Chhi! All lies!” she said, jerking her head away, glaring at the ground in the distance. “Nothing like that happened!” I didn’t press her right then. Later on, I asked why she did not want to admit it. “Because it’s a basket of lies,” she snapped.
“In that case, why did you kill them in Behmai?”
“They were just terrible men. They tormented people.”
Even Phoolan Devi, the formidable Bandit Queen, did not want people to know that she had been raped. I was travelling with the slightly nervous, fun-loving, straight-talking, freshly reformed dacoit as she campaigned for a Lok Sabha seat in Uttar Pradesh. Through our several chats, she explained, among other things, why she was so annoyed with Shekhar Kapur and his film Bandit Queen, and how embarrassing it was to be depicted on screen as a gangrape victim. What would people back in her village say? Horror!
I was slightly taken aback. She did not mind being known as a killer, as a dacoit, as one who loots and maims and murders, she was not ashamed of being a gun-slinging criminal, or a jailbird. But she would be ashamed to be identified as a victim of gangrape? Yes, of course she would, she stated, surprised that I did not understand. But that was beyond her control, it was not her fault, I insisted. There she was a victim. And it explained her anger at being attacked and humiliated so badly, in a way it explained her own acts of terrible violence later on. Yes, she admitted, revenge played an important part in her life. Yes, she had been grievously wronged. Her acts of violence were justified. She would show them how they had attacked her first, how deeply she had been wronged, she would show them the film! That was Phoolan — passionate in everything, swinging from one extreme to the other depending on her mood right then.
So if the fearless queen of bandits was so scared of being identified as a rape victim, why would ordinary women with no guns come out as rape victims? In our culture, there is an uncomfortable silence around sex, sexuality and particularly sexual violence. We don’t talk about incest, we don’t talk about rape.
The social stigma that comes with rape is difficult to brush off, especially in a society where rape is more about family honour than about individual horror and pain, more about izzat than about injury.
By focusing on intangibles like dignity, humiliation and shame rather than on tangible crimes like aggravated assault or grievous bodily harm, we make rape not just a crime against a woman but a tool to dominate a caste, a community, a tribe or a clan with. The fear of disgrace keeps women from reporting rape, the fear of somehow being blamed for it, of not being believed, of being looked at as a disgusting partner in a sexual act, perhaps even as the instigator.
Blaming the victim is the easy way out — even for our leaders. Recently BJP’s Kailash Vijayvargiya, Madhya Pradesh’s industry minister, declared that if a woman crosses her limits or Lakshmanrekha she will be punished, just as Sita had been abducted by Ravana. And RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat has announced that only Western educated “India” had the problem of rape, good old “Bharat” cocooned within old norms and traditional values was quite rape free. Earlier, Mamata Banerjee, the first woman chief minister of West Bengal, had stated that the root cause is the fact that “boys and girls are mixing freely”. She had roared against the reporting of rape in the media — which was “destroying the culture of Bengal.”
So our powerful leaders believe that even talking about rape is shameful. Clearly Shashi Tharoor’s suggestion about naming the Delhi victim, though well intentioned, would not help. The stigma is too deep seated, too far-reaching. Naming a victim of rape is forbidden by law, unless she gives her consent. Because the odds are stacked against the rape victim, from the callous attitude of the police, our flawed rape laws, the insensitive handling by doctors, the prejudice of the investigators, lawyers and judges, right up to the suffocating stigma that binds it all. No wonder so few rapes are reported, and only 26 per cent of rape cases actually result in conviction.
Of course this attitude needs to change. The stigma must be transferred from the victim to the perpetrators. The rapist should be huddling in shame, not the victim. But it cannot be done by force, and not by further pressuring the already traumatised victims of rape. It can only be done by changing the attitude of society, by making men aware that they do not have a god-given right to make sexual demands on women.
Our attitude may not change as long as men are allowed to rape their wives — marital rape is not a crime in our country, if the wife is over 15 years old. It won’t change as long as men are allowed to molest, harass and humiliate women and we laugh it off as mere “eve teasing”.
In a patriarchal society where ideas of masculinity and honour are in a hopeless tangle, in a poverty-stricken yet increasingly aspirational country where the concept of maryada often degenerates into misogyny, sexual aggression by men is not frowned upon. Boys will be boys, we say.
We forget that sexual violence doesn’t begin with rape. It begins with a disrespect towards women and ends in their sadistic murder. Rape, all kinds, exist in between. Every rape is a crime but rapes exist on a graded plane of greater or lesser violence. And we must not group them all together as a sexual act — they are often murderous acts, like in the case of this Delhi student, or similarly tortured and murdered women like Thangjam Manorama killed by the Army in Manipur, Surekha Bhotmange and Priyanka Bhotmange killed by upper-caste goons in Khairlanji, or Munia Das, a ragpicker murdered by unknown rapists in Kolkata, for example.
While we are still fuming, while the government is scurrying to make the country safer for women and make justice more accessible to rape victims, let’s also try to change the attitude that underlies the violence. The honour trap must go, the silence around sexual violence must end. And the acceptable limit of “masculine” fun needs to be urgently examined.

The writer is editor of The Little Magazine. She can be contacted at: sen@littlemag.com