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Magazine
Law of the jungle
KALPANA SHARMA
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Hideous forms of violence in the subcontinent prove that women are still powerless.
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WE may have just edged away from a war, but at least on one thing India and Pakistan are united — on the extent to which in both our countries women are subjected to the most hideous forms of violence.
The world has now read about the Pakistani woman in Muzaffargarh, Punjab, who was gang-raped by four men on orders from the village jirga on June 22. Her "crime"? Her brother had alleged sexual relations with a woman from a higher tribe. So for his crime, she was publicly assaulted and raped.
Worse still, hundreds of people watched as the woman was dragged inside her room and raped. No one intervened or said anything. "They raped me for an hour and afterwards I was unable to move," she said.
Another woman was butchered in a village in Kolar district, Karnataka. Yashodamma of Nagalapalli village in Bangarapet, Kolar district was assaulted by nine men at 9.30 at night on April 26. She was cut to pieces, her breasts were cut off, her vagina was stuffed with wooden pieces and her two sons, who were with her at the time, were also killed. One child escaped.
As in the story from Pakistan, the villagers heard and saw what was happening in Yashodamma's courtyard. But no one intervened. This is not a remote village. It is just a few kilometres away from a police station. Yet, not one person had the guts to report the crime to the police.
And what was Yashodamma's "crime"? She was an illiterate Dalit woman, a widow, but one who was determined not to succumb to any pressure from the people who had money, land and political power. So despite all kinds of threats and even assaults on her children, she refused to sell a small piece of land that belonged to her that was located in the middle of a larger plot of land that had been acquired by a powerful individual. Yashodamma did not belong to any organisation. She was not one of the hundreds of Dalit women who have now been organised as part of various self-help groups by the government or by non-governmental organisations. This is the story of a determined individual who was not afraid. She had filed over a hundred police complaints because of the treatment she had received at the hands of the individuals trying to wrest her property. Needless to say, no action was taken on these complaints.
Two days before she was murdered, the local inspector of police, who had taken on the role of mediator, told her categorically that she should accept what her potential buyer had offered and settle the dispute. Yashodamma held her ground and refused.
The case of her murder was registered as "usual Dalit quarrel leading to assault and murder" and a Dalit, who worked for her, was forced to admit to the crime. Yashodamma and her children were initially not even granted the right of a decent burial. After a hurried postmortem, the police were ready to bury them in a single pit. It was only on the intervention of the Dalit Sangharsh Samithi, a Dalit rights organisation that has worked in the area for well over three decades, that members of the family were permitted to reclaim the bodies and perform the last rites.
In Pakistan, the Muzaffargarh story hit the headlines, both domestic and international. The Government has been forced to act. One of the culprits has been caught and the woman has been given some monetary compensation. But this is just one woman. According to the Pakistan Human Rights Commission, a woman is raped every two hours in Pakistan and in Punjab, a woman is raped every six hours and gang raped every four days. Yet, the commission also acknowledges, the majority of sexual crimes go unreported.
In Nagalappalli, the perpetrators of this terrible crime have yet to be arrested. The story was reported, but it did not make the headlines of national papers. It was treated as one more story of a Dalit atrocity of which we have plenty. What little was done was only because of the intervention of the Dalit Sangharsh Samithi. They sent a seven-member team of Dalit writers who brought out the full details of the story. And on June 26, a meeting was held in Yashodamma's courtyard. Over 300 individuals made their way to Nagalappalli when they read the story.
In India, the situation of Dalit women is particularly acute. As more Dalits get educated, begin asserting their rights and refuse to tolerate being treated as sub-humans, they have to face the inevitable backlash from the upper castes. But the victims of this lashing out are not just the men but also the woman. When a woman, who is also a Dalit, dares to raise her voice, she is asking for the worse kind of trouble. What happened to Yashodamma was clearly meant to send out a signal to others like her.
The common factor in the two stories from different sides of the border is the indifference and the fear that paralyses people who witness such crimes. This fact, that people cannot, or do not, act, is actually a brutal reminder of a reality we sometimes like to forget. That away from the metropolitan areas and even smaller towns, where ostensibly some sort of rule of law prevails, you still have the law of the jungle.
Might is literally right. And women have neither rights nor the might to fight against the brutal and primitive laws that prevail.
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