Department of Rants: The 2 am rule for rapists

"If you travel alone after 2 am and become victim of a crime, the police alone can't be blamed. It is advisable that a relative or friend is with you at odd hours." Delhi Police chief, BK Gupta, on crimes against women in the capital.


I'm assuming the Delhi Police chief, Mr BK Gupta, is a conscientious man who often patrols the city at 2 in the morning, remarking on the astoundingly high number of women out on the city's streets. I'm also assuming that his Delhi is significantly different from the city we live in, where most women who work in offices and shops will try to get back home at a "decent" hour, where it can be actively dangerous for women to walk around the city after 7-8 pm, and where it's scary taking the Metro or a bus after 9 pm, when the number of women travelling by subway seems to fall sharply.

I'm also assuming that Mr Gupta's access to Delhi's rising rape figures reveals a pattern none of us had suspected--the only reason for the Delhi Police chief to imply that women would be safer if they didn't insist on wandering the city at 2 am, after all, would be if he had noticed a distinct pattern of rapes and assaults on women occurring after 2 am.

That would make us want to assume that this attempted rape of a child, which took place at 3 pm, or this case of rape, which began well before 2 am, or any of the cases of molestation and assault that happen in the Metro or on public transport during the day, are statistical outliers. The fact is that except for call-centre rapes--often crimes of opportunity, where the rapist(s) will wait for a car to drop off a BPO worker late at night--rapists don't keep to Mr Gupta's timings, nor do men who're into harassing or assaulting women.

The truth is that Mr Gupta and his police force have been unable to make the capital a safe place for women, and part of the reason why the police repeatedly fail may have something to do with this attitude, this expectation that women should always take the blame. It's our clothes that get us raped, or the fact that we're out in public spaces, or that we have the temerity to be out without a (male) guardian: there is no parallel analysis of male behaviour in the city.

But it's not Mr Gupta's ridiculous premise--logically, he's arguing that women are more often at risk of violence after 2 am--that we need to get angry about. It's the belief behind his statements, that somehow, just by insisting on being out and about in public space, women bear the responsibility for the attacks perpetrated on them. It reinforces a powerful view of Delhi as a man's city, with public space defined as masculine by default, women defined as interlopers and intruders as a matter of course.

It's one thing to be told this, in harsh ways, by some idiot who'll brush up against you on the road, or follow you back from the bus stop. It's another thing to be told, by the police chief in your city, that if you're out after 2 am without a male protector, you get what you deserve. You don't see BK Gupta addressing men in this city, telling them that they should be ashamed of themselves for treating women with disrespect. You don't see him lecturing the boys and men who're out looking for victims, before or after 2 am, on the evils of their ways. You don't see him saying that as the police chief of India's capital, he has a zero-tolerance policy towards men who harass or offer any kind of violence to women.

Instead, he's effectively endorsing the old arguments that women, somehow, ask for it, by being where they shouldn't be, by having the temerity to travel the city without that all-important protector. The stereotype of violence against women that he's promoting is an old one, too: a crime visited upon those who in some way transgress the norms, who call violence upon their heads by "dangerous behaviour". This ignores the facts about rape and violence in the city, the fact that a slum dweller is at higher risk for being raped because of her unsafe surroundings and the perception that she has no means of redressal; the fact that neighbours and family relatives are often the ones who offer violence towards women; the fact that our streets can feel, to women, like battle zones, regardless of how you dress and when you're out.

But all of this is too complex for Delhi's police chief, who might then have to admit the truth--about the relatively low reporting of rape as a crime, the lack of seriousness with which we treat sexual assault and verbal harassment, the low conviction rate in cases of assault and rape, the unthinking aggression of many (not all) men in Delhi. He might actually have to ask his police force to change the way they treat women who are out and about at 2 am, or even at 2 pm. He might even have to change his own mind about the way he sees violence against women in this city. And if Mr Gupta can't do this, he doesn't really deserve to keep his job.



(The views expressed here are personal.)

A quiet rant on the Assange case, and a response to Kavita Krishnan

I have a lot of respect for Kavita Krishnan and her work in the field of women’s rights in India. Reading the first four paragraphs of her opinion piece in the Huffington Post on rape, I was in complete agreement with her. Krishnan confirmed my understanding of the way rape laws work in this country-—the conviction rate is low, reporting rapes is often a difficult, brutalizing process, and the understanding of consent is limited in the legal system. (Marital rape is not yet an offence, for instance; and a woman’s right to the integrity of her own body is not at all well defined in India, in either legal or cultural terms.)

It is in the final paragraph of Krishnan’s article where we part company. Here’s what she has to say:

“Certainly, from the perspective of all those women in India who find the most brutal of rapists going free, protected by the police and the state, and their most serious charges of rape trivialized or even suppressed by force, the idea of a man being hunted down by Interpol on charges which are as complex and ambiguous as those in the Assange case is disturbing. From what I hear, Sweden's rape laws are nothing to quarrel with, and are in fact quite enviable for us in India, where even marital rape is yet to be deemed illegal. But for the US to fire at Assange from the shoulders of the two Swedish women indeed is an insult to the women struggling in vain for justice the world over. It is possible that Assange's casual flings with female fans may not be very democratic; he may be guilty of insensitivity to the concerns and rights of women (for instance their right to be free from HIV). But if sexism is a crime worthy of Interpol's attention, then Interpol should immediately arrest Silvio Berlusconi and Bill Clinton, just for starters!”

The Assange case is complex, and has drawn intense scrutiny across the world. At present, allegations have been made by two Swedish women of sexual assault, sexual molestation and, under the nuanced provisions of Swedish law, an allegation of "less severe" rape; he has not yet been formally charged. The case is nuanced and it would be very wrong to assume his guilt. (I’m attaching some links that might be of interest below.) But this is why I disagree with Krishnan, and think that she has not paid enough attention to the details of the Assange case before offering her opinion on it.

1) She assumes that the allegations brought against Assange by the two Swedish women are part of a US-backed conspiracy; there has been little evidence of this so far. There are legitimate fears that the case will be misused, and legitimate questions about the workings of the legal system and the timing of the case, given Assange’s current situation, but news accounts do not support the idea that the two women are involved in any conspiracy theory. The allegations made by the two Swedish women should be treated as a separate matter, in the absence of any evidence to back the conspiracy theory.


2) It’s a fallacy to assume that because the worst and most violent instances of rape routinely go unchecked across the world—Somalia, South Africa, India and a score of other countries—it is an insult to those women to seek redressal for cases that involve apparently lesser degrees of rape and sexual assault.

The allegations against Assange wouldn’t hold up in any Indian court for a reason: the rape laws in this country are extremely unevolved. A woman’s consent or withdrawal of consent is not taken seriously, and the assumption most courts would make is that if a woman agrees to sleep with a man, she gets what she deserves, even if the man subsequently overrides her wishes or uses force.

The better argument would be not to envy or marvel at Sweden’s laws, but to work for more progressive laws in India. In terms of degree, there is a difference between a Dalit woman brutalized and raped by the men of her village, or a Somalian woman subjected to repeated, violent rape, and a woman who experiences a turning point when the man she’s in bed with uses unacceptable force or coercion. But can we be clear that both of these—first-degree and third-degree rape, so to speak--are unacceptable, instead of drawing false parallels?

3) Krishnan should know better than to assume that Assange’s crime is “sexism”. The allegations made by the two Swedish women concern sexual molestation, sexual assault and "less severe" rape. These are not trivial, if true. And this case is not about an HIV test, sex by surprise, or a broken condom. It’s about consent, the overriding of that consent and the use of force in the process of the overriding of a woman’s consent. The allegations made by these two women deserve to be taken seriously. There’s a big difference between being "insensitive" to a woman’s fear of HIV, and the allegations of molestation and assault laid out in the Guardian report.

I am not an expert on either the law, or on rape victims, though I have written on rape and sexual assault in the course of writing for the gender beat. I’m following this case the way I’ve followed rape trials in India—just as an observer and as a woman who is interested in women’s rights.

But Kavita Krishnan is an expert, and she should know better than to prejudge two women, and to trivialize the allegations they have made against Assange. I understand and share her concerns for the harshness that Indian women face, on a daily basis, and I understand how dealing with the everyday brutality of rape and rape charges in this country can make anyone wonder why the Assange case matters at all.

Here’s the thing. To the two women involved in this case—women who have been vilified, who have had their names and addresses posted on the Internet, who have been blamed and dismissed, even before the case comes to court--it matters. The laws in their part of the world allow them to file a complaint against a man like Assange; the laws in my part of the world would leave an Indian woman in a similar situation with little or no prospect of redressal. I get that discussing the nuances of consensual sex versus non-consensual sex might seem like a luxury, when every week brings its raft of gang rapes, call-centre rapes, caste-conflict-inspired rapes, the casual rapes of sex workers, the routine rape of Dalit women or women in conflict zones to our attention.

But the right to give or withdraw one’s consent is not a small thing. The right to say 'no' to one's sexual partner, when you're uncomfortable, afraid, in pain, or fear rape, and to have that 'no' heard and accepted, is not a small thing. The right to be heard instead of being dismissed, or belittled, or vilified, is not a small thing. The right to consent should be the right of every woman, and every man; it shouldn’t be a luxury at all.

Here are some links that might be of interest:
1) The full allegations against Assange, from the Guardian:
The two Swedish women say that consensual sex with Assange turned, in separate incidents, into non-consensual sex. One woman alleges that he used force to hold her down, and then deliberately tore his condom when she insisted that he wear one. The other woman alleges that after several instances of consensual sex, where she insisted that Assange wear a condom, she woke up to find him having sex with her, not wearing a condom. He faces charges under Swedish law of sexual molestation and sexual assault. The allegations are yet to be proved, and Assange is yet to be charged.

2) Jessica Valenti on the laws in Sweden and the US on rape, and issues of consent:

3) From Kate Harding, an early piece contesting Naomi Wolf’s assessment of the Assange case:

and a more recent post on the rape myths coming up in the wake of the Assange case:


4) Caroline May on the rift between feminists and progressives on the activist left:

5) Jaclyn Friedman on What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape:

and: Friedman debates Naomi Wolf on Democracy Now:

6) Salil Tripathi: When No Means No

Rants and nymphomaniac kutiyas

I'm reading university vice-chancellor Vibhuti Narain Rai's deeply sexist comments on women writers: "There is a race among women writers to demonstrate who is the greatest prostitute", "feminist discourse has reduced to a grand celebration of infidelity". (More here: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/Textual-violence/654764)

He's under pressure to resign now, with women writers (including the redoubtable Krishna Sobti) and womens' rights activists demanding that he be sacked.

It's the language Narain Rai uses that interests me: he calls a character in a book by a Hindi woman writer a "nymphomaniac kutiya", quips that another writer's autobiography should have been called How Many Times in How Many Beds. Behind the classic, well-worn terms of abuse--prostitute, nymphomaniac--are the equally classic male, misogynist fears, of women going out of control, owning their sexuality, stepping out of line. All of his criticism, so to speak, is focused on sexual politics and freedoms. I'm not sure he would have made his remarks if he'd realised how glaringly it displays the anxieties and the fears of men like him: how do we handle these women who refuse to know their place?

In 1979, the writer Mridula Garg was charged for "obscene writing", because her protagonist in Chit Cobra was a self-aware woman who explored her various freedoms, including sexual freedom, with an absolute lack of guilt. It was the absence of guilt that was offensive; what was telling was that for decades afterwards, Hindi male writers often spoke of Garg disparagingly, as the woman who "writes about sex", even though her work covered far wider feminist terrain.

Ritu Menon and others explored the persistence of censorship--informal, but powerful--when it came to womens' writing in The Guarded Tongue: "What is it that women can't write about? There is a pause... Religion, politics, sex. You then wonder: what is there left to write about?"

One way of dismissing a woman writer is to say that her only subject is sex; she is twice-damned, for being a "loose woman", and for having such a narrow mind. I love the way Ismat Chughtai fought back when she was on trial for writing about a lesbian affair in her famous short story, The Quilt. Here's her account of the trial:
"There was a big crowd in the court. Several people had advised us to offer our apologies to the judge, even offering to pay the fines on our behalf. The proceedings had lost some of their verve, the witnesses who were called in to prove that “Lihaf” was obscene were beginning to lose their nerve in the face of our lawyer’s cross-examination. No word capable of inviting condemnation could be found. After a great deal of searching a gentleman said, “The sentence ‘she was collecting ‘ashiqs ’ (lovers) is obscene.”
“Which word is obscene,” the lawyer asked. “‘Collecting,’ or ‘‘ashiqs’?”
“The word ‘‘ashiqs,’” the witness replied, somewhat hesitantly.
“My Lord, the word ‘‘≥shiqs’ has been used by the greatest poets and has also been used in na‘ts. This word has been given a sacred place by the devout.”
“But it is highly improper for girls to collect ‘‘ashiqs,’” the witness proclaimed.
“Why?”
“Because ... because ... this is improper for respectable girls.”
“But not improper for girls who are not respectable?”
“Uh ... uh ... no.”
“My client has mentioned girls who are perhaps not respectable. And as you say, sir, non-respectable girls may collect ‘ashiqs."
“Yes. It’s not obscene to mention them, but for an educated woman
from a respectable family to write about these girls merits condemnation!”
The witness thundered.
“So go right ahead and condemn as much as you like, but does it merit legal action?”
The case crumbled."

In 'The Past Is Another Country', Taslima Nasreen speaks of her belief that Islam is anti-women, of her brushes with the fundamentalists, and of the importance of being a "fallen woman". The easiest way to discredit a woman writer, or womens' writing in general, is to call it obscene, to set yourself up as Narain Rai did, as a morality cop.

Ismat Chugtai had the right answer so many decades ago. Some of us are girls who are not respectable, who are in many ways, out of place, out of control. And much as we make men like Narain Rai, who is, incidentally, a former IPS officer, uneasy, even angry, we aren't that easily brought back into line.

Rant: The Death of Criticism (Yes, Again)

This post by Amitava Kumar reminded me of a debate that happened in several tents at the Jaipur Litfest, and that's been continuing in several virtual tents for the last decade in India. It's second only to the Whither? (Whither the Novel? Whither writing in English in India?) questions in the persistence with which it comes up, and can be summarised as Criticism in India is Dead, Let The Lamentations Begin.

I've always maintained, and continue to maintain, that we're wrong to say that there are no good reviewers left in India; personally, I look forward to reviews by Manjula Padmanabhan (trenchant and always honest), Chandrahas Choudhury, Anita Roy, Jai Arjun Singh and Sanjay Sipahimalani, to name just a few, as well as the old stalwarts. (All of them are friends, which may be seen as yet another pointer to the incestuous circles of Ind.Lit--but it may also be revealing that all of us became friends through our work. The bylines came before the coffees and the lunches.)

But Amit Chaudhuri captured one glaring absence in the Indian scene when he said that we have no Indian-grown magazine that has the authority--or the readability--of a NYRB, a Paris Review or of, say, the Far Eastern Economic Review.

Biblio and The Book Review have been soldiering on for years, and offer excellent reviews; but both operate under severe budgetary constraints, which limits the kind of reviewers they have access to (neither has the budget needed to dispatch books to reviewers outside India, for instance, or can match the kind of payments an NYRB or Granta might make), and the kind of articles they can commission (chiefly book reviews--no original reporting, limited fiction, etc). Civil Lines looked as though it might fill this gap for a while, but the gaps between issues are now chasm-sized; Caravan is promising, but it's just two issues old. The Little Magazine carries respectable book reviews, but where it scores is in offering essays and fiction in translation--it doesn't position itself as a literary magazine so much as a magazine of ideas.

The politics of book reviewing have changed over the last five or six years. We've contended with not just shrinking book review pages, but shrinking space for reviews: as I've often said, a 400-word 'review' is a blurb, and the most generous magazine spaces seldom go beyond 800 words, which is adequate for a book notice--it doesn't really allow for a serious review. The Hindu Literary Review comes out just once a month; Tehelka and The Calcutta Telegraph are unusual in that they often offer classic "editorial" space to book reviewers, but they remain rare examples. Most newspapers and magazines in India ghettoise books; it's rare to find writers (including historians and non-fiction writers) offering opinions or commentary on the editorial and op-ed pages.

Books page editors struggle to balance the political needs of their editors: several of the more respected publications use the books pages as a kind of social gossip section. This is actually quite fascinating. It makes the books pages a great way to track who's in and who's out, as though it were a kind of Sensex of the social world, but it doesn't do much for books pages as literary pages.

Many of the old conventions--a full disclosure on the part of the reviewer of biases, the practice of not assigning a book to a hostile (or an eager-to-please-the-author) reviewer, even the practice of assigning books to experts in the field--are observed only by a tiny handful of reviewers and books page editors. And as many of us know, this *is* an incestuous circle: the worlds of publishing and writing are still very small in English-speaking India. This has its benefits--it's easier for young or emerging writers to find space in the circle, but it turns into a kind of Indian joint family system after a while, where everybody knows why Cousin x has a blood feud on with Maasi y. Many of us have also watched the disappearance of some of our best reviewers off the books pages with some alarm: as Arvind Krishna Mehrotra said, there's no satisfaction to writing a blurb-sized book review with just a week in hand to consider the book, and you see far fewer reviews by the likes of Mukul Kesavan, Ram Guha, Sunil Khilnani and company than you might have just a few years ago.

Up to this point, what I've offered are the old, familiar lamentations. This often turns into a pointless, circular argument. Reviewers in India often admit that they hold Indian writers to a lower standard--or expect less of their work--than they have for the Junot Diazes and Lorrie Moores of the world. And of course, reviewers blame books page editors; editors often cite the relative pusillanimity of today's reviewers, who won't give a negative review to a Big Name Author, and many editors also say that there are very few reviewers with the right reading credentials. Everyone blames publishers for highlighting and pushing trivial books; publishers blame the media for concentrating on the fluff instead of on works of substance. Faintly, in the distance, a few voices lament that no one pays any attention to poetry, works in translation and children's books, but no one pays any attention to them. And we can continue like this ad infinitum ad nauseum.

I don't have solutions to offer, just a few questions.

1) Might it change the situation if publishing houses fill the gap between mainstream media and literary magazines by continuing to publish anthologies of new writing, and to commission anthologies of short stories etc? Several of them are experimenting with new forms: Penguin and Tranquebar have commissioned novella-length work recently, marketing them as Metro Reads and as easy, accessible reading.

For this to work, though, gatekeeping standards need to be much higher than they've been, and I say this as someone who's committed my fair share of sins by letting average work through the gates, both in publishing and in journalism, because of deadline pressures and other exigencies. It would be great to have more ruthless editors; to have anthologies so good that writers would mudwrestle each other just to get their bylines in the Table of Contents.

2) Is part of what we're lamenting part of a wider decline in the quality of our public intellectuals? Ram Guha gave an interesting talk recently about the demise of the bilingual intellectual--in passing, he mentioned that he had trouble naming the next generation of public intellectuals with all-round interests under the age of 40. This might be part of a slow degeneration in the overall quality of debate in the public sphere: I would love to see more dissent and informed response, not just in the field of books and writing, but in a wider sense.

3) And an aside to published writers: when was the last time you had fun writing a review? Do most published writers feel free to criticise a "colleague", and would they spend as much time crafting a truly entertaining, thoughtful review as they would on turning a piece of fiction? (Damn, I miss Dom Moraes: one of the last of the grand old school of reviewers, absolutely fearless, absolutely honest and such an entertainer.)

End of rant, back to the deadlines, and thank you for listening.