Hathras & Balrampur: Same act, different reactions

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Hathras & Balrampur: Same act, different reactions

Sunday, 04 October 2020 | Swarn Kumar Anand

Hathras & Balrampur: Same act, different reactions

Caste is in the DNA of India and parties doing caste politics do everything to exploit caste dynamics in every aspect of life, especially in villages. Therefore, any social tension that builds on the caste dynamics yields dividends for such parties

In December 2012 and early 2013, when Nirbhaya’s gangrape and murder galvanised a nationwide protest and forced the slumbering political class for action, the nation exuded confidence that the promised stringent legislation will instil fear in the minds of potential sexual predators. Seven years later, however, the National Crime Records Bureau data — year 2019 saw 32,033 cases of rape, about 34 per cent jump from 2012 — on sexual assault cases and the recent Hathras and Balrampur rapes have dashed that hope. It has now dawned on the masses that more battles lie ahead in the war against the rape culture.

Although, violence against women is as old as human civilisation, and has existed in all societies, albeit with varied degrees, it is a blot on our modern democratic system whose founding fathers tried to infuse scientific temper in the people. Also, there is characteristic distinction in the sexual assault cases in the urban and rural set-up. While rapes in urban areas are mostly sexual crimes against women, in rural areas where there in no constant influx of population, rape is used as a weapon to perpetuate the inhuman hierarchy of class and caste, and sometimes religion. A case in point is the 2016 Jat quota agitation, when the affluent agrarian community members dragged Dalit women out of their houses and raped them.

Dalits are vulnerable to caste-based discrimination at the hands of OBC and the upper caste communities in impoverished rural India. Moreover, Dalit women’s financial and social vulnerability further instigates caste predators to assault them sexually with impunity.

However, tragically only a few rape cases get wider attention from the political class. Although no information is hidden from the public in the age of diverse media platforms, all sexual assaults don’t get the same level of response from the public, the media and political parties. It is a systemic malady. There is a certain amount of skepticism about the commitment of the political class towards making the environment safe for women. While, public outrage against widely publicised ghastly rapes is genuine, most politicians weigh pros and cons before even paying lip service. Their hypocrisy is an open secret. Either they shed crocodile tears or outrightly blame the victims of rape. We have some infamous quotes on rape: Then Samajwadi Party supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav said, “Boys will be boys, they commit mistakes” and his party leader Abu Azmi said, “If a woman is caught (in a rape case), then both she and the boy should be punished”.

Protest against rape is an expedient platform for political parties, particularly those in the Opposition, and is also an agent of change of a government as was seen in 2013 when Nirbhaya’s case proved to be the last nail in the Congress’ coffin in Delhi. The brutal Hathras incident has the same potential, and, therefore, there is a compulsive urge for political tourism to Hathras. Their purported aim is to lay bare secrets surrounding the tragic incident. However, courtesy the media, the truth, suppressed till now by the district administration, has already come to the fore. 

It is interesting to analyse why certain political parties have been hell-bent on reaching the village to meet the family members of the Hathras victim, while a similar ghastly rape-murder in Balrampur has not evoked similar reactions from those parties. In fact, all protests don’t give political dividends, and therefore the discrimination. Though victims in both Hathras and Balrampur are Dalit women, the rapist-murders’ identities are different in the two cases. The Hathras accused are men from upper caste, a politically divided community not considered the solid vote bank by the political Opposition; but Balarampur accused are men from another religion, which are their traditional vote bank. This dreadful revelation is an eye-opener for the uninitiated to the fact that most political parties are not committed to hitting at the root cause of the societal malady if their efforts are not politically beneficial.

When politics feeds on such terrible crimes, the rot in the criminal justice system has a long life. Every now and then, India witnesses paroxysms of public outrage against sexual assault cases, but the protest dies down after some time as new events hog public attention. If the pressure is mounted, we see “instant justice” as seen on November 6, 2019 in Hyderabad when all rape-murder accused were shot dead in an encounter with the police. That was a tragic incident for democratic India as many cheered the encounter deaths and saw it as an epitome of a parallel justice delivery system for the fallen daughters of India.

For this systemic rot, the blame goes to the political establishment and political parties who make officials scapegoats when no solution is immediately visible. However, at the same time, it must be realised that legislation against sexual assaults is not a silver bullet. Laws don’t shape the social system and the caste-based hierarchy in rural India. Laws which are divorced from the social demands and desires will always be in conflict with the social set-up.

Caste is in the DNA of India and parties doing caste politics do everything to exploit  caste dynamics in every aspect of life, especially in villages. Therefore, any social tension that builds on the caste dynamics yields dividends for such parties.

(The writer is Associate Editor & News Editor, The Pioneer)

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