A funfest for urban glam girls

Go for it, girls. Go have fun at your Slut Walk or “Besharmi Morcha” in Delhi. You have every right to wear what you want without being harassed. And there is a certain joy in needling the prudes who seem to rule our lives. Go get their goat!
The Slut Walk could be good fun. But let’s not lose perspective. It is not a movement to empower women in India.

It is like polishing a door knob when you don’t have a door, or even a roof over your head. What works as a political statement in Canada and Europe may seem outrageously irrelevant in India. Me-too feminism plucked from countries where women’s rights and gender equality is treasured doesn’t work for India, where women lack basic human rights.
Last week, a Thomson Reuters Foundation global poll named India as the fourth most dangerous place for women in the world, after Afghanistan, Congo and Pakistan. And that has nothing to do with what women wear. It is about women’s lack of choices in general — where there is no escape from violence. Unlike Afghanistan, Congo or Somalia (fifth on the shame list), India is not war-torn. It is just systematically violent towards its women through deeply entrenched social and cultural conditions. Apart from rape, murders, dowry deaths, honour killings and various forms of domestic abuse, our failure to check female infanticide and foeticide, or trafficking of women, or to provide women adequate healthcare and education have clinched our place in the top rung of the shame list.
Unfair, you say? Why, Indian women have cracked the glass ceiling in the corporate world and politics, you point out. Our President is a woman, as are the uncrowned leader of our government, the Lok Sabha Speaker and the Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha. We have four powerful women chief ministers in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu. Come on, every country has rapes and murders, why single us out?
Because it is not so much about stray incidents of crime as about the systematic violence against women that we sigh and accept. Girls and women are killed for dowry, for family honour, for not bearing a male child, for just being female in her mother’s womb or in the birthing chamber. Or simply allowed to die. Twice as many girls as boys die of common, treatable diseases like diarrhoea. And 75 per cent of unexplained baby deaths happen to girls. The UN Population Fund reports that thanks to foeticide and infanticide, we have lost close to 50 million girls in the past century.
Take Delhi, our centre of power and urban, educated cosmopolitanism. The provisional data of Census 2011 shows a pathetic gender ratio — only 866 girls per 1,000 boys, far below the national average of 914 girls. It shows how we use the tools of empowerment to disempower women. Instead of rooting out prejudice, our education, wealth and technological progress have made us its slaves. Sex-selective abortions are most prevalent among the educated, including in the posh areas of Delhi. I haven’t heard of any spirited march in Delhi against female foeticide and infanticide.
Anyway, I have a problem with branding Slut Walk Delhi as a march against sexual violence. Remember what the early feminists said? Rape is not about sex, it’s about power. It doesn’t matter what you wear, in the dark crevices of our savage patriarchal society, your body remains the conventional battleground for power politics. Elderly women are raped and killed for family feuds and property. Children, even infants, are raped in our perverse society. Dalit women are routinely raped by upper caste men. The dominance of a religious or caste group is often established by arbitrarily raping local women of the weaker sections. The inhuman violence on Muslim women during the Gujarat riots is just an example of this traditional power game.
And once violated, like our ancient foremothers, women often “choose” death over dishonour. Just this week, a 17-year-old girl killed herself after being raped in Baghpat, near Delhi. If a woman is raped, she is encouraged to die, or live largely as an outcast. As “soiled goods” she is routinely rejected by her “owners”, usually her husband and in-laws, sometimes even her father and brothers.
Besides, honour rapes still prevail in our villages — where a boy’s love affair with a higher caste girl is punished by the boy’s sister or mother being raped by upper caste men. Similarly, village justice can demand that a rapist’s wife or sister is raped by the victim’s brother or husband. In short, the rape victim is insignificant in a society that looks at rape as a currency of power.
If we wish to holler against rape, we must accept it as a vicious power game. Rape has very little to do with sex, and nothing to do with dress codes. Focusing minutely on the urban empowered woman’s right to sexy dressing trivialises the huge, old, bloodthirsty, hydra-headed monster that sexual violence in India actually is.
Which brings me to my other problem with Slut Walk Delhi as a political march: its attempt “to reclaim the word slut, to remove the shame, to replace it with pride!” Let’s not go into whether we had ever claimed the word slut in the first place, or if we need to be proud of being a slut. I just find reducing woman to slut doesn’t necessarily lend dignity to a movement that has for decades been crying itself hoarse about not making women into sex objects. And when at the ground level women are denied basic rights and looked upon as commodities in my country, do we have the luxury to flaunt ourselves as sexual objects just because we belong to a somewhat empowered crowd?
Besides, in a country where prostitutes have no rights or privileges, are usually not in it out of choice and are often victims of human trafficking networks who have been abducted or duped or just picked up as little girls, glamourising “slut” by dressing provocatively is like saying let them have cake. For example, a 2009 Central Bureau of Investigation report says that India has three million prostitutes, of whom about 40 per cent are children. That’s a lot of children in the flesh trade — and I doubt that they have any education or a choice in reclaiming any word, with pride or not.
So let the Slut Walk be a funfest — everyone deserves fun. But branding it as an empowerment mission is silly. In the fourth most dangerous country for women, we can’t really expect to protect ourselves with straps and thongs.

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