Impunity of Law and Custom: Stripping and Parading Women in India

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