Justice for Hathras Victim
Women, youth and student organisations held a protest today, September 30, outside the Uttar Pradesh Bhavan in Delhi against the rape and murder of the 19 year from Valmiki community by Thakur men from Hathras, after which an attempted cover-up swiftly followed. The body of the 19-year-old Dalit woman, was taken to the cremation ground and the rites performed by the police against the will of her parents, at around 3 am. Her family said they were not allowed to take her body home and were being pushed to cremate her immediately. The woman’s brother told Indian Express newspaper at 3.30 am, “We begged them to let us bring her body inside the house one last time, but they didn’t listen to us.” The village people began to mount pressure on the police to succumb to the wishes of the family but they refused to concede them their right. A cold reminder of the series of incidents that followed the Badaun rape and murder of two Dalit women comes to mind.
Listening to the mother’s interview, who is now being met with senior officials from the government, it is clear that her helpless cries were not only ignored last night but were barely acknowledged by the police force which claimed to perform its ‘orders.’ Even if so, the attitude of the police personnel didn’t represent any remorse or express any desire to share of pain of the family. They offered them no comfort, no peace rather the police was unflinching and resolute in its use of force and addressed the family with a casual flippancy, preaching them manners thus revealing how caste order rots people. For them this just happened to be a ‘situation’ which brought bad publicity, a ‘matter’ to bury. They don’t even recognise the loss of those whom they speak to, they do not recognise the ones they speak to. This is an even greater violation for it displays ordinariness of violence that confronts working class and castes.
They don’t even recognise the loss of those whom they speak to, they do not recognise the ones they speak to. This is an even greater violation for it displays ordinariness of violence that confronts working class and castes.
If we listen carefully to the mother, she knew exactly why they were denied the permission to perform last rites, she recognised the urgency for a cover-up in the tone of condescension and intimidation and rejects false solidarity being extended to her by officials which was quickly followed by statements refuting the details and denying the accuracy of reporting carried out by the media. As if, it is the details of the gruesome rape that has evoked anger and not the fact of the violence itself. In trying to contest the ‘details’ of the injuries, they are undermining the family’s loss, burdening them with producing evidence despite themselves unlawfully cremating her. Leaving them with little means to fight for justice. In fact they have gone ahead and claimed that Manisha was never raped, having hastily cremated her body now, they are now trying to reduce her tormenting reality to ashes. The whiff of a cover-up could be sensed from the start and therefore, the police’s negation is not shocking but harrowing, nonetheless.
Add to that, a video of Hathras’ DM has been released where he is clearly seen pressurising the family to shift their position and change their statement. He can be seen stating that this media spectacle is transitory and will fizzle out, ultimately the case will be in the hands of the administration to overlook or oversee. This offer and aid by the administration is done in a bid to make the family acquiesce to falsehoods of the State’s narrative. It is precisely for this reason that it is not enough to merely demand legal action but ensure that there are movements to maintain the pressure on the administration which wants to preserve the status quo. Three days on, after destroying evidence, they are now suggesting to investigate for ‘honor killing!’ How brazen could this get? The family needs to be protected from this harassment. Just when you think things could not get worse, the family and journalists phone were being tapped and far from assuming guilt for snooping, the BJP released chats to manipulate public perception by alleging a nexus between journalists and the family. Further, the family is made to undergo a narcotics test while the UP government hires a PR firm to falsify rape.
Those contesting the fabricated details want to isolate Manisha’s predicament from the structural violence that she and her family have faced, inter-generationally at the hands of the Thakurs of the village. A violence that the villagers are not unfamiliar with. In fact, just after Manisha’s news, there followed a similar incident from Badohi, following Balrampur, and there may be many more unreported, under-reported cases. The media wants to make eruptions of caste violence appear sensational and ‘irrational’ acts, as if they are a ‘barbaric’ exception to the otherwise healthy social norm. Thus failing to reflect the larger social problem but presenting it as isolated incidents of crime. While case-to-case follow ups and demands for justice as necessary, we have to simultaneously think of addressing the systemic production of an endemic violence.
Last night (30th September 2020), the entire village had come in support of the family and yet the police acted with the confidence secured by caste supremacy and impunity, they pushed the village people aside and isolated the victim’s body to cremate her without the presence of her family.
The police insisted that the family too was at fault and educated them on the ‘optimum’ time to cremate a body, all these were pathetic excuses to justify their overreach. Saahil Murli Menghani reported that the Hathras police has now retracted its Tweet where it had falsely claimed that the victim was cremated in the presence of the family, when in fact they had done so despite their refusal and inspite of their repeated pleas to mourn and grieve their daughter before letting her go.
Its reported that Hathras police has now retracted its Tweet where it had falsely claimed that the victim was cremated in the presence of the family, when in fact they had done so despite their refusal and inspite of their repeated pleas to mourn and grieve their daughter before letting her go.
Tanushree Pandey reported that the family was being forcibly grabbed by the police to make them attend the funeral which was being conducted against their repeated requests. In order to avoid being falsely implicated in the State’s narrative. They had to withhold their presence at the cremation for it to not be seen as a legitimating tool – the family had to lock itself up in a room as the police set their daughter’s body on flaming embers of the funeral pyre. Their abstinence was their protest. It was their foresight that informed their restraint, as their presence would likely have been retrospectively attributed as an approval of the police’s action.
Curious Remainders of Conscientious Media
For hours there was no news about Chandrashekhar Azad’s whereabouts who had been picked up by the police in Delhi, where the victim was being treated. Many had gathered outside Safdarjung Hospital where people were demanding for transparency in the medical treatment. He was later put under house arrest. Protestors in Delhi were detained and many other cities like Agra, Lucknow rose in rage demanding accountability from UP government.
Chandrashekhar and other activists and the community members of the village are the reason why we know of Hathras today. Their resistance and pressure foregrounded the injustice and oppression, which has been routinized by caste society. It is peculiar then that even when progressive media was taking Chandrashekhar’s byte, they felt the righteous need to interrupt him repeatedly, to advocate for doctors, not out of malice but out of an presumed proximity to social movements. Various channels asked him if the incident could be ‘called’ a caste based rape, which he not only positively affirmed but insisted that is ‘called’ such because it is so! Progressive media revels in its own ‘bravery’ for doing their job (for which they get paid) that they lose all sense of perspective when they actually pose questions to leaders who do the work that they do by risking their lives against the work which routinely takes their lives! Impressed by their own ‘progressiveness,’ they think others should be grateful and indebted to them for it, although Azad held his fort and sharply cut through such a twisted sense of entitlement.
While it is great that people are educating themselves and have positioned themselves on the right side of history, the online political influencer persona has got the best of people. The pinching urge to appear more ‘just and fair-minded’ than the political worker whose byte was being solicited by the media itself, can be traced back to a false sense of grandeur that the urban media harbors.
It is crucial that the progressive section of the national media is not antagonized but at the same time, it is for people to identify their historical role in the struggle without stepping on each other’s toes or assuming false leadership riding on their social media popularity. There are many things that need to be done, and can only be achieved by laying an actual stake in the struggle and actively thinking about, working together towards how best to facilitate it.
Its not enough to ‘introspect’ and parrot political positions that sound correct, but also to recognize that there are real social contradictions which we are not only emblematic of but also produced in and through social relations which our efforts are geared towards preserving. So, we need to not simply ‘improve’ ourselves or feel proud about not falling for the diversionary baits by the right wing but also forge actual unities with political clarity of our goals, role, and sites of struggle. Only a movement that confronts structures power can reverse it.
For that we need a political framework and less righteousness, even lesser empty hermeneutics and verbal acrobatics of ‘learning and unlearning’ that has become a convenient excuse for political inaction. The progressive media needs to abandon its grand sense of self, which expands their ego to identify theirs as the sole voice of reason, ‘sanity,’ neutrality and objectivity which might seem like a saving grace within a predominantly right-wing network.
Its not enough to ‘introspect’ but also to recognize that there are social contradictions which our lives produce and are a product of and therefore, we need to not simply ‘improve’ ourselves but also forge actual unities with political clarity of our goals, role, and sites of struggle to transform the basis of our social relations.
The whole day newsrooms were abuzz, ‘debating’ caste without any serious acknowledgement of the exploitative roots that form our social edifice. In delinking caste from its materiality, the news anchors mystify it as something which can be debated at the level of ‘comparing privileges’ or ‘retracing motive.’ To their minds, a woman is not raped because of her caste identity but because she is a woman. This obscures the reality that women’s vulnerability to violence at the hands of power is as much informed by their caste identity, socio-structural location. Its curious that people fail to grasp the relevance of caste as a constitutive factor in women’s oppression but are capable of comprehending why its easier to get away with unleashing violence on the poor. They cannot fathom that the poor are not without political context and history. Why? Ask yourself why there is widespread opposition to caste-based reservation?
Often, we see people mixing up their class interests with their political allegiances and income. The media however considers itself to be mere individuals hanging mid-air, in suspension, as if they were floating figures in historical time, who are above caste, capitalist patriarchal ideology. Gleefully, they celebrate their lack of political stakes on matters. Such uselessness is its own reward, self congratulating words follow, “we are resented both by the right and left wing.”
Reminding me of the verses:
Oh, hideousness of self-complacent, unbending, cheaply bought virtue; thou art almost more revolting than the frank hideousness of vice!
- Ivan Turgenev, The Egotist
They speak of caste as if it exists outside of us – like they need to surgically unearth it, tease it out, quantify it and feel self congratulatory in recognizing this act for what it is, caste based rape. They understand a caste based violence as that which is reducible to individual intention, and motivation, as something that can be understood in isolation. This is not about ‘cherry picking’ and ‘foregrounding’ aspects of one’s identity, though without an understanding of how those identities get constituted, it might may appear to look as such.
However, an individuated case-by-case view obliterates how caste delimits people’s access, mobility, ensures that the family remains on the peripheries of social life, brink of poverty. Its precisely caste that’s at work when people have nowhere to go when met with severity of upper caste frenzy, who are secured by kinships, state institutions, structural impunity, economic, cultural and/or social capital.
Another crucial detail that was not highlighted by the media was the political mobilization of Savarna Parishad that came in defense of the perpetrators.
The reason for extracting and supplanting the women’s specificities is because of a commonly held misunderstanding about sexual violence, which is viewed as a manifestation of ‘natural/biological’ drive rather than recognizing that women’s position is society has been historically and systemically been produced in exploitative relations such that sexual violence. Sexual violence thus becomes one of the ways the many ways in which women’s bodies are abused.
We seem to have forgotten that only recently over 600 migrants workers lost their lives, charting an arduous walk back homes, in abandonment. Among them were many pregnant women, women with kids. Did that outrage the nation? No. In fact the government did not even deem it worthy to record the statistics of the lost lives so it as to subvert its obligation to compensate families for the loss of their loved ones. It should be clear why the labouring bodies of working class men and women, who belong to the most marginalized communities and castes are more susceptible to violence and abuse! Their lives are considered dispensable because their suffering is normalized under the conditions which reproduces inequalities, encloses social inter-mixing, prohibits interaction, fixes caste borders.
Its curious that people fail to grasp the relevance of caste as a constitutive factor in women’s oppression but are capable of comprehending why its easier to get away with unleashing violence on the poor.
Media’s attempts at playing ‘devil’s advocate,’ help sustain the fallacy of casteless ‘general’ people which both betrays the cause as well as reflects how far removed the class interests of media are from people’s social realities. In fact, as reported by Nidhi Suresh, the village from which Manisha belonged is one where untouchability is openly practiced, this should have lent to informed reporting than the ‘caste angle’ being posed as a question. The imagined audience for the national news is presumed to be a ‘common man,’ who cannot ‘see’ the caste dynamics playing out in society and wants you to demonstrate it. They do so not because they don’t know better but precisely because they know their caste privileges too well!
In actuality, the ‘casteless’ audience is a class which willfully obscured its socio-economic location since it structurally benefits from it. Therefore, the imagined viewer for whom the news is designed is a reflection of the systemic problems in reporting which presupposes the ‘general populace’ as casteless to sustain the caste-cluelessness fallacy. This, however, is not a depiction of actual lives and social realities of people but expresses an ideological fiction which is geared towards concealing the fact that our social relations are organized along; effectuated, animated and implicated by the caste order.
Pro-Active Agitators
The Bollywood brigade took some time before recycling its statements of condemnation and expressions of shock, which slowly receded to calling for blood! The advocates of unchecked State violence think they are bypassing the treachery of law with direct action, answering to the urgency to combat the crisis with ‘decisive’ onslaught against crime – with a ‘once and for all’ solution! On the face of it, this appears ‘fair,’ more so because it subverts the tiredness of what appears to be a sleeping judiciary.
Yet, those who faithfully regurgitate, “kill the rapist,” have no interest in seriously assessing the law, state form, social structures. I would like to ask them if it feels good to say this? Does it help them sleep peacefully at night without doing the labour of unmaking social relations? Various political parties spokespersons recycle their jaded arguments decrying ‘selective’ outrage in order to insist that Hathras is not an aberration to the ‘rape norm.’ We know how margins and violence are structurally produced but they seem to only want to pass the buck instead of sincerely addressing the uneasy normal. They simply want to ‘condemn rape’ or demand ‘harsh punishment,’ or impose ‘death penalty.’ They want to play sovereign and righteously pronounce that rape must end. But how would it end? Because they said so? Without taking the trouble of finding out how marginalized women are vulnerable to violence?
People who are eager to end rape with State violence, capital punishment just want it ‘done with it’ without losing any part of their own entitlements. It seems they only see rape as a ‘crime’ that they want to ‘rid’ the society of without adequately understanding why it exists in the first place! At best, then, coming up ways to cement the rot.
In fact, as reported by Nidhi Suresh, the village from which Manisha belonged is one where untouchability is openly practiced. This should have lent to informed reporting than the ‘caste angle’ being posed as a question.
We need only observe our life histories to see how caste passes on and lives through us and effectuates society. Caste offers privileges by producing and sustaining an unequal society, by organizing social relations such that the certain communities remain caught in a relation of abandonment which perpetuates the cycle of debt, humiliation, destitution and death. Caste reinforcing patriarchy therefore cannot be externalized and evidenced only by the fact of its brutalities. By isolating rape as ‘heinous crime,’ they want us to overlook the myriad factors that produce structures that make vulnerability to violence possible.
Let the words of the wrongly incarcerated Dr Anand Teltumbde ring loud: “Violence is an intrinsic aspect of caste, and that such eruptions of caste violence, far from being isolated events, have a more functional, systemic aspect of enforcing the social order, hence its tendency ‘to be performed as a public spectacle by collectives in a celebratory mode.’ This is made clear by the collective dimension of rape, where the woman’s body becomes the privileged site of collective punishment. ‘Rape is not a private affair, it becomes a celebratory spectacle. Atrocities involve intricate and devious planning so that they become a ‘lesson’ for the entire dalit community.’”
Another crucial detail that was not highlighted was the political mobilization of upper caste that came in defense of the perpetrators is produced by class consolidation, bottom-up organized expansion, furthered by the structural reproduction of inequality, institutional co-option and impunity. This is not radicalization but far worse, it is an entire political economy. Savarna Parishad doesn’t exist in a vacuum and cannot simply be wished away! As the ambit of suffering widens and engulfs more people, we need a political framework that corresponds to the realities and forsake empty and abstract calls for political unity for real ones.
Reports suggest that Yogi Adityanath has promised the father of Manisha to deliver the harshest punishment to the perpetrators, which is perfectly consistent with his track record of extra-judicial encounters, and retributive carceral framework. We must be careful to not obscure how a protectionist response to violence helps the law expand its power to reverse engineer, determine and punish powerless people with all its might! Such myopia is unpardonable, especially when one has seen the cunning of UP government and the police force. One cannot hold the UP government to account by pretending not to see how demands for ‘killing’ overlap with and satisfy his government’s language of retributive justice, which would eventually be deployed against the working sections of society.
We seem to have forgotten that only recently over 600 migrants workers lost their lives, mostly belonging to marginalised communities. They chartered an arduous walk back to their homes, in abandonment. Among them were many pregnant women, women with kids. Did that outrage the nation? No.
UP government uses women’s systemically produced vulnerability to violence to justify setting up its own private militia to “fight crime,” which is but a euphemism for preserving the mighty criminal caste order which is reproduced by carcerality to sustain patriarchy. In assuming the neutrality of the State, you end up pushing the working class and castes towards the slaughter house.
While the State justifies its overreach citing ‘law and order’ situation lets us remember to not respond to rape by inverting the same narrowly defined frames that fail to diagnose the structural violence of caste society that manifests itself in both gradual killing and excessive brutalities. These laws are in fact used to arrest men from marginalized communities en masse. It is why not everyone has the luxury to hold onto legal positivism and other such self-deceptions, for exceptional laws won’t just be applicable on one. The attempts at serving ‘exemplary’ justice, to gratify people’s outrage could cost those suffering the consequences of unequal structures with their lives, since the force of law is always thunderous on them. Not every case will be brought into public attention, since an average of rapes per minute is too alarmingly high in this country and therefore, we must see beyond immediate quick-fix solutions and demand more!
When decisions start being taken at gun point, all decisions are opened up to the state’s ‘discretion’ – be it the dismantling of affordable government colleges and universities, protection of women from sexual harassment, safeguarding the Dalit and tribal community from atrocities, privilging the peasantry, protection of forest dwellers and urban poor families from eviction, social security for workers in terms of wages and job security, freedom of expression and dissent so on and so forth.
Everything can be scrapped or punished with the might of the mighty rulers without resolving anything! The juggernaut of Hindu Rashtra – that Yogi is the face of – which echoes the sentiment of a ‘strong state,’ has proven to crush people for optics and expansion.
UPDATE: Read Nidhi Suresh’s story which traces the lives of the remaining family after four months of the criminal injustice.