INDIA-HUMAN RIGHTS: Crimes against Women on the Rise

By Neena Bhandari Reprint | | Print |

Neena Bhandari

NEW DELHI, Sep 16 1996 (IPS) - Just a year since the Fourth World Conference on Women in China, and there is an increase in sexual assaults on women in India, both in the rural and urban areas.

Every seven minutes a woman’s rights are violated somewhere in the country, according to official figures, and the reasons could be anything from a land dispute to class and caste conflicts or the settling of scores with their menfolk.

In the Indian capital Delhi alone there has been a 30 percent increase in the number of rape cases over the previous year. The level of violence is chilling.

Two months ago, 19 Dalits (the lowest caste and among the poorest) and Muslims were massacred in a village in Bhojpur district, in the eastern state of Bihar, by 60 men of an upper caste private army that has, in fact, been banned by the government. Among the victims were 11 women and five children.

The reason for the attack is not hard to find: there is a deep chasm between upper caste landowners and the landless. The “landlords” wanted to reassert their feudal tyranny over the poor who have started becoming more vocal and by attacking the most vulnerable, women and children, they sent a clear message that they would not allow anyone to disturb the social structure.

“Women were raped and hacked. The huts and small houses in which the victims took shelter were burnt down. The shrill cries failed to draw the attention of the police posted a kilometre and a half away because their food comes from the landlords’ houses,” an eyewitness told activists investigating the crime.

Even after 49 years of independence, the Bihar government has not been able to implement land reforms and set up systems to ensure minimum wages are paid to agricultural workers in the state. Bihar is in eastern India.

Land was again the reason for another attack on women, this time in the state of Rajasthan in northwestern India. In a village in Alwar district, some 150 km from Delhi, three Dalit women were tied to trees by upper caste men and mercilessly beaten because they wanted to take away their land.

Newspapers blandly reported yet another case in the state’s Ganganagar district where a villager Chandoori Bai was beaten with sticks and chilies inserted in her vagina by a member of the local government and his two accomplices because she had dared to ask him to return the land he had tricked her out of.

There are hundreds of such cases, but the state government’s, caught up in political wrangles and power struggles, are indifferent, while the police at times have been accused of abetting the crime by not taking action.

Because India’s rape laws are antiquated, in most cases the accused uses political influence to get his name deleted from the first information report. Even in the case of a four-year-old girl in Rajasthan who identified her rapist in two identification parades, the police arrested a young Dalit for the crime and let off the accused, a 53-year-old man who knew the local legislator.

The crimes are neither isolated nor restricted to a particular region. But in each case the state machinery has remained a silent spectator and those involved often have political links.

In July, a villager in Khandwa district, Madhya Pradesh state, was paraded naked by the deputy village chief, a woman. Her crime: suspicion that her husband was having an affair with the elected deputy’s daughter-in-law. Instead of punishing the husband, his wife had her clothes ripped off and she was beaten in public while a crowd of 300 people watched in terror.

Women are as culpable. A deputy chairperson of a Social Welfare Board who is also politically active, black-mailed a 20- year-old girl into a sexual relationship with her husband, threatening to expose the girl if she dared to report her.

In India’s caste-ridden and male-dominated society, gang-rape seems to have emerged as the way to punish a woman who tries to break social traditions.

A 26-year-old woman was sexually assaulted by 15 men belonging to her caste some 20 km from Roorkee, a university town in Uttar Pradesh, because she had eloped with a Muslim in a desperate bid to break free from years of abuse she had suffered at the hands of her husband, who had even tried to sell her three times.

The list of reports of rape and assault are endless. Yet it could take years for those accused to be brought to trial.

Few women have the courage to pursue a case of sexual assault. Having to prove sexual violence at every stage of the trial is not easy.

For the past several years, women’s groups in India have been campaigning for the amendment of rape laws, with very little success.

The campaign has, however, picked up in recent months over the gang-rape of Bhanwari, a village-level development worker, by upper-caste men four years ago in her village in Rajasthan.

While the accused were let off last year by the lower courts in the state, Bhanwari has appealed against the order in the Rajasthan High Court. Delhi-based activists behind the campaign say they are prepared to take the fight to the Supreme Court.

Because of the publicity around the case, Bhanwari may eventually win her case. Until then, for the women’s movement in India, demanding accountability at all levels — the administration, police, doctors and courts — is the only way.