We cringe when we hear convict Mukesh Singh blaming the girl codenamed Nirbhaya for her gang rape and murder.

Under Indian law, we had to codename her Nirbhaya because it makes us wince to think she had a real name just like us. Her parents, though, are saying on record that they are fine with her name being used.

We must squirm when we hear 44 per cent Indian college students “agree” that women have no choice but to accept a certain amount of violence. This survey was carried out across 11 states by the Children’s Movement for Civic Awareness, a Bangalore-based non-profit.

The statistic tells us Singh and his friends are not exceptions — the “face of evil” is all around us, we just live in denial and don’t see them. So the Delhi Police, which could not protect Nirbhaya in the first place, filed an FIR to get a legal restraining order on the documentary India’s Daughter, in which Singh was interviewed.

The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting also issued an advisory to all television channels not to broadcast it.

Like an ostrich with its head in the sand, we believe the evil will go away, if we do not see it.

The great churn

“When being raped, she shouldn’t fight back,” says Singh in the documentary to filmmaker Leslee Udwin, a rape survivor. The film premiered on BBC Four earlier this week, but Indian viewers may not be able to watch it anytime soon. “She should just be silent and allow the rape,” continues Singh, who was driving the bus in which Nirbhaya was fatally assaulted, along with her male friend, by four of his friends. “Then they’d have dropped her off after ‘doing her’, and only hit the boy.”

What’s striking is not Singh’s lack of remorse: criminals will find a way to justify themselves. What’s striking is how a rapist’s view is so common in the rest of society. Singh sounds just like the godman Asaram Bapu, who had once said that the girl should have begged her rapists for mercy.

Singh’s lawyer ML Sharma sums up the cultural context. “We have the best culture,” he tells Udwin. “In our culture, there is no place for a woman.” Another defence lawyer AP Singh had earlier claimed that he would set his daughter or sister on fire if they engaged in “pre-marital activities”.

The worst mistake we can make as a society is to dismiss these views as cringe-worthy aberrations that should not be aired. These men are more than just demented criminals and their craven defenders; they are creations of a large culture of sexism that has been supported by millions of religious conservatives and an agrarian economy that values strong male shoulders over feminine ones.

But now a social and economic churn is defying the old gender balance in India. As the country moves from an agrarian to a serviceoriented economy, where women are better workers than men, the conservative male backlash is fierce. What makes it tougher for India — than, say, China — is that we did not really experience the intermediary manufacturing phase, which could have made the change in labour and gender relations less abrupt.

At less than a quarter of the workforce, India still has among the lowest representation of women workers anywhere in the world. But urban women’s income more than doubled from 2000 to 2011, though the average Indian woman still earns less than two-thirds of her male counterpart. India has nearly 350 million women below the age of 35, and as many as 100 million could move to cities and towns in the next two decades. Greater opportunity for financial independence in the city is the biggest tool that Indian women have in their fight against traditional mindsets and the evil they produce. But to challenge these ills, we must first be ready to see it, without recoiling and burying our heads in the sand.

The relapse

The unprecedented street protests of December 2012 happened because we refused to bury our heads for once. At least for a few weeks, we were ready to stop flinching and start raging.

We were ready to look evil in the eye. We were ready to challenge it, no matter how much discomfort it caused us.

On the streets and in the media, we saw discourse that we had not seen before: on marital rape and child abuse, on police apathy and judicial delays, on religious diktats and sexual harassment at the workplace.

For those few weeks, it seemed that one 23-year-old girl had woken up a sleeping giant, which had become oblivious to the rot within.

For those few weeks, it seemed, a young, restless India would rewrite the rules of the game.

But two years down the line, one has to agree with Nirbhaya’s parents when they say that nothing has changed. The police and the I&B Ministry’s reaction to India’s Daughter confirmed that we have officially relapsed into a coma on gender justice.

(Sambuddha Mitra Mustafi is the founder of The Political Indian)

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