Liberals have exposed themselves over Kathua rape outrage
Self-important chest-beating and navel gazing help no one.
The responses to the two rapes that have shocked the Indian internet in the past few days have been stock and offensive in predictable ways. They are late, they are chest-beating in an obnoxious, self-regarding way that only middle class Indians can manage (Pratap Bhanu Mehta/Barkha Dutt), they are full of overdone outrage, self-flagellation and whatifery, and offensive metaphor (Inji Pennu’s self-appointed radicalism of how the Kathua victim is a metaphor for what India does to/in Kashmir).
Asifa, in fact, represents Kashmir. Abducted by the Hindu Indian State, brutally raped and murdered by the State — no less than a Hindu temple — itself.
— Inji Pennu (@InjiPennu) April 12, 2018
None of these respects this child for what she was – a child, a human being. We can know nothing of what she felt or what she went through, but we need not shut our horror of that out by cluttering the silence with empty words, outraged words, benign self-implication and bleatings about complicity.
What we can, might and ought to do is to think about the various events around these rapes and what they tell us, and what we should be worried about.
The first, less disturbing because more expected, is that we ignored the Kathua rape for almost two months. Rape is a daily occurrence; brutal gangrapes less frequent, but since 2012, we are immune to those too. But this was a terrible rape by any standards: a temple, politicians, priests, you name it. But the problem with this hierarchisation is that the hierarchisation is the real problem. What is a particularly brutal rape case? All rape is brutal.
The second is the victim in Unnao protesting by threatening suicide before a political party office. What is it about the persistence of the narrative of suicide after rape? While this announcement is definitely protest, why must protest be predicated upon the taking of the lives of women, Dalits, adivasis and other marginalised and violated victims?
The third is the brutal beating up and eventual murder of the victim’s father in the Unnao case. This was in the papers a few days ago. Why were we not outraged by this? He was on his way to court to file the case against his daughter’s rape. He was beaten so badly, he died. He was also arrested for being beaten up, for having a daughter who was raped by powerful men. There was no midnight vigil or protest for him.
The fourth is the real reasons why we now have the outrage over the Kathua case: a bunch of lawyers protest the filing of the case against the accused; Hindu nationalist groups form overnight and take out a rally in defence of the rapists.
Lawyers, to me, have proved to be the sickest people in the country. Whether on Leslie Udwin’s film India’s Daughter, or beating up Kanhaiya Kumar at Tilak Marg or now in Kathua, they show an astounding irreverence for their own chosen profession. These lawyers should be charged with contempt of court proceedings and jailed immediately.
That Hindu nationalist groups with names like Hindu Ekta Manch and Bharat Bachao Rathyatra can stand by the rapists and murderers of a child shows what nationalism, even if only in name (even if these people were only bribed to march in these rallies), can represent, the levels it can fall to.
What do these four aspects of the rapes and the events surrounding them cumulatively tell us? I think that we need to sit in silence and reflect on them.
The chest-beating and the self-implicating rhetoric of the Barkha Dutts and Pratap Bhanu Mehtas offer us no insight. These liberal responses are completely unaware of their own deeply hideous complicity with nationalism. Dutt reads it as “acute national shame” and a “mirror to the worst of us”. She asks for reflection but dips back into the “shamed India” business.
Mehta thinks India’s moral compass has been "carpet-bombed" but offers not much more than such mixed metaphors. The “dark sickeness” which we apparently “so easily cloak” meets the broken currency of outrage. He calls for a psychoanalysis of political differences and deep political complicity, but everything goes down a “moral black hole” in the end. The Kathua victim is no Alice and this is no rabbit hole. She has no voice here.
The kneejerk feminist responses on the internet about hanging and castrating and killing these bastardly men (something we are used to now since 2012) are equally implicated in a blindness to the corrosive futility of retributive rage and the foolishness of not seeing that either all men are bastards or all men are historical subjects who, given the warped nature of their training, will produce such violence and that violence is not the answer to it; working with them is. They offer us no insight either.
The outraged middle-of-the-roaders pasting the child’s face all over their Facebook profiles are also blind to their own naiveté and the emptiness of their own repulsive innocence. They offer us no respite from their own navel-gazing.
We need to sit in silence and try and see the world from bright eyes of an eight-year old girl, both as she playfully herded animals and as she lay in horror as twisted, drunken men brutalised her body. That is all we can and might do. What our reflections lead us to might alter how we live our lives.