Monday, January 14, 2013

The troubling response to the Delhi gang-rape

I write this entry as the horror and the theatre of the brutal rape and the ensuing protests play out in India.  The rape itself sickened and enraged me; but the mass-protests that have followed, which have included calls for the death penalty and castration for rapists have left me equally disturbed. 
 
I agree that this rape has brought an issue to the forefront of Indian consciousness that otherwise is given no voice.  Rape, usually a taboo subject, has become a topic of widespread discussion.  The government and the police, though slow in reacting and responding, are beginning to show some signs of life – but I fear that this awakening will be brief, and the “system” shall go back to its usual torpidity soon enough.  Still, something has shaken us out of our stupor, certainly.  All this notwithstanding, I am left troubled, unsatisfied, and uneasy by the response to this rape.  Here are some reasons why:
 
I.  We have to realize that there is a distinction between wanting retribution for an act of violence against a woman, and actually believing that women are equal to men and deserve to be treated as such.  There have been reports of women being molested at the protests by men protesting beside them.  It’s clear from this that for many of the men protesting and asking for stringent punishments for rape, it is not so much that a woman has been denied basic respect and dignity, but that a woman has been disrespected and dishonoured.  Whereas the former ideas are about the fundamental right of a human being to expect that she shall not be violated, the latter concepts involve notions of society’s and family’s ownership of a woman’s body that can be violated under some circumstances and not others.
Of the thousands of men and women who protested, a sizeable number of them – both men and women – will continue to live out and perpetuate unequal social norms in their daily lives: at weddings, they will expect the bride’s family to acquiesce to their material demands in the form of wedding arrangements and dowries; they will pressure their wives and daughters-in-law to abort female fetuses and will physically and/or psychologically abuse them for giving birth to girls; they will impose restrictions of dress, movement, speech, and action on the women in their families; they will presume that the first priority of a woman is as a daughter, a sister, a wife, and a mother, and that her priorities to herself as a woman are negligible if not non-existent. 
The loudest voices at the protest have come from those demanding dire judicial consequences for rapists, but unless our national dialogue stays focussed on combatting the underlying misogyny of our culture and the inequities of patriarchy, it will not mean much change for the average Indian woman.
 
II.  Why has this rape caused outrage, and not others?  We have heard the dreadful statistics of rape in India: estimates are that several hundreds of thousands of rapes occur each year in India, and forget convictions, a scant few are even reported by the victims for fear of persecution and dishonour.  This rape was brutal and horrific, no doubt.  But even as protestors vented their outrage at this rape, women and members of alternative gender and sexual orientations continue to be victims of sexual assault throughout the country.  This rape, in many ways, fits conveniently into our pre-programmed notions of violation and abuse: urban, educated, middle-class women assaulted by lower-class, mostly-uneducated men.  For many of us who have a voice in India – we members of the urban middle- and upper-classes, the educated – violence against women is something that is perpetuated by men at the margins: habitually drunk men in the slums of India’s cities who beat their wives as a matter of course, or the rural uneducated who think that over-lordship over women is their birth-right.  While these men may certainly be part of the demographic, what we ignore in making these presumptions is how much violence and abuse of women occurs in middle-class urban homes; how much sexual violence is used as a tool of intimidation and control by upper-caste men over dalit women, by the police and the armed-forces over the citizens they are entrusted to protect; and we are totally blind to the abuse of transgender men and women (hijras/kothis).  Even as the protests continue, there are claims being made that this is a problem that we are being subject to from some alien, outside sources, or because we have forgotten our Indian traditional values; there continues to be a refusal to accept that rape, sexual violence, victim-blaming, and the marginalization of women are endemic to our culture, and that we must all bear the burden of this, and the responsibility to fundamentally change it.
 
III.  Violence only perpetuates violence, it does not resolve it.  Violence is useful as a weapon of provocation; it is woefully inadequate as a tool of justice.  When we demand that violence be punished by death or with equal brutality, we tacitly affirm that violence is a legitimate way to resolve our problems.  The death-penalty, police-brutality, torture, rape, psychological and verbal abuse, and class-, caste-, and sex-based subjugation are all part of the same continuum of violence.  The problem here is not that rapists are dealt with too leniently, or are not punished harshly enough.  The problem at the heart of the issue is the culture of violence, in which violence is acceptable social tender.  The only way to extricate ourselves from this web of abuse (we are all both victims and perpetrators in this), is to remove violence from the equation. 
 
In the end, all I can say is that our energies are better spent struggling against violence and oppression (based on class, caste, religion, sex, or skin colour) at every level, than to insist that rapists be hanged and women be protected.  This is not a problem that will go away through the judicial or criminal- “justice” system, or by telling women how to ensure that they are not raped.  No.  This is more basic than that.  It starts with how we raise our sons and daughters, and with our acceptance of oppression and violence as inviolable truths of life.

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Adult Behaviour


Tarek Masoud's recent Slate article just got my goat.   It had the sensationalist title, Why Can't Muslims Remain Calm? (which was prudently changed to Is This the Clash of Civilizations?) that we now come to   expect from most news media, where the glibly used identity-marker of "Muslims" covers a staggering 1.6 billion people, and the desired (but sadly unattained) emotional state for said billions is an opiated state of "calm".  The subheading and most of the article speaks of how the United States is being an "adult" in this whole situation -- how they are responding to "Muslim Rage" and senseless mob violence with an even-toned and very reasonable call for afore-mentioned calm.  This elicited from me a sardonic smile, a mirthless chortle.

Michael Muhammad Knight hits the nail on the head when he writes of the kind of violence being exported from the United States abroad, in his response to recent events: "[The anti-Islam movie] is simply the playground bully calling your mother a slut after already breaking your jaw, and then wondering why you can’t take a joke."But on the face of it, the United States response does seem to be a very grown-up one -- sensible press releases and press conferences that speak of sorrow at loss, condemnation of a "reprehensible" video, defense of free speech -- the very epitome of good sense...on the face of it.

Here's the thing to not lose sight of, though.  The United States is a two-headed beast -- both the good cop and the bad cop. Official press-releases and statements from the United States are all markedly elegant and restrained, not allowing for more than a creased brow and a sombre tone.  And yet, this creature coexists with a United States that routinely kills civilians through drone attacks (read as "collateral damage"), places its own citizens on "kill-lists", indefinitely detains people whose only crime is being born in the wrong country and being at the wrong place at the wrong time, and props up oppressive regimes all over the world.  

The violence we're seeing in response to the video, and the deaths that have resulted are tragic and horrifying.  That is a given.  But to say that "the United States is the only one willing to act like an adult" in all this is tantamount to commenting on the restraint of Don Corleone and the elegant cut of his suit, while paying no heed to the bloody horse-head under the sheets. 




Thursday, August 04, 2011

Calling a spade a spade

I was listening to an older podcast of WNY's Radiolab (an excellent show, BTW, that I highly recommend) yesterday that featured a segment about how about 16 million men in the world today can claim direct descent from Genghis Khan.  To really get a sense of how crazy that number is, it was noted on the show that statistically speaking, a man who lived around the time of Genghis Khan could expect to have about 800 male descendants today.  That's 800 vs. 16 million.  The sheer disparity here boggles the mind.  
But there was something else about that segment that struck me.  Something about the tone of the show that struck me as terribly dissonant.  Throughout the segment, the hosts and the scientists talked about this discovery as "thrilling"; that basically, Genghis Khan is probably the most successful biological father in human history.  The show featured people who enthusiastically talked about wanting to know if they could trace their descent to Genghis Khan; and even a restaurant in England that had a drawing in which the winners could be tested for that characteristic Y-chromosome (it costs around $300 to do).  There was something markedly celebratory about the whole thing, and this disturbed me.  
Yes, scientifically speaking, I found the whole thing fascinating.  But what was with all this hip! hip! hurrah!-ing of Genghis Khan's loins?  Because, really, however you want to spin this, what we're saying here is that Genghis Khan managed to rape more women than any other man we know of.  Rape. That's the word.  And that's the word that was missing from this conversation.  
This got me curious.  I wondered if this avoidance of the reality of what this data meant was more wide-spread.  Turns out that this celebratory tone is pretty much what's out there.  A google search of 'Genghis Khan' and 'genes' popped up tons of reportage on Genghis Khan and his 16 million descendants -- about half a million hits, actually.  And most of them were in same vein as the Radiolab segment.  I next plugged in 'Genghis Khan', 'genes' and the added criterion of 'rape' and I got close to half the number of hits than the previous search.  And this is when things got really disturbing.  
Here were articles that acknowledged the "rape and pillage" of the Mongol hordes, that acknowledge that access to women was part of the "spoils of war".  But the acknowledgement of these facts did not prevent these articles from lionizing Genghis Khan for his sexual conquests.  Many of these articles were from popular mainstream news media. Like the Guardian article with the headline:  We owe it all to Superstud Genshis Khan, which talks about how Genghis Khan "claimed" women during his "merciless conquest", but then follows it up with talk of Khan's " enthusiastic mating habits"; or this priceless headline from the The Daily Mail: Genghis Khan: The Daddy of all Lovers. Or this from The Times: Genghis Super-Y -- the gene for a true alpha male.  National Geographic does not disappoint either: Genghis Khan a Prolific Lover, DNA Data Implies.  
I found only a few science blogs that tackled this story with purely scientific interest and did not comment, either positively or negatively, about Genghis Khan's sexual appetite.  And only a few that called Genghis Khan a rapist (but the comment threads to these posts made me want to curl up in a ball and disappear).  
When we look at the vast majority of the stories out there, these are not conversations about the science of tracking the Y-chromosome, or articles that talk about rape as evolutionarily adaptive behaviour.  These discussions talk about how amazing it is that one man is ancestor to so many millions; yes, it's rape at a grand scale, but come on! the dude was a "superstud", an "alpha-male", a "prolific lover"! 
Forgive me if I'm not so thrilled.  


[Of related interest: Chauvinism in reporting. ]    

Saturday, April 16, 2011

Men in suits

A couple of weeks ago I watched (with a smirk, I'll admit) CNN's Wolf Blitzer reveal to his presumedly shocked audience that Qaddafi's youngest sons had been interning with a corporation in the United States till very recently.  Blitzer, in his characteristically sleep-inducing cadence, informed us that Khamis Qaddafi had been a high-level intern with AECOM, an engineering firm.  The central idea that was being sold as a shocking revelation was that a man associated with such brutality (Khamis Qaddafi heads the feared Khamis Brigade, an elite unit of the Libyan armed forces) had till recently been hobnobbing with the corporate elite in the United States.
Though I found this disbelief to be utterly bizarre, I was glad this story was receiving some reportage.  For a while now, folks in the United States have been given to believe that the bad-guys, the much talked-about "enemies of freedom", are men in flowing robes, head scarves or turbans, sporting decidedly un-fashionable beards; men who think up their diabolical plans in desert caves, and execute them with the words "Allah hu akbar" [God is great]!  All of this played quite well into the 'us-vs.-them' narrative of Euro-American governments, in which the 'us' were the freedom-loving people of the West, and the 'them' were the afore-mentioned troglodytes.
But since January, the face of "evil" has been dramatically altered in current mainstream reportage.  And I dearly hope that those in America watching the recent events of the Middle East have taken note of this.  It started quietly enough with President Ben Ali of Tunisia being ousted; but by all accounts, Ben Ali was the mildest of the lot and left without too much fuss.  Egypt came next, and with Hosni Mubarak, the image of a stoic, clean-shaven man with brilliantined hair and an immaculately tailored suit entered the Euro-American public consciousness.  But the image that perhaps chilled us to the bone was that which followed in Libya.  In Saif al-Islam Qaddafi's first appearance on television in the early days of the troubles in Libya, he is cool and detached.  His rimless glasses, his smart tie and crisp suit add a bureaucratic detachment to the scene as he casually threatens that blood will flow in the streets of Libya. And now we have rumblings in Syria and what promises to be a brutal suppression of dissent at the hands of President Bashar al-Assad, another man in a suit.
Brutality, tyranny and suppression meted out by men who would look quite at home in corporate boardrooms and martini lounges has been a reality the world over for a while, but we're seeing it on full view after a long time.  These men, often educated at elite Western academic institutions, who live lavish life-styles complete with yachts and parties on Greek islets, cannot so easily be relegated to an Other-ness, to a world-view far removed from our own experiences.  These men are visibly modern. Their excesses and their repression cannot be dismissed as the products of some obscure alchemical processes.  They represent regimes that have long been political and economic allies of Euro-America.  And they are what they are not in spite of these alliances, but because of them.  I hope that these images and the accompanying coverage by the mainstream media will add complexity and nuance to a picture that has been painted for too long in primary colours. 

Monday, April 11, 2011

An update

Several weeks ago I posted about how responsible the Egyptian military had been while the Revolution of Tehrir Square played out.  Well, over the past couple of weeks we have been witnessing a very different, and at times diametrically opposite, face of the Egyptian military.
Mubarak has been ousted, but he has been replaced by a military regime.  Though the military government purports to be merely transitional, the Egyptian people have quite naturally been less than sanguine about the regime and the intentions of its constituent members.  And so, to ensure that this transitional government does not forget its mandate, crowds of protestors have continued to gather every Friday at Tahrir Square.  And as these protests continue with unabated intensity, reports have been pouring in of dissidents being imprisoned and tortured, journalists being obstructed and suppressed, and just today, we hear news of an Egyptian blogger being sentenced to prison by a military court.
So I fear that I spoke too soon, and was too readily wooed by the men in khaki.  The Egyptian military's supposedly-transitional government is now, by all accounts, a junta.
Vive le revolucion...

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Mixed signals?

A few days ago, we were confronted with two pieces of news that were seemingly at odds with each other.  First, we heard that the Arab League had endorsed the idea of a no-fly zone over Libya.  Second, we heard that many Gulf States (Saudi Arabia and the UAE included) were sending troops to Bahrain to help the ruling family put down civilian protests. My first reaction to this was to think that surely we had here two incompatible stances. On the one hand, the Arab League was acquiescing to foreign intervention to aid rebels in their bid to oust the leader of an Arab state; and on the other hand, they were actively providing military support to an Arab regime to quash unarmed rebellion within its territory.  Mixed messages?
On further reflection, I realized that there was a huge difference in the way these countries perceived Libya and its leadership (for want of a better term), and the way they perceived Bahrain and its ruling family.  And the word 'family' is one of the keys to this conundrum.
Libya is certainly like the Gulf States in that its politics and society is shaped in many ways (perhaps even dominated) by issues of clan/tribe membership, and Qaddafi's loyalties to his al-Qaddafa tribe speak to this matter.  However, the origins and the sources of Qaddafi's power are markedly different.  A colonel in the army of Libya's King Irdis, Qaddafi staged a successful coup in 1969, abolished monarchy and established a republic. His power is based on an anti-monarchical stance, and is entirely contemporary in origin.
Contrasted to this are the ruling families of the Gulf States.  The ruling families in Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain and the various city-states of the United Arab Emirates trace their power to authority that has been inherited, and not usurped.  Though the domination of such families as al-Saud, al-Nahyan, and  al-Khalifa can be traced back only a few generations, these families most likely see their rule as an entitlement, rather than a consequence of various fairly-recent geo-political forces (such as colonialism, the discovery of oil and various bargains made with the religious elite).  In this view, while the ouster of the upstart Qaddafi is a worthy cause, the dethroning of the al-Khalifa family is not at all an option.  The power vested in the al-Khalifa family is too much like the power they possess.  Theirs is power taken for granted as a consequence of their birth; Qaddafi's power comes from its seizure, and can therefore be seized away from him just as surely.
The presence of a large Shia population ruled by a Sunni ruling family in many of these Gulf States has also a role to play in this drama. But that may have to be the topic of another post.

Tuesday, March 01, 2011

The world changed ever so slightly

I was listening to NPR the other day, and the panel of commentators and experts were discussing the labour and union-related protests in Wisconsin.  And as the discussion wound down, one of the panelists said something that gave me pause.  She said that the intensity of the protests in Wisconsin may not let up as soon as one might imagine, and that some of that endurance and resilience could be a direct result of the events in Egypt.  That the power of the masses was tested and proven half a world away in Egypt, and the people in Wisconsin drew strength from this.


Had I heard the mainstream media in America ever speak of events in the Middle East in such terms before?  Arabs had flexed their democratic muscle and how refreshingly odd it was to hear of Americans drawing inspiration from this.  I had become so accustomed to hearing of freedom and democracy as America's primary exports to the world.  But here the current of ideas and ideologies seemed to have changed direction in a way that I would not have predicted as possible a mere month ago.


Perhaps this is a temporary reversal of roles, and perhaps American presumptions about the rest of the world shall in the long term remain unaltered.  But the optimist in me would like to believe that something has changed for good, if ever so slightly.  For once, our gaze in America looks farther away than the limits of red, white and blue.  For once, there is an acknowledgement that the freedom of another people is not being won at the end of American gun-barrels; that the rage of a mass of bearded men is a just rage; that veiled women are women with will and women with voices that can and are heard; and that we who have been lulled into complacence by the warm and fuzzy ideal of 'inalienable rights' have been awakened from our stupor by the voices of men and women we presumed to be mute.


How can we go back to the way we were after all this?