Brinda Karat brings together her experience as the General Secretary of All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA) with several instances of communalised sexual violence against Muslim, Dalit, Adivasi, and Christian women across the Indian subcontinent. Karat in particular provides a detailed account of two instances of communal violence in BJP-ruled states – the pogrom in Godhra, Gujarat (2002) and the ethnic cleansing in Manipur (2023) – and the attendant sexual violence in both cases. Karat’s narrative draws on the stories of the victims that she collected during her visit as head of AIDWA to violence-torn areas.
Karat’s narrative reveals that all the cases had similar patterns. The first was that the raped women knew some of the men in the gang of rapists and/or it was the men from their neighbourhood or village who led the gang to the women’s homes or their hiding spots. Second, the police and the judicial system were complicit with the men perpetrating the violence – in letting the violence happen, it not being reported, complaints to police not being admitted, chargesheets not being filed, the court cases being dismissed, softer sentences being given out or the convicted men being let out on bail.
Third, there was complete violation of the basic principle of governance – political accountability of the State and Government. Instead, the administration abetted and colluded with the perpetrators who were mostly upper or dominant caste men from the majoritarian community. Fourth, in all the cases there was a normalization of the fact that rape was being deployed as a political instrument. Women from marginalized communities were treated as collateral damage. Otherwise politically invisibilized, these women would come into public view during communal flares. Curiously, the battered bodies of these women stood in contrast to the pristine image of Bharat Mata as a weapon-wielding goddess that the right-wing venerates.
Karat argues that it is the Hindutva – a supremacist ideology based on Manusmriti and Savarkar’s writings – that abets and sanctifies sexual violence against women. This ideology, especially in the BJP-ruled states, has spawned an ‘ecosystem’ that enables the execution of these violently misogynist ideas. What and who does this ecosystem comprise? According to Karat, the ecosystem includes the topmost political tier – the PM, the RSS Head, the Chief Ministers of states where the ruling party is in power, and its MLAs down to the community leaders, the police, lawyers, and judges. Not only do the political administration abuse the existing laws but has also passed new legislation such as UAPA that gives the state unremitting powers.
The basic details of the cases that Karat discusses are common knowledge as they were extensively reported in the media and generated a great deal of political commentary. The argument that the Hindu-right wing ideology or as Karat calls it ‘Manuvadi Majoritarianism’ perpetrates sexual violence is also well known. Karat’s book is primarily useful for the documentation for the ground view that it provides through the interviews the AIDWA officials conducted than a critical analysis of the cases.
Karat’s gaze is focussed on the workings of the ruling party, the Government, the action of its officials, and its policies. This is perhaps a function of her own position as the head of a national women’s body and her location as a Delhi-based CPI (M) political leader engaged in a polemical battle with the Government.[1] The ensuing argumentation therefore remains entangled in parsing out the ideology, agendas and paradigms set by the ruling party and misses out on a more granular and contextual understanding of the phenomenon.[2]All the cases are subsumed within one explanation: Manuvadi Majoritarianism generates and sanctifies the violence in society. However, Karat’s argument in seeking to expose Manuvadi majoritarianism which undoubtedly has exaggerated the violence manifold, nevertheless loses sight of actual structures that have historically generated and sustained oppression; and gets entangled in repeating a known set of ideas.
Her analysis also leaves several questions unanswered for the readers. What makes the Hindutva ecosystem uniquely positioned to use rape as a political instrument of subduing the other? What is it about the Hindutva ideology that lends itself to facile network-building, the ecosystem that Karat talks about? What makes it socially resonant? How does one account for the fact the perpetrators were known to the women who were violated? Does the inherent misogyny and violence of the Hindutva ideology suffice as an explanation for how the crowds of men gathered and perpetrated violence? The telos of Karat’s argument is that the removal of Hindutva ideology would restore our society to equilibrium. But would it?
There is something more here than Karat’s argument is willing to account for. What we are looking at is a political violence with deep social roots and historical antecedents that predate Savarkar’s writings. The roots of this violence are actually located in the Gaurakshini (cow-protection) movement that emerged in the later 19th century and ever since communalised sexual violence has racked the Subcontinental body-politic.[3] Women experienced this violence in the form of gang rape, and the minority men as lynchings. It is not simply a downward-percolation of supremacist ideology that allows one to mutilate and batter the marginalised body but a caste-ridden social structure that invisibilizes the everyday forms of violence and keeps the public gaze focused only on the spectacular violence (like the one the book discusses).
What sets apart the communalised sexual violence, especially in the cases that Karat discusses are two phenomenon: the Hindutva becoming the governing state ideology (which gives it unprecedented power and access) and the social media revolution – both of which are harnessed to, and vehicles of the neo-liberal economy – setting into motion the violence that inheres in our society in a new way.[4] So to offer Hindutva ideology as the sole explanation for this violence is to mistake part of the story for the whole. Karat’s book would have been richer if it had offered the reader deeper insights into the world of the victims and the details the work AIDWA has done to support and rehabilitate the women.
[1] Sundar Sarukkai, ‘To Question and to question: That is the Answer’ and Jawed Naqvi, ‘The Indian Intellectual and the Hindu-Muslim trap’, in Romila Thapar, The Public Intellectual in India, Aleph, 2015, pp.41-61, and pp.114-137 respectively.
[2] Tanweer Fazal, Practice of the State: Muslims, Law and Violence in India, Three Essays Collective, 2024.
[3] Aparna Vaidik, My Son’s Inheritance: The Secret History of Lynchings and Blood Justice in India, Aleph, 2020.
[4] Shakuntala Banaji and Ram Bhat, Whatsapp Vigilantes: And Exploration of Citizen Reception and Circulation of Whatsapp misinformation linked to Mob Violence in India, Department of Media and Communication, London School of Economics, https://www.lse.ac.uk/media-and-communications/assets/documents/research/projects/WhatsApp-Misinformation-Report.pdf