[These presumptions and ways of talking
about women can be found up and down Delhi’s class ladder. Consider the recent
case of Tarun Tejpal, a muckraking crusader and newspaper editor who resigned
after being accused of sexually assaulting a female subordinate. What the woman
detailed in leaked correspondence as the forcible removal of her underwear and
physical penetration was described by Mr. Tejpal as “drunken banter” — banter,
like tango, being a thing that takes two.]
By Anand Giridharadas
One year ago, a
fatal gang rape, in which a group of men on a bus repeatedly attacked a young
physiotherapy student and shredded her internally with an iron rod, smeared
this city’s name. That case and others stirred much national soul-searching.
But the idea of rape as a physical impossibility is one of many myths about
sexual violence that remain in common circulation among men in India. So is the notion
that women are simultaneously victims and perpetrators of the rapes they
endure.
“If anyone
tried to rape my daughter, she would beat them with a shoe,” Mr. Yadav, a clerk
in the market, said of his 15-year-old. “There’s no way any man could rape
her.”
Just to be
safe, though, Mr. Yadav, 45, has removed her from school back in their village.
Otherwise, he said, how could he know what she was doing?
These
presumptions and ways of talking about women can be found up and down Delhi’s
class ladder. Consider the recent case of Tarun Tejpal, a muckraking crusader
and newspaper editor who resigned after being accused of sexually assaulting a
female subordinate. What the woman detailed in leaked correspondence as the
forcible removal of her underwear and physical penetration was described by Mr.
Tejpal as “drunken banter” — banter, like tango, being a thing that takes two.
To talk of rape
with so many of Delhi’s men is to discover a chasm between the world of their
minds, flush with medieval ideas of womankind, and the world of the modernizing
megacity in which they find themselves. In fact, many men — including those at
the barber stall that day — attribute the rape problem to vertiginous social
change that has created new temptations at a faster rate than the new habits to
cope with them.
The barber put
it simply: Rape isn’t a man’s fault. “It’s the fault of the times,” he said.
He said that
rape was the result of poor choices made by women. “Wearing the wrong kind of
clothes, eating the wrong kind of food, going to the wrong kind of places,” he
said.
It is a
familiar notion, here and elsewhere, that women entrance men into rape by
wearing particularly cute skirts. Men will be men, the argument goes, which
apparently means that men will be rapists. The barber gave a metaphor: “Where
there’s a candle and a fire together, the candle will melt.” He added: “The
fire is always the girl. The candle is the boy.”
A young boy of
10 named Durgesh was standing around, waiting on his father’s haircut. His face
wore sadness, and it emerged that his sister, Ratna, was locked in juvenile
jail. She, too, was cast as modernity’s victim. She got a job, which led to
taking a loan, which led to buying a cellphone, which led to plans with strange
friends, which led to alcohol, which led to sniffing intoxicants on fabric,
which led to jail.
When Ratna gets
out next year, Durgesh wants her rusticated to the family’s ancestral village,
in the state of Uttar Pradesh. “Otherwise,” he said, “she’ll get spoiled
again.”
As the men
spoke, a bit of feminism flared. Mr. Yadav was talking about removing his
daughter from school when a male passer-by, wearing a sweater inscribed with
the words “Two plus three equals 5,” burst forth, exclaiming: “That is not
right!”
But Mr. Yadav
barreled on. What really happens, he said, is that women trade sex for money to
acquire nice clothes. When their mothers find out and confront them, they call
what happened rape, to protect their honor.
“If the parents
have only 10 rupees, and your daughter is wearing 100-rupee clothes, where is
she getting those clothes?” Mr. Yadav said. Many of the men nodded. He wasn’t
alone in assuming that most women are a couple of coveted outfits away from
prostitution.
The man in the
mathematical sweater was persuaded. “Who am I to judge?” he said now. He who
had stood up for women just as quickly stood down.
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[Salma Khan, 26, who was one of the many women browsing in a local market, said she has keenly followed the politics of Juhapura ever since she moved into the neighborhood in 2003 from the Old City area of Ahmedabad. “I have an opinion on everything and everyone, but how does it matter? No one wants to hear us,” she said, her eyes welling up.]
By Raksha Kumar
AHMEDABAD,
Gujarat — On a hot October morning, an intense discussion was waging between
three women in a nondescript beauty salon in the Juhapura locality of
Ahmedabad, the city’s largest Muslim ghetto.
While
the most common topics of discussion in a beauty salon are fashion, cosmetics
and men, here the women were discussing national politics, particularly the
prospects of Gujarat’s chief minister, Narendra Modi of the Hindu nationalist
Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P.
“Modi
should become India’s prime minister; let’s see what road the country takes
then. Others will understand the pain we felt,” said Sageera Sheikh, 42, her
eyes closed as her face was covered with a walnut scrub.
“What!”
exclaimed Tasneem Aslam, 30, whose feet were soaking in warm water, just before
her pedicure. “No way! I think the country should understand that he is a
tyrant and won’t stop at anything to get his way.”
“Why
are you all getting so emotional?” said 18-year-old Zeesha Khan, who was only 7
in 2002, when over 1,000 people, most of them Muslims, were killed during riots
while Mr. Modi was in power. “How does it matter who becomes the prime
minister? Our state of affairs will remain the same.”
It’s
a discussion that can be heard in many places in urban India, but for the women
of Juhapura, this sort of informal participation in the political process is
rare, as they have very few places where they can freely exchange their
thoughts on non-household issues in their area. These opportunities for
discussions are limited partly because of cultural pressure on women to avoid
political topics, but also because the densely packed neighborhood simply has
no room for their debates.
Many
of the women who live here chafe at the constraints on their voices and the
lack of outside interest, especially from politicians and lawmakers, in this
Muslim neighborhood, which is walled off from the rest of Ahmedabad and
bisected by a national highway.
Salma
Khan, 26, who was one of the many women browsing in a local market, said she
has keenly followed the politics of Juhapura ever since she moved into the
neighborhood in 2003 from the Old City area of Ahmedabad. “I have an opinion on
everything and everyone, but how does it matter? No one wants to hear us,” she
said, her eyes welling up.
Juhapura
used to be a desolate neighborhood in a western suburb of Ahmedabad,
constructed for the victims of the 1973 flood in Gujarat’s capital. But after
the 2002 riots in the state, Muslims from across Ahmedabad moved to Juhapura,
which had become a Muslim neighborhood by then, changing it to an urbanized
ghetto of almost 400,000 people, as big as about 10 football fields put
together.
Away
from the national highway, tiny houses, crammed up against each other, line the
narrow, muddy streets of the second-biggest Muslim locality in India by
population, after the old city of Hyderabad.
Twelve-feet-high
walls surround Juhapura on all sides, defining its informal border. This border
ensures that the interaction of people of Juhapura with the Hindu parts of
Ahmedabad is limited. Some men step out for work and travel about seven or
eight kilometers, or four or five miles, to the old part of Ahmedabad, which
still houses a sizable Muslim population.
Since
most women in Juhapura don’t work, they are confined within the walls of the
ghetto.
“We
live in this strange island, within Ahmedabad, and have little interaction with
the outside world,” said Shakeera Imam, 56, another shopper at the market.
As
such, politicians see no need to try to woo voters from this area – very few
campaigners come out to Juhapura during election season. Several women said
they don’t bother to vote at all now.
“Our
level of disillusionment is quite high as you can imagine,” said Mrs. Imam. “We
can never vote for the B.J.P. because of what they did to us in 2002. And we
don’t want to vote for the Congress because they take us for granted. They know
we do not have a choice but to vote for them. Gujarat has only two major
parties, unfortunately.”
The
women of Juhapura said they would welcome more public spaces, like parks or
community halls, where they could speak freely about politics and other
matters, but it’s a very low priority considering that the ghetto lacks basic
government services like water and electricity, even though it is under the administration
of the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation.
The
crowded market serves as a more common venue for free-flowing female
discussions. After the women finish their household chores at around noon, many
step out into the market, where mobile stalls of vegetables, fruits, cheap
clothes and plastic utensils are set up.
Here,
some women chat with their friends and neighbors, mostly about their families.
But on one visit, it took only a little effort to instigate a discussion on the
availability of water in Juhapura, and the women who were busy shopping
immediately stopped what they were doing so that they could chime in.
“Why
does Juhapura not get enough water?” asked a young woman in a gray burqa, who
asked to remain anonymous because she feared she would get in trouble for her
question, which she then answered herself: “It is because the government has
systematically kept this neighborhood from availing even the basic facilities.”
She
added, indignantly, “If they don’t want us Muslims, why do they collect tax
from us?”
As
the women talked about politics, Shazia, 8, who was shopping with her mother,
Zahra Mirza, was eyeing the colorful clothes on display. The girl, who was born
in Juhapura, admitted she didn’t understand most of what was being said around
her. “However, I know about the toofan,” she says. Toofan, meaning a powerful
force of nature, is the euphemism that is commonly used for the religious riots
of 2002.
The
girl’s mother said that the main reason women are pressured to avoid all the
political discussions in their house is to shield the children from
uncomfortable subjects.
“I
don’t think it is a nice idea to keep discussing uneasy topics like the riots,”
said Mrs. Mirza. “In doing so, we might deepen the divide. And unfortunately
for us, there is no political topic that excludes the riots.”
As
the political discussion continued in the market, several men ventured in with
their own opinions. When the women were asked why Juhapura was denied basic
facilities, the men kept trying to answer the question for them, until a
reporter explicitly asked them to stop.
A
handful of educated women of the community are working to encourage women to
speak up for themselves in the public domain, like Gulistan Bibi, a principal
at a local primary school. She has been involved in social work for more than a
decade, convening meetings at the Ahmedabad Muslim Women’s Association, a
nonprofit based in Juhapura, and training women so that they can become
self-employed.
“Everyone
is scared to allow women to have their voice,” she said. “It will create fresh
problems for the politicians if we begin protesting for our basic rights.”
The
association has helped women like Tahira Shiekh become more aware of the world
outside Juhapura’s walls. Mrs. Shiekh, 52, gets 1,500 rupees, or $25, every
month from the association, with which she buys some thread and makes a living
by sewing clothes.
She
said she had no life beyond her husband and children, but she learned about
next year’s national elections, the struggling Indian economy and Gujarat’s
development outside Juhapura through some informal discussions at the women’s
association.
However,
when asked who she thought would be the next prime minister or anything about
current events, she kept saying, “I don’t know.” At one point she suggested,
“You should ask someone with more information or wait until my husband gets
back.”
She
didn’t have any confidence in her opinions, she said, because women like her
didn’t feel free enough to venture out past Juhapura’s walls and had no
exposure to the outside world.
“How
will we shape our opinions? We have no opinions on any significant things,” she
said.
Raksha
Kumar is a freelance journalist based in Bangalore.
