This is a blog post from
It was a freezing afternoon in December 2012 but hordes of people had gathered in front of Parliament to protest against the rape of a young paramedical student. Most of them were students and were screaming slogans or holding up placards that they had written down the night before: ‘Stop atrocities on women’, ‘Save the girl’, ‘Enough is enough!’, ‘Punish the criminals’, and the popular and problematic ‘Hang them’. One man suddenly wriggled into a group of students and stood near a friend of mine.
“ B*******d …, Kya kar rahe ho? [What are you doing?]” he clenched his fists. He was referring to the then Delhi Chief Minister, a woman. And then to the Congress president: “ Aurat hoke kuch nahin kar sakte kya, c******* ? [Being a woman, can't you do anything?]”
My friend confronted him but it was a lost cause. He was abused too, so he quietly turned to Facebook to register his point. Here were people gathered to protest against abuse by using abuse, he wrote. Do they not see anything wrong in this?
The message came rushing back recently. The protests by the students of Jawaharlal Nehru University against the arrest of JNU Students’ Union president Kanhaiya Kumar divided the Internet deeply. While many supported the protests, others stood their ground that Mr. Kumar was ‘anti-national’ and ‘seditious’. To validate their argument, they resorted, like the angry man of the 2012 protest, to abuse: “You’re all presstitutes. “Wait till a [*insert some animal here*] rapes you.”
Protecting Bharat Mata
Source: Wikipedia
'Bharat Mata', a painting by Abanindranath Tagore dating back to 1905, depicts a saffron-clad woman holding a book, sheaves of paddy, a piece of white cloth and a garland in each of her four hands. The painting is considered significant for its historical value in having helped in the conceptualisation of the idea of Bharat Mata (Mother India) and create nationalistic feeling during the freedom struggle.
Sidenote: Do I have to be saffron-leaning to love the idea of my motherland?
So, the irony continues. No insult to Bharat Mata will be tolerated, Human Resources Development Minister Smriti Irani said in a dramatic speech in Parliament. But somehow all the women in Bharat Mata are insulted with new words every other day by some of the same people who defend her honour. So, who then is Bharat Mata and what does she embody? Why is this passionate interest in protecting her reputation not accompanied with respect for her women or a serious engagement with the existing condition of her women? Is it alright to ask for Bharat Mata’s protection while politicians and parliamentarians, such as Minister of State for External Affairs V.K. Singh who popularised the word ‘presstitutes’, use words or coin words that are meant to offend and denigrate women?
The vision of India as Bharat Mata has implications for nationalism, the raging topic of the day. “The nation”, according to the social anthropologist Lise McKean, “is figured as a loving mother surrounded by her devoted children; the secular state and Muslims… figure as the tyrannical father [she refers here to Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Anandamath ]. Whether celibate or supported by their devoted wives, Bharat Mata’s sons are valiant protagonists whose struggle is a righteous patricide, a conquest that simultaneously liberates the nation — the mother and her children — and enables her sons to enjoy the power and riches they have successfully wrested from the malevolent father.”
In other words, the woman is still reduced to the role of a mother in the 21st Century, devoted and pure; as one who is sacrificial while the man protects her honour in a valiant way. (This also rings true in the other recent and equally passionate defence of India’s soldiers, which springs up in every discourse on nationalism — here are our brave men fighting for our protection, why aren’t you proud of them ? — even as human rights abuses and atrocities against women by the Army in Kashmir and the Northeast take a comfortable backseat or fade away in public memory.)
Thus, protecting women here evidently does not mean protecting all women. Tied to this idea is that of morality: only those who deserve protection will be protected, those who support our men fighting for us will be protected, those who toe the line will be respected, while others who question or whose statements, ideas, value systems and actions fall outside this circle of morality can be abused.
Of course, speaking about women in a derogatory manner is not restricted to any one party in India. That the Bharatiya Janata Party asks for Bharat Mata to be protected falls completely in line with its ideology. Examples of nonsensical statements by other parties over the years are legion: JD(U) chief Sharad Yadav said some years ago in a debate on the Women’s Reservation Bill that parkati (short haired) women would take the 33 per cent quota in Parliament, pitting elite women with short hair as a symbol of modernity against the large majority of women and the age-old patriarchal social order.
The call for loving one's motherland and the call for respecting the women of the motherland are interrelated. The former without the latter is sheer hypocrisy.
Former Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh Mulayam Singh has made a string of misogynistic comments, calling poor women unattractive, telling us in the context of a rape case that “boys will make mistakes”, wondering out loud how it was “practically possible” for four people to rape a woman, stating that the number of rapes in the country is lowest in Uttar Pradesh — a statement so outrageously incorrect that it left the most articulate of people speechless. Note the words that are used to describe women in these contexts — as western, with flimsy morals, as telling lies, and so on. ‘Presstitutes’ is clearly a reference to a vocation attributed to women and often used to demean: the press apparently engages in promiscuous activity in return for money. The word seems to be widely seen as clever wordplay, for it has really caught on, with social media catapulting it to the position of its most favourite insult. Nothing can be worse than being a prostitute is the message.
Not only is the Sangh Parivar’s cultural nationalism deeply damaging to the struggles of women, who for years have been trying to dismantle the pigeonholing of the Indian woman into the template of ‘mother, daughter, or sister‘. It is the verbal abuse thrown by political parties against women in general that is terribly destructive, especially because its effect is insidious: there are no immediate telltale signs of the effect. Take the word ‘rape’, for instance. How often do we hear it being used by people to mean victory or mauling?
“India raped Bangladesh in the match yesterday” or “He raped him in that speech” are common ways of hailing victory. What kind of message does that convey, say, to a child of ten? ‘Rape means victory. It means exertion of power and celebration of the same.’ Or ‘presstitute’ means “the media is getting paid for some illegal activity”. It means dishonour. It means shame. These are not mere insults; they are slurs that are meant to be a tool of oppression. These are slurs used by the public in general, but imagine the kind of effect that political leaders have with their reprehensible statements on women? What will a young nation then think of its women?
Language is the easiest way of spotting misogyny — just observe the way someone talks about women, to women, about women-related problems or concepts, how they treat women. Verbal violence is merely a silent friend of physical violence but the kind of friend who remains in the shadows, not attracting much attention. Verbal violence might be in the news sometimes, but is put across as disconnected throwaway statements, never as a serious problem that needs to be addressed from childhood.
If we as a nation truly want to address the problems in our society, let’s first start with this simple idea: let’s not abuse.
