scorecardresearch
Tuesday, March 26, 2024
Support Our Journalism
HomeOpinionWrestlers' protest is no 2012 for Delhi's urban class. Sexual violence now...

Wrestlers’ protest is no 2012 for Delhi’s urban class. Sexual violence now a partisan issue

While the rhetoric from nationalist ramparts has been about ‘Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao’, Modi govt's silence has shown that gender equity and safety in India are not universal concerns.

Follow Us :
Text Size:

As Sakshi Malik, Bajrang Punia, and Vinesh Phogat returned to their railway job on Monday, one thing that has become abundantly clear in the last six weeks is that whether it is the Unnao rape case or the wrestlers’ protest now, the rampant issue of rape and sexual violence against women will continue to be met with steely neglect.

The ruling BJP and the Narendra Modi government’s silence on the female wrestlers’ protest is now loud and clear. In contrast, social media is awash with theories and backstories on Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, the man accused of serial sexual harassment of India’s women wrestlers. The ruling establishment’s articulate, if awkward, silence is nevertheless likely to extract a political price.

The Modi government entered its ninth year in power with ceremonial pomp and symbolic overload, with a series of invented traditions that projected Modi as the monarch of a New India. For once, and perhaps as a sign of things to come, India’s political opposition looked united in its boycott of this high-voltage power play as it sat out of the ceremonial proceedings. Despite all the pomp, partisanship, and politics, Modi’s latest big moment was overwhelmed not by the opposition but by a handful of women wrestlers. The images of Sangita Phogat and her colleagues being forced down to the ground by armed police as they were violently ejected from their chosen spot of protest at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar deflected and contested the high-Hindu sanatan imagery that accompanied the inauguration of the new Parliament, sceptre or no sceptre.

The conflicting events and images of pomp and protest happening on the same day have set the women wrestlers’ resistance and the Modi government on a collision course. In the first instance, the collision is fast unfolding in regional and caste terms, which only indicates that the women’s cause is far from becoming political on its own terms. Sexual harassment and sexual violence against women seem to have to pass the test of India’s caste, class, and religious politics. Women and gender issues are intersectional, to be sure. Yet the politics of silence by the BJP attests to a cruel bid to make sexual violence entirely sectional and partisan.


Also read: Questions for Modi—why alienate middle class, why pick gangster over women, is it worth it?


Sectional solidarity?

It has now been over six weeks since India’s top women wrestlers have been publicly agitating, filing FIRs, and persistently taking on the local strongman and head honcho of the Wrestling Federation of India (WFI) president and BJP MP, Brij Bhushan Singh. Analysts and folk social media theories aim to explain the Modi government’s silence by pointing to the six-time MP as a man of significant political clout in the all-important state of Uttar Pradesh. You can add or subtract his value in the forever-changing chessboard of local factions, or his worth in relation to the current chief minister, Adityanath, or that he has even won in the past on a ticket from the rival Samajwadi Party. However, you get the distinct impression that in Brij Bhushan Sharan, you have a political player who can only be measured in local muscle, to which he is second to none. Yes, in case you had missed it, Brij Bhushan Singh is a bahubali. This adds a wholly violent dimension to the already heavily masculine stakes of sexual harassment, making India’s Vishakha guidelines on workplace gender relations look all too polite and ineffectual.

The women wrestlers have been given solidarity and support above all by Rakesh Tikait, the prominent leader of the farmers’ protest. Tikait and his Bharatiya Kisan Union have not only demanded the immediate arrest of Brij Bhushan but, in publicly supporting the wrestlers, they have, at the very least, stymied Brij Bhushan’s efforts to publicly flex his muscles, leading him to cancel a rally last week. Tikait and his fellow travellers, especially in the Jat-dominated Khap panchayats of Haryana, have now doubled down in their support of the wrestlers. Tikait’s support, along with several Khap panchayats from Haryana, is formidable. It replays some of the dominant regional and caste patterns that forged the successful farmers’ protest. We only need to recall here that it was only in the persistence and depth of the farmers’ protest that PM Modi reneged and retreated on his policies two winters ago. With Birendra Singh, the BJP’s former minister and Jat leader from Haryana, breaking his party’s silence in favour of the wrestlers, the sportswomen’s protest is gathering force, if in a sectional manner.

Despite the women wrestlers’ six-week long occupation of the prime political spot of Jantar Mantar in the capital’s architecture of power, it did not galvanise Delhi’s urban middle classes. While social and mainstream media have been awash with outrage, commentary, and solidarity, there have been few to no rallies, let alone quaint candlelight marches that had come to typify protests against sexual violence and rape culture in the pre-Modi era. While stars of other entitled sporting pursuits, notably cricket, have been rightly chided and called out for their silence, what explains the lack of any groundswell of support from ordinary citizens? Is the urban middle class fickle, hypocritical, or simply apathetic? Arguably, does the social position of women have something to do with the relative lack of visible mass mobilisation, as the protesting wrestlers come from hard-up rural backgrounds, battling all manner of obstacles, and are arguably all-too-different and not identifiable for the urban Delhi woman? It is hard to give a straight answer to this, but the general lack of urban solidarity is all too noticeable, even if not easily explicable. In forcibly removing the protesting wrestlers from Jantar Mantar, the ruling dispensation has ironically created the possibility of wider mobilisation.


Also read: Wrestler protest morphs into farmers’, Jat anger against Modi govt. Women not at forefront


Cruel silence and partisan subjects

If Delhi’s urban citizens have failed to show up on the political square, then the emerging coalition between the farmers’ protest and the wrestlers will make it altogether political and unavoidable. The latest meeting between Home Minister Amit Shah and some of the protesting wrestlers, such as Sakshi Malik, now indicates that the protest is political in the partisan sense. While the wrestlers’ cause will seek to remobilise support from the farmers’ movement, the BJP too will seek to factionalise it along party lines. The silence and standoff once again testify to the central problem of India’s women and feminist concerns, in that their political valence is tested along and subordinated to other concerns, notably religion or communalism. To this extent, the mobilisation in 2012 on the Delhi gang rape case remains an exception rather than a model replicated in its cross-party national and urban support.

In the nine-year Modi era, rape and sexual violence have appeared with regularity. And while the high rhetoric from nationalist ramparts has been about ‘Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao’, the silence on wrestlers’ protest has shown that gender equity and safety in India are not universal concerns. One only has to glance at the loud calls of ‘love jihad’ that get easy and swift mobilisation in this era. ‘Love jihad’ may rouse and divide social media but its true force lies in converting gender equity into a communal issue.

In this political context, the continued wider neglect and silence with which the wrestlers’ protest has been met should not be construed as apathy. Instead, their struggle and the consequent wider silence only highlight the drawing of a partisan line in India’s hyper-competitive democracy. Above all, it leaves the impression that gender equity will become more partisan, tethered to concerns of other communal and even caste identity, but it is unlikely to become political and powerful in its own right. Regardless of the fortunes of Indian democracy, this indeed bodes badly for Indian women.

Shruti Kapila is Professor of History and Politics at the University of Cambridge. She tweets @shrutikapila. Views are personal.

(Edited by Prashant)

Subscribe to our channels on YouTube, Telegram & WhatsApp

Support Our Journalism

India needs fair, non-hyphenated and questioning journalism, packed with on-ground reporting. ThePrint – with exceptional reporters, columnists and editors – is doing just that.

Sustaining this needs support from wonderful readers like you.

Whether you live in India or overseas, you can take a paid subscription by clicking here.

Support Our Journalism

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

Most Popular