It’s not the first time the state has decided to punish those who engage  in pre-marital sex, which it perceives to be an immoral, value- devoid,  hedonistic, large-scale- social –disintegration- of –Bharat- Mata-  inducing- inferno. Before marriage, the state, as well as a vast section of  the Indian populace believes that sex is about as horrific an offence as  can be. Being the victim of rape might still be condoned in present  times, but positively consenting to sex before you are married? Surely  that must be a crime!

Well, it’s not. If you’re both above eighteen, and if you are both consenting to any form of sexual activity, the law does not criminalize it (with the exception of prostitution and homosexual sexual activity, which are currently illegal in India). Engaging in pre-marital sex is perfectly within the four corners of the law, as has been repeatedly upheld by the Indian judiciary. But our self-righteous police authorities take up the mantle themselves, flanked by multiple self-proclaimed ‘Senas’ , to disallow, ridicule, humiliate, assault and harass couples who dare to do something which is perfectly legal: have sex before they are married.

A popular, and fairly pathetic excuse for such behavior, is to bust prostitution rings. However, all standard hotels mandate production of a valid, government issued proof of age, identity and permanent address/institutional affiliation, in order to prevent the use of their rooms for prostitution. So long as guests are able to produce these documents, the excuse of combating prostitution is highly tenuous and deeply offensive. But more importantly, even with the lack of such proof, the fact that the police can force you to open your door, arrest you and drag you to the police station at their whim, with no whiff of a warrant or any other procedural backing is horrifying. In the recent incident in Mumbai, the police dragged unmarried couples out of their rooms in certain hotels, arrested them and imposed fines on them. Needless to say, all of this was done without a warrant for search or arrest, and the imposition of fines was directly in contravention to the Bombay Police Act, which only allows imposition of fines after conviction. The audacity of the state to drag you out of a room, without any adherence to the procedural law of the land, simply because you are doing something they disapprove of, demolishes any sense of security, liberty and privacy accorded to you as a citizen of India.

Now let me make it worse by telling you that it doesn’t have to be the police, even rogue ‘Gundas’ or unemployed youth swollen with an overdose of the state-spun Sanskriti can do this too, and Mr. Modi will beam and say to you – well, nothing. Because as a part of the youth wave that swept him to power, he can’t afford to alienate you by telling you that in the eyes of the state and most of the feverishly conservative Indian populace, pre-marital sex and prostitution are not very different, beta. Maybe you should read the Mahabharat (oh wait, read the Ramayan instead. Sita is cool, Kunti is not).

But I think the most pertinent question still remains, why are the state, the police and self-appointed moral policing squads able to get away with this? Why are individuals who engage in pre-marital sex so vulnerable, even if the law protects them? And there is a simple, yet distressing answer. Because it is not only the police which occasionally polices couples. Almost everyone in our society morally polices them, from the inquisitive neighbours who prey on their lives and broadcast this information to all and sundry to the doctors at hospitals who stop trying to treat them once they know that these individuals are unmarried and sexually active.

Pre-marital sex is, for some unfathomable reason, absolutely taboo in India. Most of us in our twenties cannot imagine going up to our parents and admitting to engaging in pre-marital sex. As a student your parents might probably micromanage your allowance and ground you, if your righteous institution doesn’t already do so at 6 pm every evening. As an individual who has a job and is ripe for the marriage market, you might be giving anxiety attacks to your parents with any such admissions. Any discussions pertaining to boyfriends/girlfriends are considered distasteful in many Indian homes even today, regardless of their social and economic class. It’s probably the most uniting opinion of the country, cutting across religions, caste, economic and social strata: pre-marital sex is unpardonable, especially if you are a woman. As a male, you’re probably just ‘having some fun’, but that’s still disapproved of by most of populace.

Thus, if you were to threaten these twenty year olds to call home and tell their parents they’ve been having sex in a room they paid for, they’re effectively doomed. They have grown up hearing their elders talk with disgust about pre-marital sex and those who have indulged in the same, they’ve been shamed about having a boyfriend/girlfriend, and they have often been threatened with dire consequences if they venture into any form of ‘relations’ with the opposite sex before marriage (relations with the same sex would led to you being disinherited instantaneously I suppose).

So when unmarried couples attempt to book a room, they are exposed to dangers from every level of the social chain. The police could barge in and arrest them (again, for doing something which is perfectly legal), the hotel manager/ staff may harass them or there may be hidden cameras in their room, the contents of which may be used to blackmail them later.

There is a need, and in light of the recent raids, an urgency to change this. Why? Because pre-marital sex is real. For those of you who still think it’s a rare occurrence, which your kid/sibling will never engage in – well, too bad. Put on your invisibility cloaks and hang around a mildly liberal college campus, and you will know that I’m not fibbing. An unprecedented percentage of late teen/ early twenties today have engaged in pre-marital sex. The average age of initiating sexual activity has been estimated by various surveys to be between 17 to 22 years in India. No survey will accurately provide such information. It’s too dangerous to admit to engaging in pre-marital sex, even to strangers (they may tell your mummy-papa/amma-appa, or be an undercover agent of ‘let’s- pick -on –vulnerable- blameless- individuals- Sena’). But there you have it, pre-marital sex is not an outlandish phenomenon, it is increasingly acceptable among younger generations, and there is nothing wrong with it.

Thus, we have an elephant in the room. As parents/responsible citizen who are terrified of the plague of pre-marital sex, ponder over this. If your child was seriously unwell, or harassed at university, you would rush to their side at the first call. But what sort of a society would you constitute, if you refused to protect your child/loved one against such unwarranted, unnecessary and extremely dangerous harassment? And where do you think a society which governs its citizens based on its social judgement rather than the letter of the law is headed? Thirty years on, a majority of those of us in our twenties today will sign up our children for sex education, tell them all about consent and contraceptives, and battle any authority which harasses and judges our children. But until then, for the next few years, how our own families will support and tackle such issues will impact our lives and liberty greatly. Relationships, sexual activity and this incessant vulnerability are a significant part of our lives. The support we receive from our families, as in all other significant things, will count.

Despite an internationally felt need for the availability of more organs for medical transplantation, the sale of human organs and tissues is outlawed in most countries. Expectedly, this has encouraged the growth of an illegal, exploitative market for organ trade, hidden well under the carpet. Governments, then, feign blindness to the existence of such trade, incapacitating themselves from regulating it. Consequently, the market thus created is unfair and exploitative. “In general, the flow of organs, tissues, and body parts follows the modern routes of capital… from female to male bodies.”[1] Empirical studies in India highlight that the number of women who donate their organs is exponentially higher than their male counterparts.[2] At the same time, there remains established scientific consensus that there are no relative advantages of donations of organs from female bodies over those from male ones, renders this trend a cause for concern.[3] This essay examines how the very language and structure of the Transplantation of Human Organs Act, 1994 (hereinafter the “THO”) allows for its objectives to be circumnavigated to allow the existence of a gendered market for organ transplantation. It then comments on how such body politics have given rise to a Culture of Alienability of female body parts, thereby eroding the idea of equal citizenship.

One of the two ways in which the Transplantation of Human Organs Act, 1994 (permits living organ donation is by allowing for it to take place between ‘near-relatives’. The THO defines the ‘near-relatives’ of a person restrictively to include only his/her “spouse, son, daughter, father, mother, brother or sister”;[4] a list which was recently expanded to include grandparents and grandchildren as well.[5] Authorities who sanction Donation naturally presume that a wife, irrespective of how suspicious the conditions of her marriage may be, is willing to grant her body parts to her husband, solely out of love and affection.[6] While the Authorities are entrusted with the task of ascertaining the consent of donors, this consent remains vitiated due to internalised sociological and psychological factors.[7] Interviews conducted by the researcher indicate that in almost all cases of near-relative transplants, consent is vitiated through (i) economic or other kinds of influence, or (ii) it being originated in conceived notions of the role of the woman and diminished value of her body within the family, or (iii) relative absence of consenting male donors.[8]

The other kind of living organ donation permitted under the THO is of the kind prompted by considerations of “affection and altruism”. Designed as a safeguard against the commercial sale of organs while allowing for their availability to those who need it, this provision requires the Authorization Committee to scrutinise all such cases in order to verify whether the said donation was prompted my genuine considerations of ‘affection and altruism’.[9] Regrettably, studies show that most donations prompted by “affection and altruism”, are made by women.[10] M.K. Mani, argues that “they ­(exploitative middle-men) do them (kidney sales) with the seal of approval from the Authorisation Committee, and are therefore a very satisfied lot. The law, which was meant to prohibit commercial dealings in human organs, now provides protection for those very commercial dealings”, indicating the THO, by necessary implication, is blind to these sales.[11] Cultural studies in Kidneyvakkam and Ayanavaram ascribe this to the perceived role of the female in society and economics, both limiting her ability to choose her profession as well as making her more vulnerable to invasive processes in order to be more economically valuable than men.[12] While a woman is not free to work in more rewarding professions due to constraints of societal conditioning and opinion, she is expected to sell her organs as an apologetic compensation for her perceived inability to the economically useful; subjecting her to an exploitative market and the mercy of untruthful middle-men and false promises.[13]

Sociological conceptions relating to the roles of women within families, the kind of occupations they may engage in, the economic value of their bodies and the tacit reluctance of men donating their organs has led to the creation of this Culture, according to which the body parts of a woman are mobile and can compensate for the relatively diminished economic role.  A Culture of Alienability of Human Organs necessarily rests upon the premise of their commodification.[14] When organs are traded in order to supplement the income of a family, it leads to the ‘collateralisation’ of the human body.[15] On the other hand, the prevention of commodification lies at the heart of the reason for the criminalisation of commercial dealings in Human Organs.[16] Commodification of human organs is said to deny the subjectivity of human beings, leading to their being treated as fungible instruments.[17] The commodification and collateralisation of human organs, then, takes away from the very purpose of the criminalisation of commercial trade in organs, both in India and internationally.

A Culture of Alienability of female organs, even when prompted solely by filial affection or altruism, then, strikes at the very objective of the THO. It has been argued out that the existence of such a parallel dialogue between the State and females denigrate them to the status of second-grade citizens. Cecelia Van Hollen argues that the gendered treatment of the human body in all spheres of public health creates different classes of citizens, with women occupying a significantly inferior position.[18] Consequently, the Culture of Alienability of Female Organs and their Commodification has clearly rendered female bodies as belonging to second-grade citizens to whom the logic and purpose of the THO does not apply, even as its framework continues to do so.

[1] S. Shroff, Legal and Ethical Aspects of Organ Donation and Transplantation, Vol. 25(3), Indian Journal of Urology, (July-Sept., 2009).

[2] Id, also see L. Cohen, Where It Hurts: Indian Material for an Ethics of Organ Transplantation, Vol. 128(4), Bioethics and Beyond , 147, (Fall, 1999).

[3] F. Ge, T, Huang, S. Yuang, Y. Zhou, W. Gong, Gender Issues in Solid Organ Transplantation and Donation,Vol. 18, Ann Transplant, 508, (2003).

[4] S. 2(9), The Transplantation of Human Organs and Tissues Act, 1994.

[5] S. (1), The Transplantation of Human Organs and Tissues Act, 1994.

[6] S. Shroff, Legal and Ethical Aspects of Organ Donation and Transplantation, Vol. 25(3), Indian Journal of Urology, (July-Sept., 2009).

[7] S. Carney, The Red Market, (Hachette India, Gurgaon, 2011).

[8] Interviews with Interview with Mrs. A, aged 60 years, Kolkata, on 29^th January, 2015 and Mrs. Y, aged 35 years, Kolkata January, 2015 (Names of the interviewees changed. On record with the author) . Further, Interviews with the Hospital Authorisation Committee and Competent Authorities, BGS Global Hospital, 25^th April, 2015.

[9] See S. Shroff, Legal and Ethical Aspects of Organ Donation and Transplantation, Vol. 25(3), Indian Journal of Urology, (July-Sept., 2009), and S. Carney, The Red Market, (Hachette India, Gurgaon, 2011).

[10] Id.

[11] M.K. Mani, The Nephrotoxicity of the Tsunami, Letter No. 154, Vol. 20(3), National Medical Journal of India, (May/June, 2007), available at http://www.nmji.in/archives/Volume_20_3_May_June/Letters/Letter_from_Chennai.htm, (last visited on January 15^th, 2015).

[12] L. Cohen, Where It Hurts: Indian Material for an Ethics of Organ Transplantation, Vol. 128(4), Bioethics and Beyond , 147, (Fall, 1999).

[13] S. Carney, The Red Market, (Hachette India, Gurgaon, 2011).

[14] K. M. Bridges, On the Commodification of the Black Female Body: The Critical Implications of the Alienability of Fetal Tissue, 123, Columbia Law Review, Vol. 102, No. 1 (Jan., 2002).

[15] Supra note 7 at 141.

[16] See B. N. Colabawala, Issues in Organ Transplant, Indian Journal of Medical Ethics, (2002) and S. Wilkinson, Commodification Arguments for the Legal Prohibition of  Organ Sale, Vol. 8(2), Health Care Analysis, 189, (June, 2000).

[17] S. Wilkinson, Commodification Arguments for the Legal Prohibition of Organ Sale, Vol. 8(2), Health Care Analysis, 189, (June, 2000).  

[18] C. C. V. Hollen, Moving Targets: Routine IUD Insertion in Maternity Wards in Tamil Nadu, India, Vol. 6(11), Reproductive Health Matters, 98, (1998) as cited in L. Cohen, Where It Hurts: Indian Material for an Ethics of Organ Transplantation, Vol. 128(4), Bioethics and Beyond , 147, (Fall, 1999).

Let us consider a common scenario that arises when you travel by air. A lot of people like to complain about airline passengers who recline, taking away precious knee-room. A possible solution to this problem is to pay the person in front of you to not recline. If you value your knee space more than he values the option to lean back, the seat will stay upright where it belongs. There’s no need for the government, or the airline, to intervene to protect your knees. However, a solution will be difficult to reach if there are costs such as tax or restrictions imposed on the exchange of rights. Such costs, commonly known as transaction costs lie at the heart of economics. The utility of understanding and minimising transaction costs is best explained by the Coase theorem.

Simply put, the Coase theorem states that so long as property rights are well defined, the initial allocation of rights does not matter and the possibility of bargaining with a lack of transaction cost will lead to an efficient outcome. However, experience shows that zero transaction costs exist rarely, if at all. A workable restatement of the Coase theorem would, then be that fewer the transaction costs, the better are the chances of arriving at a pareto optimal outcome, namely, a state of affairs wherein the economic distribution of resources has been done in the most efficient manner.

Applying this principle to an instance of land acquisition, it can be said that if a private player is willing to set up shop on a piece of land and wants to buy it, the most efficient allocation would consist of allowing him to buy it in a free market transaction. The same is true because transaction costs are likely to be minimal in a free market transaction. However, there are several reasons for the failure of free market deals when it comes to land acquisition. A few prominent ones are fragmented land holdings, multiple ownership of land, lack of well-defined ownership rights, lack of well-defined use rights , information asymmetry and unequal bargaining power. Moreover, speculative holdouts, inadequate compensation, inordinate delays and the persistent threat of litigation and protests, too, contribute significantly to the prohibitive nature of transaction costs involved in the acquisition of land.

Let us consider a farmer who values his rights in his land at ₹1000. At the same time, an industrialist values that land at ₹1200. In a free market situation, they should be able to negotiate and arrive at a settlement between these two figures. However, due to the above-mentioned reasons, transaction costs greater than ₹200 might be necessary to affect a transfer. In such a scenario, the acquisition becomes impossible leading to an inefficient use of the land.

In 2013, the Government of India sought to minimise these transaction costs and  thereby, to improve overall efficiency by addressing these causative factors in the new Land Acquisition law. A provision for Social Impact Assessment was made to identify property ownership, use rights and to provide bargaining power to the land owners. An additional requirement of consent was introduced for Private and Public Private Partnership projects to reduce the potential for holdouts and the coercive element in land acquisition. Moreover, the same was proposed to be done through a consultative and representative mechanism and the overarching objective was to eliminate distrust and to subsequently, reduce the costs arising from delays due to future litigation or protests. Simply put, the aim was to reduce the transaction costs to an amount below ₹200 which would have made acquisition a reality in the above example.

Admittedly, SIA and consent requirements, too, could themselves be termed as transaction costs. However, as shown above, the net effect would have been a reduction in the overall transaction costs making land acquisition viable. Nonetheless, a major downside of the law enacted in 2013 was the long time period between the expression of interest and the final acquisition. A composite reading of the Act would reveal that the acquisition process can take anywhere between 3 to 5 years or more if extensions are granted. Naturally, these inflated transaction costs were a real possibility and would have nullified the efficiency gains achieved by the introduction of SIA and consent.

Amidst the clamour for reducing the prolonged process, the government through the promulgation of an Ordinance- a knee-jerk reaction, omitted the requirement for SIA and consent for practically all conceivable projects. Unfortunately, the Ordinance seems to have missed the point completely. SIA and consent, inarguably the most important provisions of the new land acquisition law and pre-requisites for acquisition, have to be completed within a time frame of 8 months. Thus, removing them would merely reduce the time frame to 2 ½ to 4 ½ years, which is still unlikely to lead to an optimal outcome.

More importantly, a Coase theorem analysis can show that the removal has the potential to increase transaction costs and will leave the buyers worse off than before. Experience shows that land acquisition becomes costly due to the subsequent protests and litigation over the determination of presence of public purpose and adequacy of compensation. The genesis of these controversies lies in the lack of consultative and participative processes encapsulated by the SIA. The Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013 attempted to remedy these inefficiencies.

However, instead of reducing the delays and hitting the final nail in the coffin, the Ordinance has done away with the efficiency gains achieved by the Act. The Ordinance has merely transferred certain present transaction costs to uncertain but highly likely future transaction costs. It is clear that the economic cost saved by the removal of SIA and consent is likely to be much lesser than the cost which the acquirer will have to bear in future due to claims of non-land owners, delays in the project, litigations by interested persons, protests by the affected parties and a downgraded public image.

The dichotomy between present and future transaction costs can be illustrated by recalling what happened with TATA Motors in Singur. Suppose that SIA and consent were the pre-requisites before acquisition was attempted in Singur. Undoubtedly, such processes would have involved additional costs. However, they would have minimised the possibility of wide scale dissatisfaction and protests that ultimately forced TATA Motors to leave a half built factory and move elsewhere. In fact, the requirement for consent would have allowed TATA to save costs and to move elsewhere much before. Clearly, the company might have saved costs at the time of acquisition if SIA was not required; however, the transaction costs it ended up with in the future were significantly higher.

The Government of India in its urgency to boost the economic growth of the nation seems to be in a haste to get the Land Bill passed by Parliament to replace the Ordinance. However, in the event that such a Bill would only convert present transaction costs into uncertain and possibly higher transaction costs that were to be incurred in the future, it is questionable whether and to what extent economic growth would be accelerated by the passage of this Bill.

- Dhruva Gandhi and Shubham Jain

 I.                

The reason for writing this piece is the feeling of utter failure to comprehend the cultures of rape that engulf us. Even as the horrors of December 2012 Delhi gang rape continue to haunt public consciousness, the incident of the brutal rape of a five year old child has put our sense and sensibilities to an extraordinary challenge. How to evoke sensibilities and make sense of the images, narratives and news of the horrific rapes hurled on to us by newspapers, visual media and other allied sources, including judicial discourses, political statements and state interventions? How do we diagnose the foundations of our society that becomes instrumental in the production of such depravity and inhumanity that even a child is not spared from the acts of such horrific atrocity? So much so that the sadistic infliction of inexorable pain, with candles and plastic bottles inserted into the private parts, can become a form of decadent human expression?

Another facet of the sense of failure is the question to our own self? Do we write this paper today with such unease because of the gruesomeness of the incident or because the news is taken seriously and appeared on the first page of leading daily newspapers? We ask this as the atrocious rape encounters are spilled, though in smaller fonts, all over in the print as well as visual media after December 2012. Why did we need yet another horrific story to evoke a similar sense of failure of contemplation or the urge to write? Is it the post traumatic incident of institutional insensitivity and indifference, as the police not just attempted to hush up the matter (by offering the parents Rs. 2000) but also violently attacked a woman protesting against the police callousness? It seems that the sense of failure to think about the problem of rape, and for us, as legal academics, from a limited canon of law, prompts us to ask the reverse question framed in Nietzschen terms: how not to think about rape and cultures of rape.

The one thing that we certainly do not want to do in this discussion is to make specific policy recommendations as to how to interpret or change the law relating to rape. Perhaps, a trap too easy and too tempting to fall into especially for those trained in the discipline of law. This consequentialist, policy-oriented turn of the present legal scholarship can at times hamper the proper structural issues of decoding the culture of rape. We are certainly not opposed to policy recommendations in principle. As teachers of law we have had occasions in classrooms as well as in doctrinal scholarship to take that route. However, we need to question the frantic activity of policy recommendations and churning out changes in laws that blinds us to the sensibility that must inform us in the very framing of issues relating to rape, which reduces humanity to mere objects of consumption to be used and then thrown away.

  II.              

 “Two sex maniacs libidinously ravaged a tiny female tot like wild beasts and finished her off. Police after investigation found that the two respondents herein are those two fiends.”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 – State of NCT v. Sunil

“The remnants of extensive mangling of the tender body of the child would reflect the possibility of more than one rapist subjecting the child to such beastly ravishment.”

                                                                                                      State of NCT v. Sunil

 “Accused Saleem who offered custard apple to the little girl when they reached the graveyard suddenly turned himself into a demon and made a forcible attempt to ravish her.”

                                                                                                            State of A.P. v. Sheikh Mazhar

“It seems that Manoj Kumar’s father had an inkling of the demon in his son.”

HT, Rapist’s father had disowned him from his property (20th April, 2013)

The discourse of rape emanating from cultures of rape remains entrenched in the dehumanization of the rapist. The TV images show the accused handcuffed, surrounded by cops with cameras desperate to catch a glimpse of what lies beneath the face covered accused. These projections stimulate the imagery of devils/ beasts concealed behind the mask. When the mask comes off- as it did for Ajmal Kasab, another “demon”- the responses are of astonishment at the visible humanness of the demon. The same flesh, same skin and an innocent young human face! Clearly that is not what demons look like. This is not what such “demons” should look like.  And thus starts the project of dehumanization of these visible humans.

The rapist (as a terrorist) is described and projected as a “wild beast”, “a demon”, “a fiend”. Such a description puts the rapist in a class of heinous monsters, a class far removed from the ordinary human beings. This is one way of telling ourselves (the civilized and responsible moral agents) that the doers of such grotesque crimes are not in any manner like ourselves, they are too distant from us. The distancing (through which we constitute our own humanity) can only happen if the representations and descriptions of the rapist are directed to evoke the emotion of disgust in the viewers/ readers. Since, as encapsulated by Martha Nussbaum, “(o)ur disgust creates the boundary: it says, this contamination is and must remain far from our bodies. We might even say…that we call disgust to our aid: by allowing ourselves to see evil people as disgusting, we conveniently distance them from ourselves” (Susan A. Bandies (ed.), The Passions of Law at p. 51).

Evoking disgust for the rapist by dehumanizing him produces an alienation of our human selves from him. It creates a distance between our humanity and his fiendishness and thus prevents us from engaging in a self-scrutiny, of recognizing in ourselves the capacity to be evil. The distancing prevents us from confronting the fact that we are capable of turning into the diabolic evil that we abhor. And thus, induces a forgetfulness of the everyday atrocities that we may be committing (covertly) when we indulge (unconsciously) in our own perversions. Disgust induced distancing from the rapist obliterates all discussions around the normalization of everyday violence of everyday lives that goes unnoticed because we fail to look within as we situate ourselves within an imagined humanity which the rapist lacks. Otherwise, how do we begin to understand the normalization of the apparatuses and structures which legitimize violence against women in the society? When the sexist representations of women- when they are cast into strict gender roles defined by dominant heteronormative structures- go unquestioned by most of us even if such representations constitute the everyday violence (not necessarily physical) of work places, public transport, markets and even the safe bounds of our homes. What can be made of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 2013 that completely ignored the recommendation of the Verma Committee Report exhorting for criminalization of marital rape? Is it not true that law reforms have failed to question the asymmetrical character of marriage reinforcing an object-like treatment of women and thus continue to legitimize violent structures in the private lives of women? How far then can the attempts at reforms and amendments of laws be taken seriously?

The rape discourse as a discourse of dehumanization of the rapist deepens the cultures of rape that produce emotions that oscillate between un-mindful retributive cries of anger to sheer apathy and indifference. The responses to violence against women in these cultures also swing between rhetorical law reforms that institutionalize retributive anger through aggravated punishments and death penalties, and an attitude of forgetfulness as we change the channel from NDTV news to NDTV Good Times, or for that matter shift our glance from the news of rape at the front page top column to the advertisements that promise us dream lives that we can buy with nothing but money. This point needs further explanation.

 III.            

Slavoj Zizek argues that the imaginary virtual reality, floating around through images of print and visual media, constitutes the reality of the contemporary society. It works so strongly and incessantly that the meanings of virtual reality surface as the reality of the virtual. And if that is so, then how does the reality of the virtual propagate the cultures of rape that we encounter?

Consider some images from the front page of a leading newspaper which reported the rape of 5 year old “Masoom”:

The five year old lies covered in a sheet as she is taken to AIIMS from Swami Dayanand Hospital where she underwent life-saving surgery. Three dolls on the stretcher accompany her as some helpers clear way for the stretcher. A box below lists the brutal horrific injuries that were inflicted on her: bite marks on cheeks, lips and chest, cuts on neck probably from blade like object, 200ml cracked plastic bottle of hair oil and three candles that were taken out of her vagina.

A passport size image of ACP BS Ahlawat slapping Beenu Singh who was protesting against police apathy and laxity.

A half page advertisement of workwear showing a happy couple, dressed in western attire, walking along exuding confidence and in complete equality. Skyscrapers and the modern city life set the background for this joyous and equal public space when men and women are equally successful, rich and safe. Provided they “Go Trendy. Strike Deal. Refresh. Get New Yorked”.

A real estate advertisement of a five bedroom luxury villa. It says: Opulence, Rs. 10.03 Cr. Onwards.

There are some issues that need to be examined here. Whether there exists a relationship, worthy of exploration, between the cultures of rape that thrust upon us an unwanted reality and the cultures of consumerism that we want to be immersed into in order to live our dreams? If yes, then how can that relationship be conceived? What does it say of our vision of progress? When images of reality and images of unreality confront each other what impact does it have on real lives? What is the relationship between the dominant images/ narratives of rape/ rapist with the other virtual images that we confront every day in our lives? What happens, as John Berger puts it, when images of reality confront the images of unreality? How can words that express anguish and agony of the feeble cries of a 5 year old victim be understood when they are juxtaposed with words and images that promise us lives of happiness and equality as we progress, as we prosper?

Juxtaposition of publicity images of products of globalization and their consumers (take for example, the images of workwear wardrobe bringing in happiness and equality in sexes at the workplace; mobile phones and cheap call rates bringing radiance into relationships; clean RO water assuring security from all fatal disease and so on) with the images of horror and agony stimulates a similar distancing as mentioned above. What happens in the images of unreality- the happiness, the dreams, the pleasures- is something that we think would happen to us (provided we gather enough money to acquire these possessions); while what happens in the images of everyday reality- rape, harassment, state apathy, perversions- is something that is far from us and cannot happen to us. Just as the rape discourse distances us from our own perversions (by producing a false distance between our humanity and rapist’s monstrousness), the culture of consumerism distances us from the reality that demands serious deliberation and well thought out political and social action. The publicity images that astound us create for us alternate lives where living in dreams and for dreams becomes our only life.

All the images mentioned above look real (virtual imaginary reality reflected in images cannot be convincing if they do not look as real, if not more, than the real images). But there is clearly a disconnect and an incoherence between the rape/ molestation image and the image of equality in workplace/ public sphere which figures prominently on the same page of the newspaper. While reality decries the position of women in society- as means to an end, as tools that can be used for one’s own interests, as bodies that can be violated because they lack bodily integrity- the virtual images make the reality of the former unrecognizable. The urgency of deliberative action to correct the injustices that surround us (that is evoked by Masoom’s tiny body covered in a white sheet), is diluted as we see our dreams depicted in advertisements that exhort us to consume more if we are to become more equal and more happy. Images of dreams are the required distraction for the sustenance and flourishing of the culture of consumerism that reduces everything to an object of consumption. While on the one hand they yield an ineffective response to violence (Criminal Law Amendment Act, 2013 has been nothing but a knee-jerk reaction, presented as a quick fix solution to rape which has failed to foreground the larger issue of the relationship between sexism that is a part of everyday lives and rape), on the other hand, they cement the attitudes that look at women as objects to be used and consumed like other objects on sale.

What is then required is an urgent emphasis on the cultural patterns of objectification of women especially the ‘culture industry’ which thrives to reduce everything into a consumable commodity. This includes women as well as men. In doing so we inadvertently create paradigms where women and men are not organic individuals who think, love, have dignity and suffer alike but as body-parts to be displayed for market campaigns. Such crass market logic reduces human bodies as the only attribute of being human and that attribute being best used as a consumable commodity. This by no means suggests that one should take a fascist turn against the market forces but certainly makes one re-think the way we are socialized into behaviors and patterns that reduce human beings into human bodies and human bodies into marketable and consumable commodities.

The relationship between cultures of consumption and cultures of rape (that thrive on objectification of women) is direct. The culture of consumption is founded on the ideas of use (of products) and domination (one who has money has the power gets to consume more). The attitude this breeds is that all things are meant for usage and they can be acquired and controlled with money. Then, is it appropriate to ask: Whether Delhi has become the rape capital because it is one of the global cities basking in the glory of consumerism, where status of a person is determined by his/her wealth and ability to acquire and consume? Is it the attitude of consumerism (which also trickles down to those who cannot consume right now because of lack of money, but nevertheless have the desire to consume because consumption defines happiness) that has conceptualized all our relationships and our entire world view? Have women become the targets of this attitude when they are looked at, gazed and used as nothing but interchangeable bodies or as means to an end, rather than ends in themselves? The objectification of women is then not about sexual perversion only; it is about a culture that values money as the only end and turns everything else into an object for consumption.

(The authors are Assistant Professors at Jindal Global Law School of O.P. Jindal Global University)

[The cover photograph is in the public domain and is sourced from the US National Archives and Records Administration]

A bride-to be dressed in lehenga and fleets is sitting on a dharna outside a showroom in one of Delhi’s luxury malls. What may appear like a scene straight out of a movie might just be one approach to seek reprisal from a deceitful trader. For those of you who consider this rather extreme, reviewing and sharing experiences online would just prove to be equally effective at protecting consumers. Here is why we think ‘responsible consumerism’ warrants emphasis and is a necessary tool in safeguarding the rights of the Indian consumer.

Like any 20 something bride-to-be, I have been have scouring high and low for that most important of important dresses – my wedding dress.  However, a recent experience with an alleged premier designer has shed a light on practices that most likely go unchecked throughout our land. Now, whether you are a shopper on a mission like me or a casual shopper, you know that shopping doesn’t always go right. That suit you bought online looks completely different from the catalogue on its arrival. Your prepaid phone is short of a few hundred bucks for the ringtone service that you never ordered. That bottle of mineral water which cost more than its maximum retail price (MRP)  just because you happened to be hiking at a tourist spot. Or the refusal of the seller to refund the advance you paid to book a dress less than 36 hours earlier. The last scenario is unfortunately what I encountered with a supposed top designer duo based at DLF Emporio – a mall epitomizing luxury in the capital. Though the dress was merely ‘booked’  and not purchased, possessed, or altered, the designer refused to return the advance and only offered a credit note. The ordeal took an interesting turn when she sprinkled details of her familial ties – a brother in the Ministry and a cousin serving as the Assistant Commissioner of Police. But of course, we were “free to take any action”. Although both a wedding and a court case appear to be on the cards for me in the next few months, it got me thinking: do consumers know their rights in the marketplace? And while a lengthy court battle may be unavoidable, what else can we as consumers do to uphold the integrity of the market?

Every year, the 15th of March is observed as World Consumers Rights Day and it represents an opportunity for us to look back on our rights and more importantly our responsibilities as consumers. India’s relatively recent rise as a world economic power has had the fortunate side effect of a middle class that is larger and more prosperous than ever before. It is this middle class that is both the envy and target of multinational corporations around the world. Although we Indians continue to enjoy increasing variety and choice in the marketplace, knowledge of our rights and protections has not kept pace. ‘Consumer is sovereign’ is but a myth in the present scenario and ‘Jaago grahak jaago’ is certainly a need of the hour. India is aeons behind its western counterparts when it comes to the protection of consumer rights as well as responsible consumerism. As a result, although marketplace choices in India are vast, the dangers of unscrupulous practices are aplenty. Our legal institutions do provide safeguards against certain unfair practices. However, these laws can only serve their intended use if consumers are aware of their existence.

While it is beyond the scope of this article to highlight the details of consumer protections that Indians enjoy, it does bear reminding that many stem from the Consumer Protection Act (1986), such as the right to be informed about the quality, quantity, potency and purity of goods; the right to choice; and right to seek redressal against unfair trade practices. It is the responsibility of Indians as intelligent consumers to have at least some knowledge of these protections. However, a lack of desire is certainly understandable. Our judicial process unfortunately suffers from delays and administrative roadblocks at most times. It is not uncommon for consumers to shy away from the protection of the courts, citing a long and arduous legal battle. As a result, one has to wonder at times, how beneficial are such protections when the path to legal recourse is littered with obstacles?  A fair point indeed. While it is the responsibility of citizens to enact and demand change, such worthwhile progress will undoubtedly take time to occur. In the meantime, consumers can seize control of their marketplaces both by investing and putting more stock in sellers’ reputations.

Unless incidents of unfair acts are made visible, our consumers’ society as a whole suffers. As George Akerlof noted in his Nobel prize winning treatise, economic marketplaces where unscrupulous merchants or ‘bad lemons’ are allowed to evade detection ultimately deteriorate. While this is certainly an extreme outcome, it highlights the responsibility we all share on World Consumers Rights Day to be aware of our statutory rights, and to spotlight merchants who deserve our ire. The reputation of merchants is ever the more important in a country where legal institutions are less than efficient. As one can surely imagine, the experiences that other consumers have had with a vendor can be particularly helpful in warning a future consumer or in encouraging that same consumer to visit the store. However, a merchant’s reputation is only as good as the information on which it is based. As a result, we as consumers have a responsibility to highlight and spread the word of practices – both good and bad. When a seller sells you a substandard good, or when it promises one item but delivers another, make it your responsibility to make that action visible to the marketplace as a whole. By the same measure, if a merchant consistently delivers a good on time as per specifications, or if he surpasses your expectations, shine a light. When consumers can assess the quality of a product or merchant through the prior experiences of others, it  will significantly diminish the ability of ‘bad lemons’ to hide in the market. Eventually, such merchants will exit the market and all consumers will benefit. Consumers in Western marketplaces enjoy several avenues through which they can share and collect information on merchants. Online reputation websites such as Yelp and the rating systems on Amazon.com allow consumers to share their experiences and have a significant effect on the financial fortunes of merchants – both in a positive and negative respect. Such websites are in their infancy stage here in India, but there is no reason why Yelp cannot be extended to the Indian context, as long as there are consumers who are willing to invest time and share their experiences. Furthermore, certifications from non-profit organizations such as the Better Business Bureau (BBB) carry significant weight and provide assurance to customers in the United States that a vendor is trustworthy. While the Better Business Bureau has a registered office in Kolkota, its presence and stature in India has a very long way to go to.

On this World Consumer Rights Day, let us remind ourselves of our rights as consumers to expect fair and transparent transactions. At the same time, we must accept responsibility as consumers. While legal recourse is our right as citizens, it is unfortunately not always the most expedient path. An attractive complement to legal action would be to attack the reputation of deceitful traders in an organized fashion. By sharing our experiences with the media and through online websites that aggregate consumer sentiment, we can ensure that unscrupulous sellers have an increasingly hard time surviving in a more transparent marketplace. Either way, if you are the victim of an unjust act, do yourself a favour and spread the word.

[Image Attribution: By Bob With from Fresno, United States (Consumer madness at Costco Uploaded by Gary Dee) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons]

Slowing economic growth, a bloated government deficit and a desperate need to boost investment. Such were the grim circumstances under which Finance Minister P Chidambaram stepped up in parliament on Thursday to deliver the last budget before general elections in 2014. The build-up was immense and expectations were running high. Although the Budget was never going to be a silver bullet making India’s economic woes magically disappear, it did present Mr Chidambaram with the perfect opportunity to set the scene for a healthier economy and convince financial markets that the government is committed to bringing India back on a sustainable path of growth. This was seeming all the more probable because of the bold and encouraging actions taken recently, like hiking rail fares for the first time in a decade and allowing companies to raise diesel prices in small monthly increments. But in the event, the Budget disappointed, with a long list of small policy measures, but no real efforts to address the broader problems plaguing the economy.

India’s fiscal deficit has widened considerably since 2010 and the sovereign credit rating is hovering just one notch above junk status. So the threat of a rating downgrade is one of the most imminent risks to the economic outlook at the moment. Being fully cognizant of this, Mr Chidambaram was careful to deliver a “responsible” Budget, with no obvious giveaways, despite the upcoming elections next year. But the policies announced to rein in the deficit lacked vision and appear to be aimed at short-term gains. For instance, there was an undue focus on cutting capital expenditure, which according to the government’s estimates has been slashed by INR 75,000 crore in 2012/13. While this may well have the desired effect of hitting the deficit target of 5.3% of GDP this fiscal year, it is an unsustainable strategy that risks hurting the economy’s supply potential in the medium- to long-term. In the same vein, while the 10% surcharge for people earning INR 1 crore or more per annum is likely to increase tax revenues in the short-term, its effectiveness is questionable in the long-term. Not only does it raise the risk of tax evasion, it could also discourage highly paid individuals from working in India, which would eventually hurt growth as well. These policies, while barely sufficient to prevent the sovereign credit rating from being downgraded to junk status, just don’t have what is required to get the economy back to its potential growth rate of around 8%.

Instead of resorting to these quick-fix measures for bringing down the budget deficit, Mr Chidambaram would have been better off focusing on cutting current expenditure, which is a more efficient and pro-growth approach. But in this regard, he fell short of expectations of spelling out further detail on reducing fuel subsidies – a process which had already begun in September 2012 when diesel prices were raised by 45 paise per litre.

Another pressing need of the hour is to enhance private sector investment. In this respect the Budget admittedly contained a number of encouraging measures. The 15% investment allowance for a company investing Rs. 100 crore or more on plant or machinery; increased spending on infrastructure investment; and the emphasis on expediting pending investment projects by setting up a special Cabinet Committee are all, in principle, very promising. But how efficiently these measures will be implemented is debateable. For instance, there is no credible basis to believe that the Cabinet Committee will indeed deliver on the promise of removing regulatory bottlenecks for planned investment projects, while spending on infrastructure projects could easily be subject to delays as well.

The dilapidated condition of the power sector also needs urgent attention. While the intention to reduce dependence on coal imports in the medium-term by enhancing coal production through public private partnerships is broadly sensible, there was no proper detail on how this would be achieved. By way of reassurance, Mr Chidambaram felt it sufficed to say that this was under “active consideration” with further details to be announced in “due course”.

All in all, the 2013 Budget was devoid of radical ideas and was a lost opportunity at a time when the nation is teetering on the brink of an economic crisis. While Mr Chidambaram made all the right noises with regard to the need for fiscal consolidation, inclusive growth, boosting investment and so on and so forth, he failed to follow them up with credible policy responses leaving a dark cloud of uncertainty still hanging over the economic outlook.

The Indian welfare state is set for a reinvention, as subsidies of all kinds are in the process of being monetized.  Some commentators view this effort as a hastily thought-out big push in an election year.  Meanwhile, the Government’s selling point is that cash transfers will bypass the existing welfare machinery and deliver benefits straight to the people.  Aapka Paisa, Aapke Haath  (“Your money in your hands”) is the pithy campaign slogan that is meant to convince the people of the reform’s value.  Yet we need to analyze whether this sort of direct transfer of purchasing power is possible and, even if it is, whether the Indian state is capable of delivering cash to the people in a reliable way.

On the former issue, of the feasibility of transferring purchasing power through cash, economists have long touted the greater efficiency of cash in enabling poor households to purchase goods and services that they need.  Empirical studies of cash transfer programs support this claim.  Of course, switching to cash makes sense if the cash transfer bestows purchasing power on households that is equal to the value of the subsidy that the households receive currently.  In other words, a transfer of purchasing power in cash only works if it is equivalent to the current transfer of purchasing power in subsidies.  In a narrow technical sense, this would require that cash transfers be indexed to regional, and preferably, local measures of inflation for essential commodities.  This is administratively complex and may not even be feasible.  Given the lack of competition in rural agricultural markets, prices of food, kerosene and other essential commodities may increase with an influx of cash.   The cash transfer pilot for kerosene in Kokrasim in Alwar district provides a sobering example: the cash transferred was insufficient for families to purchase their monthly requirement of kerosene, as market price increased substantially.

The latter issue, of the Indian state’s capability to implement the cash transfer program, is of equal concern.  A series of challenges immediately come to mind when thinking about how the cash transfer will be implemented:

Identification and Targeting: The UIDAI has issued an estimated 280 million UID cards over the course of three years, meaning that 800 million more cards need to be issued before April 2014, when the cash transfer is set to cover the entire country.  Such a vast increase in the rate of issuing cards seems unlikely.  Furthermore, while the Government plans to target the transfer based on a census identifying socioeconomic status and caste, Union Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh claims that this census will only be completed in July 2013, several months after the transfer is planned to be rolled out to 18 of 28 states (others suggest that this timeline may be wishful thinking).  Even after compiling this eligibility list, there is no guarantee that it will accurately identify the poor.  Many non-poor households have finagled their way onto BPL lists, for example, leaving the poor behind.  In 2009, a National Advisory Council panel estimated that only 39% of households deemed “poor” had received a BPL or Antyodaya card.

Financial Instruments and Bank Accounts: Financial access is a key element of the cash transfer, both because cash will be delivered directly to beneficiaries’ bank accounts and because beneficiaries need a way to access the cash in their accounts.  The status quo in India on both fronts is discouraging.  A recent World Bank study estimates bank account penetration across India at 35%, and is even lower for the poorest households.  Moreover, as many (particularly rural) poor households do not have access to bank branches or ATMs, it appears as though the Government will pursue a model whereby “banking correspondents” (essentially roving banking agents) will administer a system of micro-ATMs.  The problem is that banking correspondents only cover 70,000 villages at present, and will need to grow tenfold by the April 2014 countrywide rollout of the transfer.

Grievance Redressal: In the event that all of the aforementioned challenges are adequately addressed, there will undoubtedly be cases of non-payment, late payment, or inadequate payment to beneficiaries.  In these cases, it remains unclear how citizens will be able to file grievances and how these grievances will be redressed by the Government.  These same issues plague another of India’s massive social programs, MGNREGA.  Government reports and household surveys indicate that the lack of a grievance redressal mechanism in NREGA has allowed states to drag their feet on resolving complaints, perpetuated embezzlement of funds by public officials, and prevented money from reaching intended beneficiaries.  At present, there does not seem to be a strategy in place to avert these same problems in the cash transfer program.

Does the current implementation strategy of large scale “piloting” in 51 districts in 2013, and scaling up by 2014, help address the challenges? The answer, most clearly, is no.  Firstly, while the Government is technically “piloting” the cash transfer, the pilot is set to last only a few months, with no systematic and rigorous evaluation, and will likely be carried out in districts that have relatively high UID coverage and bank account penetration.  Consequently, the results of the pilot may not be that informative and, even if they are, will not be representative of how the program will work across India.  A better approach to piloting would be to conduct a proof of concept of the technical aspects of the transfer, followed by a larger pilot of the program in a representative sample of households with a concurrent evaluation.  (Such a strategy was suggested by Karthik Muralidharan, economics professor at Univeristy of California-San Diego, and others to the Government of Bihar in December 2011).

Second, rushing into a massive cash transfer program may complicate the Government’s ability to rectify problems on the fly, both politically and administratively.  The famous Brazilian cash transfer program, Bolsa Família, is often touted as the model for the cash transfer in India.  Lest history fall by the wayside, Bolsa Família grew out of a combination of other transfer programs that had started at the municipal and state levels and had been operating for several years prior to the launch of Bolsa Família.  These subnational cash transfer programs were then individually scaled up to the national level, and subsequently consolidated into Bolsa Família.  The Indian cash transfer program parallels the consolidation aspect of Brazil’s approach.  Nonetheless, the fact that cash transfers in Brazil started from the bottom and diffused upward and outward suggests that kinks in program administration could be smoothed out at smaller scales and the resultant successes could then be scaled up.  Of course, the evolution of Brazil’s cash transfer program is not the only path for implementation, but India’s top-down, rushed approach provides little space for weaknesses to be identified and rectified at the local level so that the most effective modalities of the program can be scaled nationally.

The Government’s ambitions of establishing a cash transfer system at the proposed size and scope should not be taken lightly.  As the saying goes, however, the devil is in the details.  To this end, the Government has not adequately considered the unintended welfare consequences of switching to cash and the complexities of implementing such a system on the impossibly rushed timeline and with the administrative capability that currently exists.  The point is not that migrating to a cash transfer system is necessarily a bad idea.  Rather, doing so in a measured way, with structured pilot testing that produces feedback that can inform a gradual expansion, could increase the likelihood that the cash transfer improves the functioning of the welfare system and thus works in favor of poor households across India.  The Government’s approach thus far indicates that India may not be able to capture the benefits that an effective cash transfer system has to offer.

[Cover Image Attribution: By L. Shyamal (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons]

]]> http://www.criticaltwenties.in/economicsocialpolicy/kitna-paisa-kiske-haath-how-much-money-in-whose-hands/feed 0 http://www.criticaltwenties.in/economicsocialpolicy/lets-talk-about-what-nandy-really-said http://www.criticaltwenties.in/economicsocialpolicy/lets-talk-about-what-nandy-really-said#comments Sun, 03 Feb 2013 04:02:18 +0000 Manav http://www.criticaltwenties.in/?p=5315 They say we live in a post-Darwinian world, and if you live in India, you would never doubt it. Here survival of the fittest has been replaced simply by survival of the richest. It is a dog-eat-dog world, which – if Ashis Nandy and Tarun Tejpal are to be believed – is a great thing, because every once in a while, the smaller dog succeeds in eating the larger one. But at the very outset, let me say three things. One, that the statements made by Nandy were meant to be absolutely un-casteist, and actually meant as arguments in favour of the oppressed classes (though in some warped, elitist kind of way). Second, if we are to even pretend to be a civilized society, then it would be monumentally stupid to debate whether he should be prosecuted for offending a section that he has spent his life defending. And finally, the truly interesting aspect of this whole fiasco is not what Nandy has a right to say (because that debate is quite one-sided), but it is what he actually said.

Let me first acknowledge that there is a lot of merit in what Nandy and Tejpal said at the Jaipur literature festival. India has indeed been, and continues to be a deeply hierarchical, unequal society with very little class mobility. And for a majority- who are on the brink of survival, it is nearly impossible to cross over to the fairer side of the green after even a lifetime of hard work and toil. But Nandy and Tejpal are not the first ones to have noticed that caste itself is a form of corruption. Fortunately, our founding fathers were acutely aware of this when they drafted the constitution, which is why they evolved various provisions for safeguarding basic rights for all citizens, and according special protection for those sections that had been suppressed for centuries. This is also why they injected the constitution with an extremely progressive and egalitarian soul in the form of the directive principles of state policy, which go so far as to say:

Article 38 (2): The State shall, in particular, strive to minimise the inequalities in income, and endeavour to eliminate inequalities in status, facilities and opportunities, not only amongst individuals but also amongst groups of people residing in different areas or engaged in different vocations.
Article 39 (b): that the ownership and control of the material resources of the community are so distributed as best to subserve the common good;
Article 39 (c) that the operation of the economic system does not result in the concentration of wealth and means of production to the common detriment;

In spite of these glorious ideals being enshrined in the supreme document of this country, policies that serve exactly the opposite purpose have been adopted in the name of ‘economic reforms’. Inequalities have actually increased, and poverty still remains alarmingly widespread after 65 years of independence. And the primary cause of this continued mockery of our constitution is the same entity that Tejpal calls a “class-equalizer”- i.e. corruption. Nandy, while giving the example of Sorabjee and himself engaging in an exchange of favours, was absolutely right in saying that our society has a very narrow definition of corruption, and does not recognize many institutionalized forms of the same. However, instead of elaborating on how these forms of corruption should be recognized as such and weeded out, Nandy conveniently assumed that they cannot (in fact, should not) be weeded out, and that to strive for a corruption-free society would be to strive for a dystopia. He then proceeded to sermonize on why corruption should instead be celebrated as a desirable imperfection in our society and how the ‘survival of this republic depends on it’.

But this was not the only statement that one of the most prominent sociologists of India made without any shred of empirical evidence. He started with his now infamous statement claiming that “most people caught for corruption are from the backward classes”, he denied the ‘myth’ of dynastic politics in India, celebrated the rise of Madhu Koda, Mayawati, and even Mrs. Indira Gandhi by describing how they had fought their way to the top. He also said that the amassing of wealth by Mulayam Singh, Mayawati, etc is only borne out of the noble intentions of defending their families from the desperation that their ancestors have faced. For some inexplicable reason, Nandy then claimed that Singapore is the only corruption-free country in the world (even though Denmark, Sweden, Finland and New Zealand all rank above it in the 2011 and 2012 corruption perception index released by Transparency International), and went on to say that “Singapore is a Draconian society” and that he would not like to live there. Well, with all due respect Mr. Nandy, perhaps you would prefer to live in a society that gives the elite (i.e. people like you) a natural advantage over everyone else, but shall we ask the other 90% whether they would prefer to live in the ‘imperfect utopia of India’ (as you call it), or the dystopia of a Singapore or a Sweden or a Finland?

Since Nandy and Tejpal have graciously accepted that their statements were not based on any facts or research, and were simply ‘ideas’ (how can you expect facts at a literary festival, folks!), I have just one simple question for both. Do they really think that the impoverished, oppressed masses of India think of corruption as an equalizing force? The farmer on the brink of a suicide after being denied a loan by a bribe-seeking bank official, the street vendor forced to pay a hafta to the policeman to avoid being beaten, the tribal forced out of his/her land due to a politician-mining nexus, and the Dalit who has to pay a bribe to register an FIR after the rape of his daughter by upper-caste goons. Do Mr. Nandy and Mr. Tejpal seriously think that all these people celebrate corruption, and think of it as an instrument for achieving equality?? Corruption is the abuse of power, and it will always favor the person with deeper pockets. Hence to argue that the powerless are beneficiaries of corruption, rather than victims, is to add insult to the injuries inflicted by centuries of injustice.

The essence of Nandy and Tejpal’s argument is very simple: The status quo suits us (the upper classes), and although we recognize that it is a form of corruption, we will not change it. So you (the lower classes) should stop complaining about corruption, and learn how to work the system. There is of course a clear reason why clever people like Nandy and Tejpal have chosen to advance such a specious argument- the fact that you need to take controversial and contrarian positions in order to stand out in the ‘intellectual’ community in India and abroad. And for them, this statement has served its purpose. They will be invited to more talks, discussions and literary festivals, and there will be endless discussions on television about them. But we would not be serving any purpose if we chose to buy into such baseless rhetoric. A spade needs to be called a spade, and the Nandy-Tejpal argument needs to be called self-serving and completely irrational.

Once, a bunch of young boys aged 5-7 were playing in their backyard when a young pup appeared. At first the boys were fascinated with it. They played with it, fed it and even cuddled it. Soon some older boys who the kids idolised came along and taunted the kids for being too soft and effeminate to be playing with a cute little pup. The boys with a confused and distorted view of fun and manliness began to treat the pup differently. They tied its hind legs together, through stones at it, dragged it behind their cycles and in the end sodomised it with a stick. When they got bored of it they dumped it on the streets for rats and vultures to feed on.

The boys turned older and became feral hyenas but the pup was replaced with a woman in a big white bus on Delhi’s glittering boulevards. What happened then was an atrocity that is a shameful indictment of your country, its culture and its times. That a country which has become numb to daily reports of gang rapes was forced to sit up, feel violated and outraged is testimony to how gruesome and brutal this particular incident was. The problem with our country is that either the young boys never grew up or continued to remain confused about their masculinity and how to express it.

It is tempting to blame the police and the establishment for what happened. But we would be barking up the wrong tree. Rape is not merely a function  of number of cops on the ground and number of rapists out there. Unfortunately, rape is not a bivariable equation capable of being regressed statistically to determine the number of cops you need to prevent rape. It is a multi-variable problem with indeterminate variables incapable of an overnight solution.

The problem our society faces is how to bring up our sons and mould their perception of themselves and women. We truly live in turbulent times. Old barriers of class and caste are being chipped away. Mass migration is happening from poorer parts of the country to the metros. The joint family with its traditional mores and notions of security (and oppression) is breaking down. Economic liberalization has causes mobility along caste, class and gender matrices. But the most important change I believe has been improvement in economic condition of women. Sure, women are still massively marginalized in the work place – both in the organized and unorganized sector. But never before in the short history of India have so many young women entered the urban work force as in the past 2 decades. With economic power comes liberty and the power to lead their lives with independence and dignity and their own terms. They work in BPOs, shopping malls, housekeeping, hotels and restaurants, in the government, banks and law firms. Essentially everywhere. There are more ‘visible’ now.

This visibility confuses the indian male. I can speak for the bad lands of the Delhi, Noida, Faridabad and Ghaziabad and Gurgaon – also called the NCR. Migrants from the hinterland are used to women not playing an important part in the house let alone in public spaces. As they work as bus conductors, taxi drivers and in other blue collar jobs they see themselves servicing young independent women whereas back in the outback they have never seen their mothers and sisters go out alone or talk to strangers. Suddenly they are not getting the respect they got merely for being men. They are professionals at an arms length relationship with  men and women who owe them nothing except for the bus fare. Back home, women were to be protected and shielded from outsiders, where in the big city women can go wherever they want whenever they want with just a cell phone and possibly a pepper spray at their bodyguards. It is unacceptable. How dare she ! Isnt she supposed to be at home and cook for the kids ? and she is out after dark watching movies, drinking and going to night clubs ! She should be taught a lesson ! And there you go…

But to blame migrants for rape is falling prey to xenophobic Thackerayism, especially in a place like Delhi where practically everyone is a migrant. Reports claim that majority of rapes happen within the home by people who are known to the victim. Games of power and subjugation begin at home and mostly go unreported. Marital rape is not even considered rape. Victims from all classes of society keep mum about incidents of sexual exploitation at home fearing loss of family honour. Even with a libertarian constitution which grants primacy to individual rights, the individual is subservient to the clan.

It is no different for white collar sexual offenders. The sanitised corporate office till now the monopoly of men has been ambushed by successful and motivated women. The engineering schools, B-schools, design schools and law schools have produced thousands of women staking a claim in the top echelons of the new economy. Sexual harassment at work place and sexism in more subtle ways are rampant.

The sad conclusion is that men from villages and big cities, poor and rich all have a reason to rape. Rape is a panacea to deep rooted insecurity. It reasserts power and authority. What they have lost in the market economy, what they have lost by displacement, what they have lost in opportunity and self worth can be reclaimed in the most primitive and visceral way. Hold her down, hit her, violate her and then throw her on the street for rats and vultures to feed on. It is a disgusting and contemptible mentality unbecoming of any civilization.

That the police should be more vigilant and increase patrolling and other measures goes without saying. If by these steps we can prevent even  one woman from being violated it is a victory. Because unlike other crimes, rape is more than a statistic. It is a trauma and personal grief that can only be imagined by us. I strongly advocate death punishment for rapists. Even more vital is the post trauma legal treatment. Police and court sensitisation towards the victims state of mind and her privacy are urgently needed. But unfortunately there is only so much the law can do. It’s up to us, how we bring up our sons and what values we instil in them. But till then don’t lock up your daughters because there are rapists out there. Teach them how to shoot the hyenas.

The Prime Minister, with whom my patience is running thin, carried on his near-perfect mime act on issues of any significance to the country and has directed the Home Minister to ensure that such issues do not recur. But is this the time for maintaining jurisdictional sanctity? Can the Prime Minister not for once be the leader that he is meant to be and say that he himself will not sign any files till he sees a concrete, multi-pronged, multi-ministerial action plan placed in front of him? Why can he not take a dramatic, leader-like action that will indicate how serious he actually is about crimes against women? Instead of expressing meaningless platitudes like “It is a heinous crime. It is very upsetting” he can actually do something about it. He is after all not a third-grade poet who is meant to ponder prosaically when an incident such as this happens. He is the Prime Minister of India for God’s sake.

And what about Sonia Gandhi, President of the Congress Party, arguably the most powerful person in the country. From all accounts, she has merely written to the Delhi Chief Minister and the Union Home Minister asking for immediate corrective and remedial action. And I am certain she will be using all her authority to ensure that these happen. But why not make all her actions public? Why not make a statement in Parliament inviting suggestions from all parties on concrete steps to be taken to prevent such recurrence? Why not stand up like a true leader and make this a cause that is worth fighting for? If not moral conscience, smart politics would demand this, and that’s an area in which she has certainly not been found lacking till date.

And what about the Home Minister? Like a true former policeman which he is proud of being, he suggested that not having tinted glasses in buses, along with a few other equally naive, myopic, short-run ideas was the grand solution. Now I don’t mean to sound impolite, but as my English teacher in school used to say, “We know you’re stupid. Don’t advertise.” Instead of taking silly knee-jerk measures, why does he not convene several public meetings where he can discern views from the people, from the women who have to use public transport in Delhi and women in other cities, towns and villages as to the problems they face and what solutions they think would work? And then why does he not sit with his ministerial colleagues from Law, HRD, Women and Child Development, Transport and come up with a basket of measures, short and long run, which will actually be the product of intensive and collective thinking rather than the output of a pea-sized brain of some ministerial official, or worse still, his own?

And what about us citizens? Gender sensitisation begins at home. We can ensure that the people around us respect women as equal citizens of the country, and by that I mean both men and women. Strive for more equal relationships within our families. Educate the girl child and make that our personal priorities. And educate the male child about the importance of women and the equal respect that they deserve. And as men, to not lech, stare, touch or molest as if it’s just okay. Pick up any one issue that concerns women and make it our own. And realise that this is not a women’s issue. It’s an issue that is at the heart of what India as a nation stands for. Because a country which cannot make its women and children feel safe is no country at all. It’s a hell-hole.

One final thought. Tomorrow the results of the Gujarat elections come out. If the media is really serious about the issue of rape and women’s security as they have claimed to be in the last 24 hours, I hope that at least one, or some of them give equal time to the woman, her struggle for her life, and how we as a nation can make India safe for our women, as they give to Narendra Modi and the self-anointed panel of psephologists analysing how the state of Gujarat is voting. Because the ascent of a new political leader or the continuance of an old one in one of 28 states in the country cannot be as important as the lives of our women. Because instead of trying to analyse hidden trends and discover complex patterns, they could do much better by grasping and responding to a simple realisation that’s staring them in the face: That crimes agains women can no longer be tolerated. The Munirka bus rape is the straw that has broken the camel’s back.

Knowing India, I doubt this or any of this will happen. We will forget. Because forgetting and moving on is what we’re best at doing.

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