Mayawati was called 'worse than a prostitute' for being a Dalit woman
If you want to assess the median level of a national discourse, look no further than its choicest abuses.
In India, the word "prostitute" [randi, raand, and its Sanskrit origin - "vaishya", as used by (now sacked) BJP UP vice-president Dayashankar Singh to describe Mayawati, former state chief minister and leader of the Bahujan Samaj Party] is a preferred slur, commonly hurled at women you want to scurrilously target in public.
Opinionated women and public figures, particularly of the secular variety, are ritually called whores and prostitutes on social media. The journalists among them are called "presstitutes", a curious portmanteau credited to a former military general now enjoying the glorious riches of the Indian political life.
The logic: prostitutes, or sex workers, have paid sex with the highest bidder, auction their bodies instead of securing it in marital contract to only one man - the husband/owner, capitalise it, and are, therefore, in this patriarchal universe, devoid of "honour" - the essential stamp that sanctifies a woman's invisible and unpaid sexual labour within the heterosexual marriage.
In other words, the prostitute's body, in this rationale, is an unclaimed body (since we still haven't learnt that a woman can have the rights to her own body). By extension, it's a thoroughfare of sexual transgression, an open-to-all buffet of a kind.
The sexual laissez-faire is nevertheless tightly regulated by men, and particularly men belonging to upper castes and classes. Dalit women have been at the receiving end of a huge pyramid of sexual exploitation - with too many intermediaries mapping and facilitating the buying and selling of sex. Like most, the sexual labourers - chiefly women - too are systematically denied the profits and given a paltry compensation for their sex work.
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| Mayawati in Rajya Sabha on July 20, 2016. [Photo credit: Rajya Sabha TV] |
Mayawati is a Dalit woman. Mayawati is a Dalit icon and perhaps the most prominent of Dalit public figures. Mayawati is the leader of BSP. Mayawati has been called a "prostitute" today. That has been construed as an extreme form of public abuse. Mayawati has been visibly upset, enraged even. Media has worked up a frenzy, a hurricane of outrage is blowing through social media. Heads have rolled. Dayashankar Singh has been sacked, perhaps as a short-term damage control truce offering.
Yet, in this rigmarole of political stunt shaming and subsequent apology and punitive measure, what got perpetuated once again was the cycle of denial and continuation of historical injustices, against sex workers in particular, and Dalits in general. Calling Mayawati "worse than a prostitute" is a replay of countless such speech-acts wherein upper class and caste Hindu men have used sexual subjugation - via language, institutional sanctions, or physical force - to sexually, economically and politically disempower women from lower castes and classes, of uncertain pedigree.
The (often dark complexioned) Dalit woman is the ultimate low point of the social schema that puts the (often pale) Brahmin male on top and sanctions him the automatic use and abuse of the Dalit woman's body by virtue of his higher birth. Manu Smriti was/is the definitive license to rape a Dalit woman - and not call it a rape at all - that an upper caste Hindu male had/has.
But in the twenty-first century, India not only has the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, it also has the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, 1956, after India ratified the United Nations Convention for the Suppression of the Immoral Traffic in Women and the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others (1949).
While SC/ST Act has been a paper tiger, with atrocities against Dalits carrying on with even greater impunity (the latest in the pitifully long list of crimes against Dalits is the flogging of four cattle skinners in Una, Gujarat), ITPA has been thoroughly effective in robbing many women of their (often traditional and voluntarily chosen) only livelihood, all in the garb of protecting their honour and integrity. An ITPA Amendment Bill to decriminalise selling sex - and criminalise buying sex instead, thereby rendering it as problematic as the existing Act - was tabled in Lok Sabha in 2006 but lapsed in 2009.
The trope often used is that of "rescuing" them from the "physical and moral corruption" that is sex work, pushing sex workers into the rough and tumble of predatory and violent streets. Brothels are shut down, commercial liaisons that made the sex worker herself in charge of her job defunct and an entire community of mostly Dalit and poor women are thrown into still deeper poverty.
Instead of decriminalising sex work and ensuring equal access to health, safety and economic security, India and its political authorities are using outdated frameworks of morality to dehumanise sex workers.
Using the word "prostitute" and its many synonyms in Hindi, English and vernaculars to abuse women - whether Dalit or not, whether sex worker or not - as a slander is being blind to its tangled history. As cycles of discrimination get rehearsed again, the unbearable violence of the past - a violence that simmers beneath the civilised veneer of twenty-first century India - is being repeated with practiced impunity.
Just like "chamaar" - a word used to describe Dalit men who skin carcasses and extract the raw material for a highly lucrative product with myriad commercial usages, leather - "vaishya" too is loaded with many ravaged pasts and uncomfortable presents.
Calling someone a prostitute/whore is a time-tested method of dismissing a political opponent, especially a female challenger, by "casting aspersions on her character". As a corollary, a woman's entry into politics automatically calls for a desexualisation, who is now seen only in chic cotton/silk saris ala Sonia Gandhi or Sushma Swaraj, or in chaste, contour-erasing salwar kameezes, like Mayawati.
Unlike a political spouse who may emanate sartorial pheromones, the female career politician muzzles every hint of sexual possibility in public in order to remain "dignified" and command political authority. Since sexualisation could mean relinquishing that hard-earned political and electoral viability, to be dubbed a prostitute is, in this logic, is the equivalent of being shown the inglorious exit.
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| Dayashankar Singh has been sacked from the post of BJP's UP vice-president for calling Mayawati a 'prostitute'. |
For Mayawati, the double whammy of Dalit women having historically borne the brunt of upper class/caste Hindu male's sexual rapacity and the pathetic state of sex workers in India has hit her hard.
That the very basis of her political capital and movement - systemic discrimination against Dalits - can be bundled with another set of continued violence (those against sex workers and perhaps all women) and used against her to rob her of political agency, has naturally jolted her.
Though she is perfectly right to be furious - and she is - can she really unsee the bitter reality that being called a vaishya is something many Dalit women live with every single day of their lives?
How can Mayawati - a Dalit woman icon and one of their fiercest leaders - get back at her attacker, not just Dayashanker Singh, but the entire crust of entitled Hindu upper caste males, who equate Dalit women with prostitutes and prostitutes with Dalit women in an interchangeable universe of meanings and sexual ravages?
While she must enrage, instead of simply boiling up with uncomplicated moral anger, Mayawati may want to redirect this word as a catchphrase to galvanise women, particularly the Dalits among them, and reclaim many a lost history, particularly the political/economic ownership of one's body.
Why not insert it in slogans and undo, partially at least, the historical scattering of a devdasi's consent?
Why not stand shoulder to shoulder with the sex worker, Dalit or not, and recoup a shred of socio-economic legitimacy - the right to a dignified livelihood through sex work - that has been denied to them under changing pretexts?
And why not we - the chatterati, the media, the general public - stand by her, give her the option, legally and socio-politically, by removing the taboo from adult, consensual sex work, by taking away the sting from the word "prostitute"?
Why miss an opportunity to actually rectify a historical wrong in this cycle of serial, politically motivated abuse and calculated, half-baked apology?