Power

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30 highlights

• In late 1979, a Delhi-based magazine called Probe India ran an open letter written by four law professors objecting to the decision of the Supreme Court in Tukaram vs State of Maharashtra. The matter was widely known as the Mathura case, after the minor Adivasi girl who complained that she had been raped by two constables in a police station in rural Maharashtra.

• “There is a clear difference in law, and common sense, between ‘submission’ and ‘consent,’” the open letter stated, addressing Supreme Court Chief Justice YV Chandrachud. “Consent involves submission; but the converse is not necessarily true.”

• The fire lit by that letter swept through the lives of many Indian women. It changed them, and those who came after them. The movement it boosted gave Indians a vocabulary to describe sexism and misogyny that many of us still use.

• The open letter about Mathura’s case caused a new awakening among some of these women, who are now among India’s most renowned feminist activists.

• In the trial court, two years later, the constable argued that the intercourse occurred with consent: the absence of injury proved as much, didn’t it? The court not only ruled in favour of the constable, but declared Mathura to be a woman “of easy virtue.”

• On appeal, the High Court overturned the lower court’s judgement, taking many factors into consideration: Mathura had been summoned to the station in the dead of night; she had immediately communicated the fact of her rape to the crowd outside the station; she could not have successfully resisted her assailants. But the Supreme Court restored the verdict of the trial court.

• The new group invited people to come out in protest on 8 March, International Women’s Day. People came. Women marched through the streets of Old Delhi chanting: ‘Supreme Court, Supreme Court, against you where can we report?’

• Women’s organizations filed a petition in the Supreme Court seeking a review of the Mathura decision, but the bench threw it out: it held that the groups didn’t have the right to demand review.

• Meanwhile, the Progressive Organisation of Women, founded by activists associated with the Maoist uprising of the 1970s, highlighted two structural problems: the sexual division of labour and the culture that rationalized it.

• In left-wing groups, a sense of dissatisfaction grew, as women “were feeling suffocated within the political structures of these groups,” Patel remembered. “They were used only as tools for fundraising and had to obey the orders of male leaders.” Constrained by male hierarchies and preoccupations, they began to look for spaces outside, amongst each other.

• “There was a joke,” Patel said. “If you meet one activist, he is an institution; if five activists meet, they start a newsletter.” In the era of cyclostyle machines, revolutions were homegrown because there was no other choice. “People had to learn the technology because there were severe curbs on freedom of expression during the Emergency.”

• In 1980, the Forum Against the Oppression of Women staged a demonstration outside the police station in Turbhe, in Navi Mumbai. The women were protesting the complicity of the Turbhe police in the investigation of a rape of a construction worker. A number of them were booked for trespassing, and several newspapers carried headlines about ‘feminist hooligans beating up the police.’ Patel recalled being amused: “My weight was around 40kgs then!”

• None of this made consent and agency mainstream issues, even though “many of us did write and talk about it at that stage,”

• “It was difficult to break the patriarchal attitude of the newsroom. Editors never saw rape as an issue worth discussing. It would never figure in an editorial, for instance.”

• In Making A Difference, Phillipose wrote that for all the apprehensions that the Forum was “blindly ‘anti-men,’” there were many––including men––who saw its transformative potential.

• Through all this, the one unshakeable demand was the amendment of the rape laws, especially since reopening the Mathura case was off the table. At the 1980 conference in Mumbai, the legal concept of “burden of proof” became an important point of contention. Criminal cases require a complainant to prove that an offence has been committed. Many in the movement insisted that the rape law reverse this, and it became something of a fundamental demand. But trade union activists and Dalit activists resisted. Such a change would make it easy to trump up charges against men from marginalised communities, as well as activists and dissenters.

• In 1983, India’s rape laws were amended for the first time in a hundred years. The Criminal Law (Second Amendment) Act added a new category of offence for custodial rape, and rape by persons in authority. Finally, women had specific legal recourse against being assaulted in jails, remand homes, women’s and children’s institutions, and hospitals.

• The Evidence Act of 1872 was amended to say that in certain circumstances such as custodial rape, the survivor’s word on non-consent will be presumed to be true.

• All rape trials were required to be held in-camera. It became illegal to reveal a survivor’s identity.

• Feminists had agitated for the inclusion of rape “under economic duress” as a separate category, hoping that it would close the loophole that protected marital rape. This was not addressed. It remains a matter of serious contention

• “After the initial experience we realised that although everyone condemned rape, the reasons were poles apart,” Flavia Agnes wrote in 1993. “For the opposition it was an issue with which to embarrass the party in power as it questions the ‘law and order’ situation. For community organisations, it was a tool to increase their local support and mass base. For the liberals and moralists (the judiciary included), it was a question of ‘violation of her honour and chastity,’ the most prized possession of an Indian woman.

• What feminists in the 1970s and 1980s achieved was momentum. Never again would the question of women’s issues, gender violence, and inequality be out of the public eye.

• “You’re not supposed to know about the women’s movement as some glorious past,” the filmmaker and writer Paromita Vohra told me. Vohra’s work builds on the discussions that the movement began. “You look at it as the history of conversations, as a history of debates, as a history of making mistakes, admitting to those mistakes and learning from them. And a history of people making tangible their imagination of how they want the world to be.”

• The internet contributes to the feeling of diffusion. On issues like consent and intersectionality, it encourages nuance, but also oversimplification.

• Social media amplifies many marginal and original voices, but also the illusion of change.

• “When one major section of society understands the injustice it has to face and gets ready to change the social structure in a fundamental way, all the activities leading towards it constitute a movement. The movement may not lead towards progressive changes. It could be obscurantist. The essential element is that people participate in it in large numbers. They aspire for change.”

• I n The Struggle Against Violence, Chhaya Datar tried to address a fundamental question: What constitutes a movement?

• The feminist scholar Uma Chakravarti believes that there has never really been a strong enough articulation of the fact that all of Indian society is based on the bedrock of a caste-based patriarchy. “We have a legal system and society that thrives on impunity,” Chakravarti told me. “Caste power gives you impunity. Patriarchal power gives you impunity. The state gives you impunity. The academic community gives you impunity. Impunity is built into the way law operates in India. So, in that scenario, what will you do? You’ll have to challenge that.”

• The conversation around consent and state accountability that Indians carry forward today uses a language that became mainstream because of the women’s movement of the 1980s. More recent watersheds, from MeToo to Hathras, no longer call for amendments. The laws exist, but they are no longer enough. “Nobody has easy answers to this,” Sonavane says. “But the point is to ask better questions, ask complex questions, and involve more diverse voices to truly make the space inclusive.”

• “People may not have (a) coherent, comprehensive understanding of the changes they want,” Datar wrote at the end of her attempt to define a ‘movement’ in The Struggle Against Violence. “But leaders do develop a ‘world view’ about the future society. This ethos encourages people to experiment with cultural practices and helps new value systems to emerge. If this definition is accepted, one would say that the women’s movement has begun.”