On August 9, 2024, a female doctor at R.G. Kar Medical College, Kolkata, was brutally raped and murdered in a seminar room on the fourth floor, where she had gone to rest during her night shift. After persistent nation-wide protests, the West Bengal government released a new set of policies to address workplace safety for women. These include assigning female volunteers for night duty, creating CCTV-monitored safe zones, and providing separate rest areas with washrooms for women. A mix of male and female guards will be employed at these institutions, with police officers managing over-all security. Night police patrols will be conducted, and all personnel must carry ID cards. Women’s working hours, especially for female doctors, will be capped at 12 hours, with efforts to minimize night shifts. Breathalyzer tests will be implemented in hospitals. A mobile app with alarm devices for women to contact local police in emergencies will also be developed, and the use of helplines during crises will be promoted. The Union Government has adimed at upgrading pgradation of utions rity personnel of hospitals, opted a similar security-centric approach, focusing on upgrading hospital security personnel, and auditing rooms in medical institutions to ensure they are not misused.
What drives governmental responses is the assumption that women need to be protected from the sexual violence of men. The public sphere of work is configured as a male territory that women have to navigate with caution. In order to ensure a safe navigation, the state starts managing women’s movement so that no male interference is possible. Heightened security is installed so that women remain cocooned in a safe zone, free from the lechery of men. Women’s working hours are curtailed to prevent them from being out late at night, a time perceived as belonging to men. Women are asked to call the police during emergencies, so that the might of the state can protect them from dangerous men. But a question arises: why do men behave this way in the first place? Why do men want to rape women?
The discourse of security/safety never answers the question. Safety means being free from certain harms or dangers. In the case of sexual violence, what are these dangers? According to the knee-jerk response of the authorities, the dangers can be simply identified with the depravity of individual culprits and the sexual brutalization of women’s bodies. Noting the dominance of violent sexual imageries, Sagrika Rajora and Aditya Krishan write: “This reinforces the notion of rape being ‘rough or violent sex’ instead of ‘violence using sex’, making the affair more about sex than violence, and hence redirecting the protective and preventive measures in the wrong direction”. Public attention focuses on the passivity of the female body in the face of unexplained male predatoriness. Any discussion of sexual violence remains at the level of crude description: women are raped by men.
Questions about the causal roots of rapes are not asked. This means that what is immediately present before the eyes transforms into an unchallengeable fact. Men become “natural” sexual predators, as women become inherently weak creatures. This gendered representation is evident in the surge of porn searches for videos involving the murdered Kolkata doctor. Thus, Indian men actively sought to enjoy the sexual degradation of the dead woman, imagining themselves as the perpetrators of rape. What drives this pornographic masculinity is a discourse that presents men in their patriarchal state without enquiring into the historicity of such a social form. When left unquestioned, male sexual violence becomes reflective of an innate lust. Since this lust is supposed to denote an inevitable dimension of male sexuality, men growing up in a patriarchal society readily identify themselves with it.
The governmental emphasis on security doesn’t weaken patriarchal male identification. Rather, it solidifies male lust as an invisible force from which women have to guard themselves at all times. In the slew of policies announced by the West Bengal government, none addresses the reasons behind the male desire for rape. Instead, they individualize rape as an instance of immorality. Breathalyzer tests, for instance, give the impression that men rape because they lose their mental balance. Rape, consequently, becomes a deviation from the normal behavior of men. Any attempt to move beyond individualizing explanations is treated as an act of “politicization”. In the words of the Supreme Court: “Do not politicize the situation. Across the political spectrum, parties have to realize that law will take its course. We are ensuring that law does take its course after quick investigation”. What matters is the immediate goal of punishing the culprits through the technical efficiency of the law, instead of asking why such culprits emerge in the first place.
Since no emphasis is placed on the patriarchal structures that produce rapists, the law confines itself to the management of an unquestioned male lust. In order tackle a supposedly “natural” sexual urge, one needs a stronger power. This position is filled by the legal apparatus, which displays a higher capacity to centralize violence. In this way, a chain of omnipotence is unleashed: the omnipotence of men is answered by the omnipotence of the state, symbolized by the death penalty. The demand for death penalty shows that rape is not treated as a social relationship of power. Instead, it is regarded as an inherent capacity for sexual violence that man possess. The only way to curb this inherent violence is through the greater violence of the state.
In opposition to the chain of omnipotence, one needs to contextualize sexual violence as a structure of power rooted in the historical necessity of extracting unpaid material and emotional labor from women. Men rape women because it allows the perpetuation of a social relationship that benefits them. No internal male sexual urge is responsible for rapes. On the contrary, rape is very much an externalrelationship of subordination in which men are dependent upon the continuing passivity of women for the reproduction of patriarchy. All fantasies of omnipotence hide the historical relationships of (hierarchical) interdependency in which we exist. Since men are not omnipotent, there is no need for women to be given “protection” by the state. The state itself is constituted through the continuing obedience of the citizenry, instead of being a free-flowing authority.
Since no entity possess an intrinsic power on its own, women can’t be regarded as passive beings. They possess the capacity to combine into a political group that can divest men of their patriarchal privileges. The formation of this political group involves the much derided task of “politicization”. In the current context, politicization means the attempt by parties to instrumentalize rape cases for electoral mileage. But the meaning of politicization isn’t exhausted by this negative connotation. There is another method of politicization that highlights the social structures responsible for sexual violence. In the upscale Powai area of Mumbai, for instance, a group of Bahujan women from the demolished Jai Bhim Nagar slums tried explaining to a gathering of upper-class women how their homelessness is linked to an increased possibility of sexual violence. But these women were met with hostility from the rich residents and were asked to leave the protest site. This incident highlights a different form of politicization in which one moves beyond the immediacy of rape to uncover the underlying causes of sexual violence. In this case, working-class women foregrounded the economic dimensions of patriarchal crimes, showing how rape is embedded in a social structure of inequality. In order to defeat patriarchy, one needs such a strategy of politicization that links sexual violence to socio-historic relationships of power.
Yanis Iqbal is an undergraduate student of political science at Aligarh Muslim University, India. He is the author of the book Education in the Age of Neoliberal Dystopia. He has published more than 300 articles in different magazines and websites on imperialism, social movements, political theory, education, and cultural criticism.