A SATIRE ON RAPE

It was a week ago that I started writing a piece on “how we should get men to understand consent and stop being creeps.” This was when I realised that it is all a joke - most of our time and energy while discussing rape is spent focusing on the potential rape victims’ actions (mostly girls/women, because boys/men getting raped is a bigger joke), instead of on the perpetrator's actions.

All of us have heard (too many times), the standard “how to not get yourself raped” advice: do not dress in a manner that the other person may find “tempting,” do not leave your drink unattended, do not go anywhere isolated where a stranger could confront you, and so on. While almost everyone who proffers this advice, vaguely oversimplifies the situation by not mentioning the rapist and their responsibility for their actions. No one asks or deserves to be raped, while a critical skill for a healthy adult life is learning to carefully live in this world, is it too much to expect men to learn how to behave themselves?.

The fact that being drunk may increase your chances of getting raped, has not once been seriously defended. They just point out a correlation between the two. As far as I can tell, this is supposed to be a conversation amongst thoughtful, concerned, and well-informed adults who care about individuals not getting raped (readers, I deem you worthy, make me proud). We repeatedly assume that women are too dumb to grasp the fact that they are to blame for their assaults, but that some precautionary measures can work in preventing some rapes? What is plain insulting, is that we conveniently put the blame on the victim.

Is an education about consent and how to “stop being creeps" all that is required to prevent men from committing rape? Another glaring oversimplification in the anti-How to Not Get Raped message. Not most, not many, but some rapists know that what they're doing is wrong, and they want to do it anyway (don’t shy away now, you educated ‘dude’, who we assumed, we could trust). All the "Understanding Sexual Consent" educational seminars in the world won't prevent them. The action is ours to take, a little more caution is needed and so is a little more courage.

In these times, we have excuses for everything, even for the rape of an 8-year old. the Rapists of Jyoti Singh Pandey (Nirbhaya) were extremely foolish, their case in the supreme court was processed quickly and they were hanged. Had they put a little more effort, they could have saved themselves. On the other hand, the rapists of Asifa - sorry, the ‘alleged’ rapists of Asifa are smart, clever and have been taking cautious steps all this while. That is why nothing is going to happen to them. This is an excerpt from the charge sheet which states some glaring details -

“An eight-year-old was gang-raped thrice in the Devasthan or prayer hall of a temple. The master had performed rituals (the fact that puja has been added to it prohibits interference, “baki sab rape-vape chalta hai’). One of the rapists was called from Meerut to satisfy his lust. The girl was confined using sedatives, then strangled and hit on the head twice with a stone, to make sure that she is dead, but not before another accused, some police personnel asked the others to wait because he wanted to rape the girl one more time before killing her.”

The charge sheet itself is a testament to the depravity of the Indian man’s mindset.

According to it, the mastermind behind the rape and murder is a retired revenue official of the government of India. Name? Sanji Ram who was amongst the eight arrested along with his son and nephew, believed to be a juvenile (there was one in Nirbhaya’s case too, the youth is making our country proud these days!) the crime branch also arrested special police officers and other members of the police force on charges of attempting to destroy evidence. What are corrupt police officers, if not undercover criminals?

We honestly assumed that nothing more horrific can ever happen after we heard what happened to Nirbhaya, but the entire episode has shaken the country to its roots. Even in terms of the grossness of the chargesheet where an eight-year-old girl was raped with such brutality brings our country to shame.

You know what? The irony about the whole case is that these rapists will survive the verdict and nothing is going to happen to them. The rapists of Nirbhaya could have saved themselves the same way, but they didn’t have contacts. The first reason this will happen is that the police are involved and the whole pólice force tries to clear their name. These rapists were lucky, which obviously the rapists of Nirbhaya weren’t, and a Hindu outfit is involved (just chant ‘bharat mata ki jai’ a few times and unleash the ‘Tiranga’, now see if anybody can even question you). We have come to a point where our national flag is being used by these guys to defend such criminals. Now the cherry on top is the support these rapists are getting by politicians. Lal Singh and Chander Parkash Ganga ministers in the J&K government supported these rapists and the police officers.

It was never about you and me. It is about Asifa, Nirbhaya and all the nameless girls, women, children, who I could not name because they were not popular enough for the media or those who simply went unreported. I write, in order to put on paper the gravity of what the horrors of rapes and the stories that unfold because of choices made by some men. I write, because I am tired, I am exhausted of stories like these, emerging almost daily from all parts of urban and rural India. We as a society still continue to struggle with the poisonous and violent reality of rape, the gravity of sexual assault, the complexity of misogyny and the patriarchal weight that continues to minimize the role of rapists and blame women whose body was scratched and snatched from within her own skin.

And I ask you, what will you do about this?

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Written by Naman Kapoor

Edited by Nandini Nalam