By Sameer Khan,
India has been rattled by the gruesome incident of gang rape in a bus and now everyone is talking about rape as an issue and demanding capital punishment for the criminals. But much to our denials and pretentiousness our history and culture is tainted with sexual crimes and it’s never going to be washed away.
As much as it happens in any conflict our past is full of brutality of rape and sexual violence against women. The mindset of using a rape as a weapon of subjugation and humiliation of the other community, caste or religion at the cost of a woman has always been displayed fervently again and again and it’s the woman who has been subjected to it.
Rape has been the most dirty weapon used all along our history whether it’s the victorious mercenaries of East India Company against the beleaguered helpless people of Delhi in 1857 or the countless rapes and abductions of women and young girls carried out by Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims in 1947.
“Please don’t kill my adolescent daughter in front of my eyes. Came the reply: Ok! do as he says: Take off her clothes and pull over on onside” ( Sadat Hassan Manto’s Concession) His short stories of Bimla, Sakeena, Thanda Gosht all resonated the painful searing effects of rape on the women. I visited my friend in the Muktsar district of Indian Punjab in 2006, in town of Giddarbaha, There were Mosques yet not a single Muslim in the Village most of them had migrated or died in the violence of 1947. An old woman walked up to me and greeted me with a Salam alaikum, I was surprised and rejoined walaikum salam, She was Muslim grandmother of my Punjabi Hindu friend abducted as a 16 year old at the time of Partition. There are thousands of such stories in Pakistan too where Sikh and Hindu women were abducted during Partition of India and Pakistan. Can we ever fathom the pain of thousands of such women who lived a life of misery for rest of their lives?
We have recent memories of Gujarat of 2002 when the brutality of rape reached a new level of abhorrence. Pregnant Muslim woman’s belly was slashed and foetus thrown in Fire. A 19 year old pregnant Bilkis Bano was raped by three men with all bestiality and left because they thought she was dead. There are countless other women who also suffered the ignominy of Rape and are living a scarred life. Was their pain and trauma any less than that of the raped girl in Delhi? Did any women’s group march on India Gate? Did anyone bother to counsel them for their trauma? Did anyone burn a candle?
Over the years, we have been reading small 5 line news stories in newspapers of a Tribal or a Dalit woman being raped in UP and Bihar by land lords. Did we ever bother to raise our voices to the hundreds of stories that we grew up reading? There are voices demanding Capital Punishment for rapist does that punishment also include for rapes committed in communal violence too? And moreover how much is rape a result of our cultural mindset of subjugating a women sexually a cultural influence?
Rape has been always a part of our psyche and we have been hypocrites in choosing which of the rape that we chose to cry for and others that we turn a blind eye to. Thus when we demand Capital punishment and raise of our voices in favor of the rape victim we need to introspect and also ponder about our past hypocrisy and future apathy towards the different responses towards different rape victims.
—
Sameer Khan is a freelance writer and a playwright.