet, a Muslim man accused of gang rape in Assam died in police custody.

All of this sustains the fiction that rape is a state of exception and emergency, which shocks us if it happens in “progressive” Kolkata and shrugged off if it is in rural Bihar. It is, instead, a common experience of injustice, that is helped along by other systemic injustices and abuses of power, which implicates both men and women.

Indeed, there is something deeply familiar, even ordinary, in the systemic abdications that enabled the death of the Kolkata doctor – and that went on unremarked till she was killed in so brutal a manner.

First, that RG Kar failed to provide doctors a room to rest in, unharmed, after 36 hours of work is the kind of routine horror that we have come to expect from underfunded government hospitals – and the blame for that must be laid at the door of the West Bengal health minister, Mamata Banerjee.

Second, the man accused of her rape-murder, who works as a civic volunteer with the Kolkata police, had assaulted at least another woman before – his wife, who went to the police, complaining that he had beaten her up in 2022 and 2023, once when she was pregnant. No action was taken.

This, too, is something that we have come to expect: Women will be routinely disbelieved and silenced by institutions, especially if they speak up against the violence they face in their homes, especially if they are not people like us.

In Delhi and in Kolkata, the two women ironically mythologised as Nirbhaya and Abhaya, were people like us. Urban, professional, modern. Which is not to say that our anger against their violations is not authentic or not justified.

But 12 years after the Nirbhaya movement, some self-reflection is in order, especially from upper-middle class and upper caste women, if we are not to deepen the defeating politics of retribution and capital punishment.

For a narrow section of upper-caste and upper-middle-class women, who have benefited from education and cultural capital, the idea of “women power” has been embraced to celebrate their own exceptionalism and merit, to experience freedom as a bubble of privilege for the chosen few – with not enough thought of how it can extend to other people not like us.

Who do we centre in our protests and why not others? Why is the death of a doctor set for a successful life more offensive to many of us than that of a working-class woman? Why do the privileged fail at solidarity with other women who do not belong to their caste and class so often? Why did a gathering of upper-class women in Mumbai, protesting against the Kolkata RG Kar rape, feel that working-class women joining them in demanding justice would hijack their “exclusive” protests? Why does the gruesome violence done to Dalit and Adivasi women not register on the collective conscience?

This is important because our rage can be used to keep hierarchies in place, to drum up support for death penalty for rape, for instance – even when data reveals that is the marginalised castes and minorities who end up disproportionately sentenced to capital punishment. And even when it appears not to have deterred men from sexual violence.

We have been here before – in a cycle of rape, outrage, protest. We will be back here again – at this same dead end, until we reimagine our idea of justice.