The construction of the female body as a battleground for bigoted masculinity, a holy land that has to be guarded or invaded, depending on the religious identity of the woman, is the direct consequence of an increasingly polarised society. Under a hyper-masculine Hindutva ruling class, It should come as no surprise that such an ideology will resort to regressive patriarchal norms of propriety and property.
The sexuality of women has always been the fulcrum around which the forces of power in a society are balanced. Any shift in the fulcrum and the delicate balance of patriarchal power tips. This fulcrum is held firmly in place by the socially constructed ideas of decency, duty and other words which seem to fall under the purview of morality but are in fact red herrings for patriarchal modes of control.
The communally-motivated violence unleashed against women during riots and massacres, such as the Partition, Gujarat Violence 2002, Surat and Bombay riots all shows a pattern of misogyny fuelled by fanaticism fanned by zealots. Mass gang rapes, carving religious symbols and the names of rapists on the genital areas of victims and more all point towards how the social construction of women as the property of one man, defiled and invaded by another man in a communally coloured environment uses rape and sexual violence as an instrument of fascist terror.
By fashioning the feminine as divine, women become the most accessible cultural-religious representatives of their communities. Women from marginalised communities become goddesses of an enemy religion or the ‘Other’ community. A deity within reach that can be defiled, to be taken as an attack on the whole of her community.
The Clubhouse discussion on Muslim women that was leaked on Twitter in January 2022, compares the rape of Muslim women to the demolition of the Babri Masjid, not once but seven times for each violation of the woman.
In the changing topography of communally charged politics today, the construction of women’s bodies as holy sites has a far graver consequence. This gives the frenzied, blood-seeking Hindutva mobs a tangible site to target, i.e the bodies of Muslim women.
The intangible ideas of what is sacrosanct have now been rendered a physical form of flesh that can be cut into. The inviolable ideas of religion have been allocated to the bodies of Muslim women that can now be violated to exact revenge.
By raising fortifications around female bodies, fascism builds upon patriarchy to take control of the bodies of marginalised women, in essence, a sacrilege against the ‘Other’ community. It is the essential step towards the creation of a fascist state.
The idea of rape as a tool of communal violence is espoused by the Hindutva ideologue V.D Savarkar in his book, Six Epochs of Indian History. Such texts that go on to form the ideological basis of the Sangh Parivar, create a dogma rooted in misogyny, subjugation and control over the sexual agency of women as the linchpin to their politics.
The bodies of Muslim women, are to be raped, mutilated and burnt. They become sites of carnage for the aggressive masculine proclivity for domination. The bodies of Hindu women are to be protected and guarded, against desecration by the men of other communities. The bodies of Hindu women also become sites of chauvinism for the aggressive masculine proclivity for domination. The word desecration has to be noted for its connotation that the bodies of Hindu women are sacred and holy; her body becomes the sanctum sanctorum, to be kept under the strictest watch, lest it is profaned.
The spate of violence against women, by stalkers, former partners and spurned suitors, indicates the inability of men to accept rejection, a well-noted phenomenon of toxic and aggressive masculinity; these sentiments must be viewed in tandem with the hyper-masculine Hindutva ideology, which by placing women on a divine pedestal, strips them of their humanity. By fashioning the feminine as divine, women become the most accessible cultural-religious representatives of their communities.
Women from marginalised communities become goddesses of an enemy religion or the ‘Other’ community. A deity within reach that can be defiled, is to be taken as an attack on the whole of her community.
Women as tangible targets for communally motivated crime paradoxically invite more patriarchal control. The role of the father, brother and son is the dutiful protector and the sister, daughter or mother is the subservient woman who is weak, and through that quality, a good woman. The Hindutva code on women revolves around a patriarchal idea of ‘protection’, a justification of the restriction on freedom explained away by the ‘threat of westernisation’ or the Other (minorities). In this way, an acutely masculine idea of women empowerment comes to the fore, which emphasises the role of women in relation to the larger Hindutva project, as “our Hindu sister” and seeks sympathy on the basis of the victim being a “good Hindu girl” and not a woman who was brutally violated.
Hindu festivals like Rakshabandhan and Bhai Dooj, further help in engineering a society that views women in relation to men who have taken up the duty of protecting them. This protection is only afforded to women who were construed as worthy of it. The grey and murky laws that govern who is worthy and who is not, in itself a patriarchal creation that relegates some women to brotherly and fatherly protection, and others to ‘disrepute’ and subjected to culturally sanctioned, socially endorsed and judicially ignored violence.
The idea of an international repository of public opinion, or rather a spasmodic outrage, seems good on paper. On-screen, however, Twitter has grown to house hatred spouted out of anonymous accounts, propagated by verified ones.
Hidden behind little circles of angry gods, and shielded by the anonymity offered by firewalls, the internet trolls, armed with incendiary ammunition, stand alert for anything that can be used for anti-minority propaganda.
In response to my tweet about the incident in Miranda House, the University of Delhi, wherein men could be seen scaling the walls and gates of the women’s college, with students alleging sexual harassment, cat-calling, nonconsensual filming and more, a debate began on Twitter with islamophobic slurs thrown at the men clinging to the walls of Miranda House. From calling them Jihadists to ‘puncture putr’ a derogatory and plainly classist slur for Muslims, among other slurs. How they could have ascertained the religious identity of the men from the video, when the Delhi Police has not yet been able to identify the culprits, is left to the imagination of the reader.
Crimes that ‘trend’ on Twitter, are usually ones of explicit violence, injustice and gore. The macabre nature of a suicide or murder ‘trending’ seems to have no effect on the vile comments of communal hatred. One of the latest such cases was that of a BDS student from Meerut who committed suicide after being harassed by a male student. While right-wing media houses have dismissed the relevance of the identities of the victim and the accused, who in this case happen to be Muslim and Hindu respectively, the same media houses are quick to publish ‘love jihad’ cases when the identities are reversed. The complexities of crimes against women, without an analysis of their class, caste, religion and gender context are erroneous and votaries of Hindutva are quick to capitalise on these for their political projects.
The deaths of Ankita, among other alleged cases of ‘love jihad’, were used by the right wing with vocabulary that incites communal hatred more than seeking justice for the victims of a primarily gendered crime. The construction of the victim’s identity as a Hindu (and by extension a good Hindu, which is different from ‘Hindu traitors’ like so many activists and writers who have been targeted by the right-wing) over that of a woman, creates a simplistic argument – ‘Hindus under attack from evil Muslims rather than exploring the complex nature of violence against women.
This phenomenon combines a paradoxical mixture of two attitudes towards women, that at once seem antithetical; misogyny and hatred for women to the extent that it calls for violence and mass gang rapes and the reverence and deification of women. Of which women, and why these particular women form the basis of this phenomenon.
Manusmriti-derived morals that portray Hindu women as cattle that need to be guarded and as fields that need to be fenced, while communally motivated hatred for Muslim women who have to be violated as representatives of the Other community may offer an explanation for the co-existence of deification of some women and the vilification of other women.
Sobhana, a student at Miranda House, University of Delhi, is an aspiring freelance writer focusing on politics, gender, caste, class and environmentalism.
