As India went into a nationwide lockdown to fight the Coronavirus pandemic, caste animosity continued its rampage and destroyed the lives of thousands of Dalit persons across the country. The book No Lockdown on Caste Atrocities: Stories of Caste Crimes during the COVID-19 Pandemic produced by Dalit Human Rights Defenders network (DHRDNet) tells stories of 60 such cases of caste crimes that took place while the country was under lockdown in order to deconstruct the psycho-social and legal dynamics that perpetuate caste violence.DALIT HUMAN RIGHTS DEFENDERS NETWORK (DHRDNet) is a coalition of over 1000 Dalit human rights defenders from across India. The main objective of DHRDNet is to create an efficient network of leading Dalit Human Rights Defenders to combat the rights abuses and to ensure that antidiscrimination mechanisms are properly and thoroughly implemented.SALMA VEERARAGHAV is a certified Communications professional from Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. She is the Founder of C4C, and has over two decades of work experience with International NGOs, domestic NGOs, Television Industry and the Education sector.
In the mid 1970s, at the peak of the women’s movement, feminist activism and research opened the door to questions that are still pressing today. While sexual violence has gained public awareness and become a subject in academic debate, efforts to understand and strategies to prevent this form of violence remain inadequate. Who are the perpetrators? How is sexual violence tied to other forms of violence? What are the consequences for individual victims and societies?Compiled by the International Research Group ‘Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict’ (SVAC), this volume takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding wartime sexual violence. Its enquiry employs four key relationships: War/Power, Violence/Sexuality, Gender/Engendering and Visibility/Invisibility. Through these, the authors identify gaps in existing knowledge to develop a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the field.This volume is the result of long-standing cooperation. The International Research Group ‘Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict’ (SVAC) is a network of interdisciplinary scholars and NGO experts founded in October 2010. Sociologists, philosophers, historians, literary and legal scholars as well as NGO professionals from Europe, the US, Asia and Africa bring together empirical and theoretical studies focusing on sexual violence in different theatres of armed conflict. The group compares source material and promotes the systematic development of research questions and methods.GABY ZIPFEL is a Founder of the International Research Group ‘Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict’ (SVAC). She is a Senior Researcher at the Hamburg Foundation for the Advancement of Research and Culture in Germany, and was previously an editor of Mittelweg 36, the journal of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. She is also a member of the Eurozine Advisory Board.REGINA MÜHLHÄUSER is a Senior Researcher at the Hamburg Foundation for the Advancement of Research and Culture and an Associate Researcher at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. She is a Founder of the International Research Group ‘Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict’, and has previously worked at the Nazi concentration camp memorial sites in Neuengamme and Ravensbruck.KIRSTEN CAMPBELL is a Reader in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London, where she teaches sociology of law and social theory. She is the Principal Investigator of ‘The Gender of Justice’ project, which examines the prosecution of sexual violence in armed conflict under international criminal law, focusing upon the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
The Sexual Violence and Impunity in South Asia research project (coordinated by Zubaan and supported by the International Development Research Centre) brings together, for the first time in the region, a vast body of knowledge on this important – yet silenced – subject. Six country volumes (one each on Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and two on India) comprising over fifty research papers and two book-length studies detail the histories of sexual violence and look at the systemic, institutional, societal, individual and community structures that work together to perpetuate impunity for perpetrators.Disputed Legacies focuses on Pakistan, examining law, pedagogy, medical practice and the situations that arise when ‘secular’ law comes into conflict with traditional practice and belief. The contributors to this volume trace the often-troubled interaction between the state and its women citizens and examine the structures and social systems that enable impunity for perpetrators of sexual violence to gain strength.CONTRIBUTORS: Sahar Zareen Bandial | Nazish Brohi | Iftikhar Firdous | Huma Qurban Fouladi | Neelam Hussain | Hooria Hayat Khan | Zainab Zeeshan Malik | Noreen Naseer | Zahaid Rehman | Fahmida Riaz | Rubina Saigol | Zahra Shah | Sarah Zaman | Afiya Shehrbano Zia | Maliha Zia
The Sexual Violence and Impunity in South Asia research project (coordinated by Zubaan and supported by the International Development Research Centre) brings together, for the first time in the region, a vast body of knowledge on this important – yet silenced – subject. Six country volumes (one each on Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and two on India) comprising over fifty research papers and two book-length studies detail the histories of sexual violence and look at the systemic, institutional, societal, individual and community structures that work together to perpetuate impunity for perpetrators.Breaching the Citadel showcases new and pathbreaking research on the structures that contribute towards creating and sustaining impunity for perpetrators of sexual violence. Focusing on medical protocols, the functioning of the law, the psycho-social making of impunity, the media., history and current politics, the book makes a valuable addition to work on Kashmir, the Northeast of India, Chhattisgarh and other regions of violence that are discussed in its sister publication, Fault Lines of History. This book is a must-read for students of women and gender studies, conflict, development, history, current politics and sexuality studies.CONTRIBUTORS: Temsula Ao | Divya Arya | Urvashi Butalia | Uma Chakravarti | Rajashri Dasgupta | Padma Bhate-Deosthali | Neha Dixit | Bani Gill | Vrinda Grover | Suzette Jordan | Christine Marrewa Karwoski | Laxmi Murthy | Farah Naqvi | Kavita Panjabi | Jagadeesh Narayan Reddy | Sangeeta Rege | Meena Saraswathi Seshu | Navsharan Singh | Shobna Sonpar
In this essay, Pratiksha Baxi explores the modes by which the law addresses stripping and parading as a political ritual of atrocity in India at three registers: the naming of the spectacular violence by law; the naming of sites of such corporeal performances in legally plural settings; and identifying the circuits of power that are activated to immunize communities and institutions from naming these acts of injustice.She illustrates the history of protests against sexual harassment, drawing on watershed legal cases and amendments, starting from the protests by women’s group against the rape of underage tribal girl Mathura in 1979, to nation-wide protests against the Nirbhaya rape case in 2012. Baxi draws extensively on the legal proceedings of Maya Tyagi’s sexual assault case (Sheo Kumar Gupta v State of Uttar Pradesh) and on the case of a young Hindu widow, S, who was sexually assaulted and paraded in her local community after she married a Muslim man (Miss M.S. Annaporani v State of UP). She examines the remnants of colonial law, particularly the laws of “divine displeasure” and “outraging a woman’s modesty” to see how mythic temporalities—like that of Draupadi from Mahabharta, in Mrs. Tyagi’s case—are evoked.Baxi argues, using this framework, that the stripping and parading of women is constitutive of a public spectacle in which the victim is put on display as a degraded object, having been stripped literally and symbolically of all that is social. The justificatory discourse of such violence constitutes its victims as transgressive subjects who deserve the violence by evoking the language of law or custom. Elaborating on various legal amendments and introductions to judgments, Baxi concludes with analyzing the failings of these in practice. The processes of according dignity remain fraught, she says, when courts insist on hypertechnicalities hollowing the law of its constitutional content
Gazala Peer’s essay, written against the backdrop of militarization and the existing Armed Forces Special Powers Act in Jammu & Kashmir, explores obstacles faced by survivors of sexual violence in seeking redress when the perpetrators of this violence are members of the armed forces. Through cross-cultural comparisons, Peer describes the extent to which gendered sexual violence is used by nation states in war and conflict situations, and the culture of impunity that accompanies this violence – conditions that have existed, too, in Kashmir since the onset of armed struggle against the Indian state in the early 1990s. The essay establishes the role of Indian authorities in signaling impunity to their armed forces in Kashmir, and goes on to investigate the procedure and function of court martials as justice delivery systems for survivors of sexual violence.Since AFSPA was imposed on Kashmir, the Indian government has not granted sanction for the prosecution of any armed personnel in any court of law. Although in principle the provision of prosecuting army personnel under court martial trials does exist, Peer questions whether these trials, taking place within the structure of the army itself, can ever be a substitute for trial in civil courts. To this end, Peer closely examines the context and process of the court martial, arguing that this system, in cases of sexual assault and violence perpetrated by its forces (which the army views as “breaches of discipline”), is disposed to be lenient toward the perpetrators, maintaining martial impunity.Finally, to highlight the hostile and alienating nature of the court martial trial to survivors of sexual violence, and questioning the system’s ability to deliver any kind of justice at all, Peer walks the reader through the experience of four such survivors. Their testimonies and interviews raise serious questions on the basic norms of justice and fair trial vis-à-vis cases of sexual violence tried under AFSPA.
The narrative of Chhattisgarh's indigenous population is one of violence, displacement, and as this essay will explore, several cases of sexual assault. The authors trace sexual violence and repression at the hands of the police, the Salwa Judum, and the state and central governments, all of which have enjoyed a great degree of impunity in the region.The conflict between the state and the left-wing insurgent groups has created an environment of fear, and with it a number of impediments to the documentation of sexual violence in the affected areas. It is in this vein that the essay traces the stories of Soni Sori and Meena Xalxo as two out of many cases of torture and extrajudicial murder, most of which do not emerge into the dominant narrative. The essay also analyses the circumstances and effects of migration on the people that did manage to flee the conflict-ridden zones, as well as those who were forced to move to the Judum camps where living conditions were abysmal.Guneet Ahuja and Parijata Bhardwaj are lawyers who have fought for the implementation of adivasi rights, and this piece relies on sources both 'official' and oral, which when taken together are telling of the extent of violence occurring in the region. The essay is a detailed analysis of what happens when authorities dismiss human lives as mere impediments to development, and state forces reject a distinction between civilians and warring groups. It concludes with a call to end excessive military campaigns against the state's own people and engage with the cause of the Maoist struggle, and, very significantly, to provide reparations and fundamental rights to those who have suffered for many, many long years.
Uma Chakravarti’s introduction to Fault Lines of History: The India Papers 2 uses a brief history of protest in the north-eastern states of India to illustrate the contract between the state, the army and the rule of law. Detailing the spread of AFSPA as a result and a feature of this contract, Chakravarti points to particular building blocks in the story of resistance in the area — the case of Manorama, Irom Sharmila’s hunger strike, the naked protest by imas in Manipur among others — and castigates mainstream state theorists’ neglect of AFSPA’s existence and growing application as a tool of oppressive state-building. She explains how the postcolonial state’s painting of AFSPA and militarisation, and the accompanying conflicts, as ‘states of exception’ is key to the contract, which is characterised by the tension between the rule of law and the state’s avowal of sovereign emergency.The chapter provides a valuable cross-section of the volume, summarising each author’s argument while drawing connections between them and larger themes of impunity, militarisation, conflict, revolution, state (un)accountability, ‘security’ and feminist scholarship. She interweaves material on militarised regions in the north-east of India, Kashmir and Chhattisgarh with work on caste-based structures of violence built on and around Dalit bodies, as well as on stripping and parading of women’s bodies as ritual humiliation, to highlight the implications of an aberrant state wielding its impunity as a precise and wide-ranging weapon.
This essay puts forward a series of accounts centred around the different manifestations of sexual violence in the lives of Dalit women. Unlike in the legal world, in these accounts lines between methods of assault and degrees of injury emerge blurred, and many of them remain unreported or have otherwise not been disclosed by the survivors.
Exposing the vulnerability of Dalit women to both gender-based exploitation and caste-based violence, the essay investigates the threats that follow the women into their homes, their workplace, and the streets. It also looks at the ways in which the survivors’ voice is silenced, time and again, by the authority of the ruling caste. Covering the many different structures that enable and even perpetuate such violence, the essay focuses in particular on the jogini system that legitimises prostitution even as it creates a circle of exploitation and social discrimination. This leads to an analysis not only of the incidents and functions of sexual violence, but also of the consequences that have to be borne by the survivors alone.
The authors explore different kinds of exploitative structures to identify ways in which they hamper women's claims over their bodily integrity, dignity and privacy. They show how the upper-caste discourse of a Dalit woman's sexual availability, along with the impunity for sexual crimes committed against them, is dangerous on multiple levels. It is the study of the contributing factors to this discourse, coupled with the functions and social effects of this particular kind of sexual violence, that the essay concerns itself with.
With the Indo-Naga peace negotiations going into their twentieth year and no concrete resolution in sight, the area stands witness to many dying hopes. In this chapter, Dolly Kikon takes an insider's view to re-contextualise incidents of violence in the conflict-ridden terrain of Nagaland. The essay is a product of on-field research and experiences as it analyses the social and legal consequences of sexual violence that exist in the area. It is a singular analysis of Naga society, in that it tracks the different spaces that a survivor of such violence must operate in as it delves into the power relations that characterise each one. It is in this context that the story of one such survivor, called Beth, emerges. Beth's account speaks about the emergence of a culture of impunity that is embedded in the social relationships of Naga society. By locating violence inside the home, the essay investigates these relationships as well as the processes through which such impunity has become an obstacle for women's rights and justice. The area of focus is the Naga woman and her experiences of occupying a space that is fraught with conflict and sexual abuse. This figure is studied as an often-neglected survivor of cultural violence, whose voice is constantly suppressed by the masculine gaze, be it of the insurgent elements or the state armed forces. The essay is replete with real-life experiences and accounts, as it studies the forms of masculinity and suppression that have become pervasive in conflict zones where over the years violence has become naturalised beyond belief.
With the Indo-Naga peace negotiations going into their twentieth year and no concrete resolution in sight, the area stands witness to many dying hopes. In this chapter, Dolly Kikon takes an insider's view to re-contextualise incidents of violence in the conflict-ridden terrain of Nagaland. The essay is a product of on-field research and experiences as it analyses the social and legal consequences of sexual violence that exist in the area. It is a singular analysis of Naga society, in that it tracks the different spaces that a survivor of such violence must operate in as it delves into the power relations that characterise each one. It is in this context that the story of one such survivor, called Beth, emerges. Beth's account speaks about the emergence of a culture of impunity that is embedded in the social relationships of Naga society. By locating violence inside the home, the essay investigates these relationships as well as the processes through which such impunity has become an obstacle for women's rights and justice. The area of focus is the Naga woman and her experiences of occupying a space that is fraught with conflict and sexual abuse. This figure is studied as an often-neglected survivor of cultural violence, whose voice is constantly suppressed by the masculine gaze, be it of the insurgent elements or the state armed forces. The essay is replete with real-life experiences and accounts, as it studies the forms of masculinity and suppression that have become pervasive in conflict zones where over the years violence has become naturalised beyond belief.
Two prominent protests in Manipur by women in recent years, one an individual one and the other a collective one, have brought to national attention the brutalities committed by the armed forces on ordinary citizens under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act.
This essay highlights what those protests mean for peace in Manipur, and how women have played a critical role in exposing the impunity with which human rights are violated under the exceptional circumstances created by the AFSPA. It also questions the unethical nature of militarization and the patriarchal nature of the State.
Broadly containing two segments, it gives a background to Irom Sharmila’s protests and her reasons for choosing hunger strike as her method of protest. The discourse of conscience and Satyagraha that Sharmila evokes is brought out through interviews. This is followed by an analysis of the 2004 public disrobing by the Meira Paibis, in protest against the rape and murder of a young woman by the personnel of the Assam Rifles.
The essay shows the inversions brought about by both protests via a comparison between Irom Sharmila’s prolonged hunger strike against an exceptionally violent law, and the Indian Army Rape Us protests by the Meira Paibis. Both challenge the division between the public and the private, holding the state publicly accountable for atrocities committed in private. Food and clothing, one a biological necessity and the other an important social norm, are given up by the protestors. According to Mehrotra, this shows the power of the human body generally, and the female body particularly, to formulate and transmit subversive messages. She finds that underlying the protests is a common thread of rebuilding Manipur out of all the chaos.