Indian women live in what is essentially a terrorist state. They are the targets in terrorism daily conducted by Indian men against women, and against other men. Like all chronic, low-intensity conflicts, this one just can't catch a break getting any attention, until some incident so staggeringly savage occurs that the national eye is briefly drawn to it. On such occasions, the media acknowledges that things are very troubling, just terrible, and then goes back to trying to wangle lunch with CEOs, Cabinet ministers, and priests.
The December 16, 2012, gang rape in Delhi forced what was, shamefully, the first real conversation on sexual violence in India. Very soon, however, the media's penitent focus took on the stale quality of a statistics roll-call, and everybody got bored and changed the channel. Politicians kept their heads down for a bit, then went right back to money and electoral contests, and the media happily followed. The Nirbhaya Fund remains unspent. There has been little or no sustained discussion on the sexual, religious, political and power dynamics that underpin India's mind-boggling gender violence.
Today we are once again inchoate with shock over the double gang rape and murder in Badaun, UP, in which a pair of cousins were repeatedly raped and left hanging from nooses, two limp children swinging from a tree. The police had ignored reports of their abduction. A few days later, in Meghalaya, a woman who resisted a group of molesters was shot as her husband and children watched - shot so brutally, reportedly, that almost nothing was left of her head.
India endures these incidents with an extremely limited bout of self-loathing, and then goes back to discussing what it thinks of as proper, grown-up subjects, like communalism, and the economy, and who got which political job. The horror in Badaun has already been overtaken by the - also horrific - murder of a Muslim man in Pune by a Hindu Rashtra Sena mob. No prizes for guessing which story will last longer.
What the hell is going on? Why is India perfectly okay with the fact that half of its citizens live in terror of their safety and their lives? Why is there no sustained media howl to pressure political will into paying attention to the human rights emergency unfolding day after day, year upon year, in homes and workplaces, cities, villages, fields, relationships and marriages? Women talk and write about it all the time, but their voices are confined to a small, soundproofed box labelled 'Women's issues', where the babes can go and talk about their feelings, leaving the men to discuss serious stuff in peace.
Read my lips: violence against women is a men's issue. Men should also be talking about it, a lot, to other men. Why are male politicians and journalists - so outraged by injustices of religious, caste and class discrimination - blind to, or uninterested in, the poisonous gender injustices that affect half the population? We hear too much from politicians who believe that rape is not a big deal, but that adulterous women should be put to death; and nothing at all from the worthies in the new-look, highly communicative, super-responsive, strong-signalling Prime Minister's Office. Silence is a strong signal, and it's coming in loud and clear. It is particularly puzzling from this PMO, since it is widely known that the fastest way to develop a nation is to invest in women and girls.
Where are our male allies in this war, the men who think that violence against women is unacceptable enough to stand up to their male cohort, horrifying enough to scream about, endemic enough to campaign about politically? We regularly acknowledge that the police force and political class are drawn from the same misogynistic society as the perps they shield. We almost never add the obvious: so is the pool of editors, reporters, and commentators who dominate media. Their work will passionately parse Cabinet formation to within an inch of its life, but gender violence? That's 'just terrible'.
If newspapers ignored electoral politics and business for a year, and devoted themselves exclusively to three-inch headlines about what is happening to Indian women, politicians might discover political will. But neither newspapers nor readers are interested enough. Maybe it would work if men wrote stories about men - their violence, their insecurities, their relationship to sexuality and religion and power, and the psychodramas they play out on women's bodies and lives.
But man on man is just a fantasy. Indian women, currently divided by caste, religion, and class, will have to consolidate, and find a way to insist on their human rights and political relevance. What's it going to take for us to be taken seriously - armed struggle?
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