In an interview with IBNLive.com, Anna MM Vetticad, writer, journalist and social commentator argues that extensive media coverage of recent sexual harassment cases has led to greater awareness among both women and men about legal recourse. Here is the full text of the interview.
IBNLive.com: December 16, one year on: has there been any significant progress in gender justice in India?
Anna MM Vetticad: Absolutely and unequivocally, yes. It's important not to despair. On the downside is the horrible truth that cases of sexual violence against poor women and women in rural areas rarely get the kind of media and public attention that's been given to last year's December 16 gangrape, and cases of sexual violence against very rich women are rarely reported by the women themselves, yet we can't lose hope. The past year has ended the silence surrounding sexual violence at least among certain sections of our society. We must end the silence to end the violence. More women are speaking up about their personal experiences, every woman needs to speak up.
Extensive media coverage has led to greater awareness among both women and men about the legal recourse that is already available to victims of violence, and the new laws that we need. To my mind, the fact that the number of reported rapes in Delhi has more than doubled in the past year, as mentioned in this morning's The Indian Express, does not for a second suggest that more women are getting raped in the Indian capital but that more women are gathering the courage to report theses crimes and/or that less police personnel now have the audacity to refuse to lodge an FIR.
The other change is that the grading of violence that one saw immediately after the December 16 case has marginally, very marginally, declined. Last year at this time I remember hearing people make repulsive remarks such as, "If they'd just raped her and left her there we could still forgive them, but why did they have to stick that rod up her?" as though we'd become so inured to violence against women, as though our threshold of tolerance had increased so much that we could be outraged only if the crime we were hearing about was more gruesome than the last, more frightening, more barbaric. As the year draws to a close though, we've had two high-profile cases of women speaking up against sexual harassment at the workplace. That brave girl from Tehelka has ended up introducing digital rape into the national discourse on sexual violence in this country. Because of her, the Supreme Court's guidelines are now a part of the national vocabulary and more awareness has been created about those 1997 Vishakha guidelines than 16 years of media write-ups and activism by women's groups have done. A law intern's complaint against Justice AK Ganguly has shown us that even the Supreme Court has feet of clay and has not been following its own guidelines on how offices should deal with workplace harassment. The issue of consent is being widely discussed causing great discomfort to vast sections of conservatives. Workplace harassment that does not get to the stage of actual rape is something many people would consider mild, yet today it's being discussed on prime-time television and on the front pages of newspapers.
Besides, as an Indian I feel great pride in the fact that ordinary men and women came out on the streets in such large numbers to protest against sexual violence after the December 16 tragedy, and these members of the public in partnership with the media compelled our politicians to give us a new law on sexual violence. It's not like India is the only country dealing with this terrible problem, but where else in the world have there been such massive anti-rape protests that have been sustained for a year now, shifting from the streets to drawing rooms and classrooms as has been persistently noted by our newsrooms? Where else?
Is it enough? No. Yet these little drops in the ocean must be counted as a sea change considering what a patriarchal, conservative country ours is. We Indians tend to be cynical about ourselves, but even the most cynical Indian must acknowledge that here for a change is something from which the rest of the world must learn from us.
IBNLive.com: Do you feel safe?
Anna MM Vetticad: No I don't. One year is hardly enough to change a society so much that I can say I feel safe. I do however speak up more than I used to about this lack of safety. I have always considered myself very vocal about women's rights, yet in the past year I've realised how much I have kept to myself. In January 2013, an American website asked me to write about what it is to be a woman in Delhi in the light of the Delhi gangrape. I was initially reluctant because I didn't want right-wingers in India accusing me of washing our dirty linen on a foreign website, but I agreed because I felt that our fight in India is far more important than any right-winger's opinion of me. As I wrote the article recounting my personal experience of a lifetime of sexual abuse in public spaces in the Capital, I found myself fighting to hold back the tears. It occurred to me then that this was the first time I was talking about these matters to anyone other than my family at such length, in black and white, in cold, harsh words staring back at me from my laptop screen. When I typed out "if I went to the Delhi cops every time I was sexually harassed, I'd have no time for anything else", I cried in spite of myself.
As a journalist, I don't like talking about myself. As a journalism teacher, I repeatedly tell my students to avoid drawing unnecessary attention to themselves. "You are an observer of the story, you are not the story," I often say to them. Yet as an exception, I've brought my own personal experience into this interview because many well-meaning men friends don't entirely understand how extremely, painfully difficult it is to speak up about such matters. I want you to know that it's tougher than you can possibly imagine.
IBNLive.com: Has the mindset of the Indian male changed?
Anna MM Vetticad: No of course not. How can the mindset of the average Indian male possibly have changed in just one year? What has changed though is that the good men among us have become more vocal, and the misogynistic men and women - yes, I did say misogynistic women - are being shamed on public platforms more often than before. Also, the average urban middle-class Indian man is being compelled to think of issues like consent and what constitutes sexual harassment at the workplace, issues that not enough of them concerned themselves with in the past. The discussion will penetrate rural areas and poorer families only when the media becomes less urban-centric and middle-class-centric, when awareness building by the government becomes active and when police action becomes swift. Still, the past year has definitely made a difference that needs to be noted.
IBNLive.com: Do you feel Indian society is pro-male or is male dominated?
Anna MM Vetticad: Of course it is. That's like asking, do you think Delhi is the capital of India? The answer is not a matter of opinion, it's a matter of fact. This male dominance is illustrated by the fact that even in a year when sexual violence and women's rights have been so widely discussed, the Hindi film industry insulted us with a film like Grand Masti which demeans women in the worst way possible. When I blogged an angry review of Grand Masti and slammed it on a TV show, the writer of the film Milap Zhaveri wrote to me on Twitter and ended a long discussion with: "I do not wish to fight ot argue. The film is a history creating Blockbuster n audiences r loving it all India. So cheers to u!" (sic) Why do you think he was so gung-ho about the subject on a public platform despite the widespread condemnation of his film's abject commodification of women? Because he was obviously convinced that I represent a small minority of decent, increasingly vocal human beings out there, whereas in his mind the majority is represented by the male-dominated hordes who went to watch his film, who clapped at Grand Masti's rape joke, who applauded the manner in which one of its dialogues reduced women to a sum of their body parts and made it a box-office success. Our society, our government, our film industry, our film-viewing audiences, our judiciary and police, our offices are all male-dominated and pro-male.
IBNLive.com: Do you fear travelling in public transport?
Anna MM Vetticad: Yes I do. I realise I should get over this fear because the more we women venture out into public spaces, the easier will life be for the women who are already there, but my experiences of the past refuse to recede from my memory. For practical reasons it's difficult for me to use public transport. The nearest Metro station is about 7km away from my house. Although I live in a relatively upmarket colony in the city, the street in front of my house has neither a footpath nor even lights at most times. Autorickshaws are hard to come by. On the only occasion when I did take an autorickshaw down the poorly lit, poorly policed 7km stretch to the Metro station, the driver misbehaved with me and threatened to leave me on that lonely road. When I told a male colleague about this once, he implied that I was exaggerating. Well, here's a suggestion: wear a burqa, pretend to be a woman, and try being a woman in crowded and lonely public places in Delhi for a day. Then perhaps you will believe me, my friend.
IBNLive.com: Do you feel the administration has been unresponsive on women's security?
Anna MM Vetticad: Without a doubt. When my late colleague Soumya Vishwanathan was shot dead in 2008, the then Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit's reflex action was to say that Soumya had been "adventurous" by being out that late at night. Could it get worse than that? Like most of our politicians, the police too tend to be insensitive to women's issues. In the past year though, our major political parties have come to the reluctant realisation that the right-thinking sections of the public and the media will not relent on this matter. That's a positive sign. We need to be careful though about any effort by political parties to use us - and by us I mean feminists, and by feminists I mean all rights-conscious men and women - for their electoral gains. The BJP's effort to turn the Tehelka case into a BJP-versus-Congress battle is a case in point. We need to be vigilant.
IBNLive.com: Has the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013 ensured gender justice?
Anna MM Vetticad: Too little time has passed since its passage for me to able to answer that question. One thing is for sure: although it does not take some of the more revolutionary steps suggested by the Justice Verma Committee, the Act itself remains an important step towards ensuring gender justice. For instance, the Tehelka case would not have been technically considered rape under our earlier law, but now is because of the new amendment.
IBNLive.com: What is your suggestion that we could include in the AGENDA FOR CHANGE charter?
Anna MM Vetticad: According to press reports, the Rs 1,000 crore Nirbhaya Fund set up by the Central Government remains untouched even after all these months. I'd like to propose that this fund should be used for a nationwide awareness-building and gender sensitisation campaign across villages, towns and cities. The money should be used to conduct periodic workshops in offices, introduce gender sensitisation into school curricula from kindergarten, public service messages should be splashed across the print and electronic media, and a strategic, well-planned gender sensitisation programme should be designed to target village panchayats, state and national-level politicians, political parties, the police, judiciary and media. There is no magic wand that will end sexual violence, there are a million short-term measures that need to be taken immediately, but the only long-term solution to this horrific, all-pervasive problem is gender sensitisation and education.
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