Transform our political consciousness to address violence against women

What happened in RG Kar Medical College has once again put the spotlight on violence against women that is embedded in the everydayness of our existence — inside households, in social constructs and even the instruments of State.

There has been an uproar across India. But if that translates into a mass movement is a question for a separate discussion. This violence, howsoever gruesome, was not the first one to happen in India (nor the last).

The Delhi incident of 2012, the brutal assault on Dalit girl in Hathras, and the unending wait for justice through legal and governance mechanisms continue. The brutal assaults on Dalit women by private armies of landlords in Bihar have mostly gone unpunished.

While there have been protests about the Kolkata incident, Maharashtra has been in the news for violence against women too. In Uttar Pradesh, a nurse was assaulted, while in Uttarakhand a minor was gang-raped in a bus, and in Bihar, a Dalit girl was raped and murdered.

The case of a Karnataka politician and the involvement of politicians in a Uttarakhand case only demonstrates how deeply violence against women has seeped into the political system too. Crimes against women does not always make news. Only a few of them make it to newspapers and online outlets.

The process of socialisation breeds violence. This socialisation encompasses each and every aspect of a person’s life, since childhood. It also becomes a battle of ideas between narratives of violence that injustices of different kinds foment, and its counternarratives too.

What transpires in society in the form of violence embedded in different social relations pedagogically reproduces that violence as the hegemonic discourse is about violence.

It is here that the socialisation in an unequal society, absorbing its language, body language, and behaviour patterns becomes significant. Having seen the gun-trotting members of private militias during my fieldwork, it became obvious how violence is internalised through the long process of socialisation and other cultural-political processes.

The everyday language of controlling women, impeding her efforts at becoming free of patriarchal norms, and resorting to physical, mental, and verbal violence to enforce control is what a child in India grows up with.

Freedom is dangerous as it may not reproduce the exploitative order and if this reproduction stops the systems, economic as well as social, would collapse. Hence, the means of control, violence being only one of them, are invented.

It manifests through the entertainment industry, the political system, and the economic order. The virtual world merges with the real and it starts mirroring each other. The characters perpetrating different forms of violence in society seem to have walked out of the electronic media and vice-versa. The violence gets commodified and it also assists accumulative practices. It ceases to be a mere moral issue or a law and order problem.

The lessons that children learn from what transpires in society and polity also serve as a pedagogical source for them. They absorb what they see without any filters or any counter-narratives.

The use of technology creates consensus.

Marcuse says “The capabilities (intellectual and material) of contemporary society are immeasurably greater than ever before — which means that the scope of society's domination over the individual is immeasurably greater than ever before. Our society distinguishes itself by conquering the centrifugal social forces with Technology rather than Terror…”

We have seen, however, that in contemporary times both instruments – technology as well as terror – are employed to ensure domination over individuals.

What is encountered by an individual is simultaneously bombarded with discourses that disallow any alternative narrative. For instance, anyone who saw the protests by women wrestlers and discourses around them and then its culmination would grow up with the harsh reality that such a treatment of women is not necessarily abominable.

One can remain a political leader despite everything. On one side is the blatant declaration that violence against women is just fine, and on the other hand is a thought process that assists this thought in creating a hierarchised society of men who are patronising and women who are expected to act subservient.

This thought expresses itself in comments on women showing knees through ripped jeans as 'uncultured' and 'without values'. Or advocacy around women being suited to a life confined to household chores while the men act as the breadwinners.

Then, there have been politicians holding grudges against women for wearing lipsticks or sporting a bob-cut hair.

Alleged tapes of a chief minister shows how violence against communities and their women are sponsored. One way to look at these opinions is to have a law-and-order angle but it does not address the problem of violence against women because it has entered the deepest corners of our society and the minds of individuals. It is part of the collective consciousness.

Consequently, rallies are organised in support of those arrested for the crime, as in the Kathua case, or to welcome back the accused in the Bilkis Bano case.

The symbols of masculinity that dominate the entertainment landscape, political systems, and governance models, and that control institutions at all levels are inherent parts of socialisation. They create boys and men growing up with a sense of power that is unbridled.

The complexities of caste, class, ethnicity, and gender need reflection. It is a question of justice as much as it is a question of inequality, which breeds injustice. The events in Mumbai, wherein elite neighbourhoods drove away Bahujan women, are indicators of the larger malaise and complexities of gendered relations. The violence ingrained into the system, into thought processes have their own biases, including that of class.

The political system needs to radically alter itself and it is not an abstract category — people making policies, and people managing the affairs need to alter themselves, in terms of how they look at the gendered relations. The delays in adjudication of cases such as the one that happened vis-à-vis wresters establish that a system will go slow on the powerful. The arbitrary suo moto cognisance of certain cases and not of others becomes pedagogical for those who keenly observe the way violence against women gets treated and learn to reproduce it. The political order must realise that this is a question of a much deeper transformation of consciousness; but that political project is nowhere to be seen.

Ravi Kumar is Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, South Asian University and tweets from X handle @74kravi)