As I write this, there are protests going on all over Delhi, and in other parts of the country,

against the gang-rape of a young woman on a moving bus a few days ago in the city. People are
out there in large numbers young, old, male, female, rich, poor and theyre angry. They want
the rapists to be caught, they want them to be taught a lesson, many are suggesting they should
be hanged, or castrated, but also that the State should act, bring in effective laws, fast track
courts, police procedures and more. Not since the Mathura rape case have there been such
widespread protests. The difference is that then, it was mainly womens groups who were
protesting; todays protests are more diverse. Sometimes, tragically, it takes a case like this to
awaken public consciousness, to make people realise that rape and sexual assault are not merely
womens issues, theyre a symbol of the deep-seated violence that women and other
marginalised people experience every day in our society.
At a time when every politician, no matter what colour, is crying foul, every judge and lawyer, no
matter what their loyalties, is joining the chorus, every policeperson, no matter from where, is
adding his/her voice, it is worth remembering some key things. First, more than 90 per cent of
rapes are committed by people known to the victim/survivor, a staggering number of rapists are
family members. When we demand the death penalty, do we mean therefore that we should kill
large numbers of uncles, fathers, brothers, husbands, neighbours? How many of us would even
report cases of rape then? What were seeing now the slow, painful increase in even reports
being filed will all disappear. Second, the death penalty has never been a deterrent against
anything where, for example, is the evidence that death penalties have reduced the incidence of
murders? Quite apart from the fact that the State should never be given the right to take life,
there is an argument to be made that imposing the death penalty will further reduce the rate of
conviction, as no judge will award it.
Then, and this is something that womens groups grasped long ago: a large number of rapes are
committed in custody, many of these by the police. Mathura was raped by two policemen,
Rameezabee was raped inside a police station by police personnel, Suman Rani was raped by
policemen. There are countless other cases: will we hang all police rapists? Put together, thats a
lot of people to hang.
Police action is, in fact, one of the demands. Yet, the polices record, whether in recording cases
or in conducting investigations, is nothing to write home about. On a recent television show, a
police officer put his finger on it when he said: how can we expect that police personnel, who are,
after all, made of the same stuff as the men who gang-raped the young woman last week, to
suddenly and miraculously behave differently? I was reminded of a study done by a local
newsmagazine not so long ago of the attitudes of high ranking police officers in Delhi about rape.
Roughly 90 per cent of them felt the woman deserved it, that she asked for it, that she should not
have been out alone, or should not have been dressed in a particular fashion. Strange that
womens bodies should invite such reactions could it be that the problem is in the eye of the
beholder? Why, for example, does it seem to be more legitimate for women to be out during
daylight hours, but not at night?
Lawyers and judges too have joined the protests and this is all to the good for the more diverse
the protests, the more impact they will have. But its lawyers who use every ruse in the book to
allow rapists to get away, judges who make concessions because the rapists are young men who
have their whole lives in front of them and so on. Do womens lives not have a value then?
And then there are our politicians. Perhaps we need to ask how many politicians have rape cases,
or allegations of rape pending against them. Perhaps we need to ask why no one is asking this

question: that here you have an elected politician, your next prime ministerial candidate,
someone under whose rule Muslim women in Gujarat were not only subjected to horrendous
rape but also to equally dreadful violence. How can we, how can the media, how can journalists
all of whom are lauding the success of this politician, how can they not raise, and particularly
at this time, the question of his sanctioning, encouraging the use of rape as a weapon of war? And
more, we need to ask: if the politicians are indeed serious about this issue, why are they not out
there with the protestors? When Anna Hazare was fasting, there wasnt a day that went by when
one or other politician did not go to see him. Where are they now?
Rape happens everywhere: it happens inside homes, in families, in neighbourhoods, in police
stations, in towns and cities, in villages, and its incidence increases, as is happening in India, as
society goes through change, as womens roles begin to change, as economies slow down and the
slice of the pie becomes smaller and it is connected to all these things. Just as it is integrally
and fundamentally connected to the disregard, and indeed the hatred, for females that is so
evident in the killing of female foetuses. For so widespread a crime, band aid solutions are not the
answer.
Protest is important, it shakes the conscience of society, it brings people close to change, it makes
them feel part of the change. And there is a good chance that the current wave of protests will
lead to at least some results perhaps even just fast track courts. But perspective is also
important: we need to ask ourselves: if it had been the army in Manipur or Kashmir who had
been the rapists, would we have protested in quite the same way? Very likely not, for there
nationalism enters the picture. Remember Kunan Posphpora in the late nineties when the
Rajasthan Rifles raped over 30 women? Even our liberal journalists found it difficult to credit
that this could have happened, that the army could have been capable of this, and yet, the people
of Kunan Poshpora know. Even today, women from this area find it difficult to marry stigma
has a long life. Would we have been as angry if the rape had taken place in a small town near
Delhi and the victim had been Dalit? Remember Khairlanji? Why did that rape, of a mother and
her daughter, gruesome, violent, heinous, and their subsequent murder not touch our
consciences in quite the same way.
It is important to raise our collective voice against rape. But rape is not something that occurs by
itself. It is part of the continuing and embedded violence in society that targets women on a daily
basis. Lets raise our voices against such violence and lets ask ourselves how we, in our daily
actions, in our thoughts, contribute to this, rather than assume that the solution lies with
someone else. Lets ask ourselves how we, our society, we as people, create and sustain the
mindset that leads to rape, how we make our men so violent, how we insult our women so
regularly, lets ask ourselves how privilege creates violence.
It is important we raise our collective voice for women, but lets raise it for all women, lets raise
it so that no woman, no matter that she be poor, rich, urban, rural, Dalit, Muslim, Hindu, or
whatever, ever, in the future, has to face sexual violence, and no man assumes that because of the
system and peoples mindsets, he can simply get away with it. And lets raise it also for men, for
transgenders, for the poor all those who become targets of violence. Lets not forget that the
young rape survivor in Delhi was accompanied by a friend who too was subjected to violence and
nearly killed. Lets talk about him too.
(Urvashi Butalia is a feminist writer and founder of Zubaan, an independent non-profit
publishing house.)
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