The nerve-clenching, sweat-soaked, heart-racing taste of fear is familiar to all Indian women. Coiled inside every ‘lesser assault’ lies fear of dismemberment and violation. This fear controls us all. A woman here can invite rape by being from the wrong religion, caste or class, but the citified urban women, with the right religious, caste and class credentials, live the lie that they can avert rape by playing it safe.

I first tasted this fear at age 15, during a school trip to Delhi, when the thrill of watching our breath turn to smoke in the thick winter fog that bit us on the ears and nose turned sinister, when a cyclist zoomed by groping chests in a row, and disappeared even before we could shriek. Lost in fog within yards. The teacher said we probably imagined it.

We were taught again and again to make light of ‘such things.’ We learned to unhear catcalls and slurs. We laughed at the uncles flashing near the girl’s hostel wall. We giggled while being hyper-alert in the face of oncoming two-wheelers, who could suddenly throw out an arm at our chests before speeding away.

We knew we would be blamed if we took off anywhere by ourselves without waiting for a group to form. Yet, the taste for freedom felt so enticing that all fear was worth tamping down, denying, ignoring. We knew that, each time anything in us attracted the gaze of men, we were at risk. That they might get compelled to teach us lessons.

Why is the intensity of grief and outrage in India over the recent gang-rape and murder of a doctor in Kolkata stark compared to cases involving Dalit or minority women? Is it because a woman’s humanity is decided on the basis of her religion, caste and class?

At age 20, my joy in early morning cycling — the sudden spurt of speed as my legs pumped the pedals, the exhilaration of wind in my face — soured when I was ambushed and groped by a scooter-borne man in an unlit lane near my house. I changed timings, never telling my parents.

At 25, I reported a colleague who had embarked on an ogling and molestation spree during Bharat Darshan [study tour for future civil servants] in Goa. I was advised to be mindful of his career. Nothing happened to the man, but I got a label for overreacting.

At 26, I would walk up three flights of an unlit stairwell in a guest house I was putting up, feeling stupid to be so afraid, yet unable to quell the fear. It was important to convince myself that it was ok. So I would tell my parents that I was absolutely fine.

In my mid-30s, I made panicked calls to a female colleague in the middle of the night, requesting her to pick me up and take me in her house, because the sounds and smells in the deserted railway guest house I had checked in, told me something was off.

Like all Indian women, learning ‘to handle’ my fears, discounting them and doing deals with them is the only way I know to be, because I cannot afford to let go of opportunities and financial agency. At a more sinister level, taking cognisance of every threat would mean not being able to function at all, let alone finish school, go to college, take up work, live alone in a city.

Every middle class woman in India is well-schooled in coughing up the price of independence. Our desire to walk further and higher than our foremothers means that we constantly assure the patriarchs, fathers, brothers, husbands — who are always fearful, because being men they know how pressing the male need to put women in place is — that the world has changed, that we are safe and un-distressed.

We know that the burden of our safety would be too much for the patriarch, so we offer denial to mitigate it. So adept are we in offering this denial, that we start believing in it.

The intensity of grief and outrage when a horrific rape happens ‘even here’, ‘even to someone like her’, as in the [recent] RG Kar [Hospital] case [in Kolkata], is stark because — unlike Soni Sori [tribal rights activist who says she was sexually abused and tortured in prison], Ankita Bhandari [teenage receptionist raped at a resort in Uttarakhand in 2022] and Bilkis Bano [Muslim woman gang-raped in 2002 Gujrat riots] whom we could swiftly other — we must now grieve for our own selves, for all the silences, discountings, denials we took in stride, to keep the illusion of safety intact.

Our organisations and workplaces collude in keeping this illusion alive, by putting token mechanisms in place, such as a forty-watt bulb in a dark corridor. Like the metal detectors at railway stations, these mechanisms are purely symbolic.

Meant only to signal that what happens to the bodies of Dalit and Adivasi women; to the women and little girls in the villages, bastis and slums, cannot happen to the middle class, educated, city women — that haisiyat [status], education, caste and social capital will cocoon us from the worst.

This illusion works only till the woman does not call out the powers that be and does not upset the hierarchy.

This logic insists that city women are insulated from horrors of Kunan Poshpora [mass rape of Muslim women in India-occupied Kashmir’s Kupwara district in 1991], Hathras [Dalit teen raped in 2020], Unnao [‘lower-caste’ minor raped in 2017]. This unspoken categorisation and hierarchy of rapes also means that Bilkis Bano’s rapists can be feted and garlanded, and a rally in support of Asifa’s rapists [eight-year-old raped in India-occupied Kashmir] can be taken out. This means that even ‘the right to protest’ against the rape in RG Kar Hospital is not available to Dalit women. As demonstrated by [Mumbai’s] Hirnandani Complex residents barring the women from the demolished Jai Bhim Nagar [slums] from joining them.

The thing is, everything is connected. The people who molest and assault women in the cities are the people who do it and have done it to the Dalit and minority women in villages and bastis to assert power over them.

The all-in-all in our academic institutions and organisations derive their impunity from the same political structures that flourish by using rape as a handy tool of retribution. Every time we women say, we don’t know, or don’t care about Unnao, Hathras, Kunan Poshpora, wrestlers’ protest; we advocate the rapist’s logic that makes entire groups of women undeserving of empathy or even cognition as human beings.

The loss of our empathy robs them of the ability to self-assert, to speak their pain. In her book Why Does Patriarchy Persist, feminist psychologist Carol Gilligan says, “Knowing and caring are essential to political resistance and specifically to resisting the gender structures of patriarchy that separate intelligence (knowing) from emotion (caring) and render both men and women less than fully human.”

The conspiracy of gendered violence is aided by political structures that buy women’s silence and decide their humanity on the basis of their religion, caste and class. Can justice for Moumita [Kolkata rape victim] exist in a world where the urban, upper caste, upper class women take pride in their silence on Ankita, Asifa, Bilkis?

The universe that denies the claims to justice of the othered will time and again keep exploding in our sweet, self-denying faces — all blood, gore and horrific detail — where, in utter despair, we will have to explain the need for justice by the numbering of wounds, listing their weight and depth, as if the extent of dismemberment would prove deservingness. That because ‘this happened’ to someone who was ‘right caste-class-everything’, the right to reparation is undeniable.

Actually, we don’t want justice for her.

We only want a resumption of our normalcy, where we can silently deny casual everyday assaults and participate in the conspiracy that rapes don’t happen to women like us.

That when ‘others’ are raped, it’s because of their religion, caste and class. Not rape really, but politics. And that the mindset of treating women as fair game is not a universal cancer, but a small excisable tumour, which we can stay safe from, if only rapists are hanged to death at once.

The writer is based in Delhi and recently published 1990, Aramganj, a translation of the best-selling Hindi novel Rambhakt Rangbaaz

Published in Dawn, EOS, August 25th, 2024