The case has become a culmination of centuries of societal inequality and control exerted against women in the subcontinent.
Trigger warning: Multiple accounts of violence, rape and murder
On August 9, a second-year postgraduate trainee at Kolkata’s RG Kar Medical College was raped and murdered in one of the most horrific femicide accounts to emerge from the subcontinent in recent years.
According to her colleagues, the 31-year-old doctor had retired to sleep on a piece of carpet in a seminar room after a marathon 36-hour shift, given the lack of any dorms or resting rooms for medics at the premises. Her bloodied and disfigured body was found the next day.
Investigators said a police volunteer had been arrested in connection with the crime, with the case now being handled by the Central Bureau of Investigation. Meanwhile, the autopsy report laid bare the bone-chilling details of the brutalities committed on her body in a manner that would induce nausea even in people of the strongest constitutions. One almost wishes she died sooner to avoid going through what was done to her.
Outrage across India has, rightly, followed the gruesome crime. Nationwide suspension of healthcare services amid demands for safety for females, particularly doctors, has taken centre stage. Hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets demanding justice for the victim.
During a hearing on Tuesday, India’s top court remarked that the case has “shocked the conscience of the nation” and criticised authorities for their handling of the investigation. It also expressed concern over the name of the victim and her photographs being shared on social media. Indian laws prohibit naming of a rape victim and those guilty can be fined or sentenced to up to two years in prison.
Many see these ensuing developments as a potential turning point for the region, with the belief that the intense horror of this incident will lead to some change. The rest are not too optimistic.
The case has become a culmination of centuries of societal inequality and control exerted against women in the subcontinent. When viewed in the context of how our general culture shapes attitudes towards women, the case, a shocking example, is actually not as shocking as one should think. To make sense of this senseless killing, people say many things: it is tragic, it is painful, it is scary.
It may, however, be more helpful to look at what it is not.
On December 16, 2012, the Nirbhaya rape and murder case made global headlines when a young woman in her early 20s was brutally assaulted with an iron rod and gang-raped in a moving bus in south Delhi. She died of grievous internal injuries on December 29.
The crime of gang-rape has seen a rise in incidence, and awareness, in the subcontinent.
On September 7, 2020, a woman was robbed and gang-raped in front of her children in a field near the Lahore-Sialkot motorway after her car broke down. Earlier the same year, a 25-year-old mother of two was gang-raped on board a Karachi-Multan train after being lured to an empty compartment by a ticket checker. It is not enough that a woman should be assaulted by one man; multiple men feel entitled to participate in this repulsive and abhorrent crime.
While these were cases that drew widespread condemnation, several others often get lost in oblivion.
Referring to the Kolkata rape case as a first, therefore, is a misrepresentation of facts. This is not a first and if things continue as they are, it won’t be the last.
On January 4, seven-year-old Zainab Ansari was abducted in her hometown of Kasur while she was on her way to a religious tuition centre. A few days later, her body was found in a rubbish dump, bearing signs of extensive rape, torture, and death by strangulation. The man convicted, and subsequently hanged, for her murder was also accused of raping at least eight other children.
Kasur, situated to the south of Lahore, has had a checkered past; a child pornography ring was uncovered in the town in 2015 featuring over 400 videos of young boys who were coerced into sexual acts, which were then used to blackmail their families.
What clothes can a child wear that can seduce an adult into the crime of rape? Is it a pair of shalwar kameez or a t-shirt with trousers? What is the relative seduction score of these clothes that can make a pre-pubescent, underdeveloped child’s body become an object of allure for a legal adult?
Clothes are an ancillary, irrelevant detail that society uses to justify sexual crimes, with no other motive than to continue wielding societal control over those who can be controlled. They are not and can never be a cause for rape because rape has never been a crime of passion or lust; it is a crime of power and dominance.
When Noor Mukaddam was held hostage, tortured and murdered, the defence counsel made all attempts to portray the actions of Zahir Jaffer as the work of a ‘madman’.
Sometime after, Sarah Shahnawaz was clubbed to death by her husband with a dumbbell, an apparent ‘sociopath with a drug habit’.
How many people truly are ‘mentally sick’ in Pakistan and India if rape is a crime that makes regular headlines? The particulars of the abovementioned murders shook Pakistan to its core but the fact that sickening sexual assaults and killings happen on a regular basis indicates one of two possibilities: either far too many Pakistani men are mentally disturbed and the country is in a state of psychological emergency, or that femicide is just an accepted and normalised part of our culture.
Neither bodes well for women living in the country if efforts are not made to seriously address each of these possibilities.
What happened in Kolkata was not a tragedy. A tragedy indicates an isolated, sudden incident that is shocking because it happened outside the bounds of ‘normal’. It suggests an event that could neither be predicted, nor planned for.
A ‘tragedy’ would lend credence to the belief that this was a one-off occurrence that stands out as the exception, proving the rule that women are generally safe.
Therefore, it was not a tragedy. It was systemic barbarism. It was another reminder that we live among monsters, created and protected through the proliferation of centuries of rape culture which normalises perverted attitudes towards women.
Pyramids have often been used to show the progression of rape culture, which begins from the normalisation of problematic beliefs — victim blaming, “boys will be boys” and rape jokes — moving onto degradation of women — stalking, cat-calling and non-consensual photography — progressing to the removal of their autonomy and then finally reaching to explicit violence.
‘Rape is Consensual; Inside Haryana’s Rape Culture’ is a YouTube video that exposes rape beliefs found within the borders of the Indian state. It does not require a huge leap of imagination to believe that similar ideas exist in other parts of the subcontinent as well.
In our part of the world, rape is considered to be a crime of lust or passion — nobody is ready to accept that it is a crime of power, dominance, and control. The confluence of these ideas, perpetuated by a society that likes to keep women in check, has led to systemic catastrophes against females who make the naive mistake of thinking they are protected by the same privileges and laws that govern men.
The messy state of affairs before us is the culmination of hundreds of years of cultural patterns and societal realities. It will take a consistent and proactive effort expended over decades to undo this belief system which includes a national state-led focus on human rights awareness, education, and swift and effective justice for egregious violations of women’s rights and protections. It takes a loud and repetitive awareness of morality, equal gender privileges, and enforcement of quick and appropriate justice by the state, to even attempt to reverse these beliefs.
Rape culture needs to be tackled by anti-rape culture. How the subcontinent creates an anti-rape culture is up to the great intellectuals of our time to advise.
As a (relatively) young person, I keep going back to ‘Keep Ya Head Up’, the 1993 hit song released by Tupac Shakur a few years before he was killed:
And since we all came from a woman,
Got our name from a woman, and our game from a woman,
I wonder why we take from our women,
Why we rape our women, do we hate our women?
I think it’s time to kill for our women,
Time to heal our women, be real to our women,
And if we don’t, we’ll have a race of babies that will hate the ladies that make the babies,
And since a man can’t make one,
He has no right to tell a woman when and where to create one,
So will the real men get up?
I know you’re fed up ladies, but keep ya head up
Header image: Doctors shout slogans during a protest demanding justice following the rape and murder of a trainee medic at a hospital in Kolkata, in New Delhi, India, August 19, 2024. — Reuters
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