At a recent talk, Kavita Krishnan explained that India’s anti-rape movement sought to confront the multiple contexts of gender-based violence

Krishnan, Kavita

South Asia, LSE

LSE Research Online

2013-10-9Freedom without fear: Reflections on India’s anti-rapemovementblogs.lse.ac.uk /southasia/2013/10/09/freedom-without-fear-reflections-on-indias-anti-rape-movement/At a recent talk, Kavita Krishnan explained that India’s anti-rape movement sought to confront the multiplecontexts of gender-based violence. Last week, LSE’s Gender Institute hosted a talk with Kavita Krishnan, Secretary of the All-India ProgressiveWomen’s Association, on India’s anti-rape movement following the brutal rape of a student in Delhi in December2012. Addressing a packed room, Krishnan reflected on the experiences of anti-rape activists, the wider questionsabout women’s freedom that the movement raised, and the need for greater transnational feminist solidarity.Kavita Krishnan during an anti-rape protest at India Gate, New Delhi.Krishnan explained that one of the movement’s first challenges was to jolt discourse following the student’s rape anddeath out of the realm of patriarchy. Initial condemnations against sexual violence focused on protecting andavenging women, and sought to take away women’s freedoms under the guise of securing them. Activists thereforedemanded ‘freedom without fear’ rather than ‘protection’.The movement was also quickly forced to confront the broader realities of gender-based violence in India. Accordingto Krishnan, in addition to agitating against rape, activists began to address sexual violence in multiple contexts:rapes by security forces in Kashmir in the name of curbing insurgency; control of women’s sexuality as a way tomaintain the caste system; rape as a form of discipline used by feudal entities to assert their entitlement overwomen’s bodies and labour.As protests continued through the early part of this year, the movement also had to challenge the profiling of certaincommunities (e.g. Muslim men, migrant workers) as sexual aggressors by pointing out that women, too, are migrantworkers, and that some of the worst gender-based violence occurs in middle-class homes. Krishnan also describedhow the movement challenged the positions of khap panchayats (caste-based village councils), which havepreviously blamed women for the crime of rape and been involved in ‘honour’ killings in Haryana with the support oflocal politicians and the police.1/2Anti-rape activists also had to challenge attempts by different political actors to hijack the anxiety around sexualviolence to use for their own agendas, whether communal, economic or otherwise. For example, Krishnan recalledRSS chief Mohan Bhagwat’s controversial statement – “[rapes] hardly take place in Bharat, but they frequently occurin India” – that sought to draw distinctions between traditional and westernised India, and sparked anger againstpolitical hypocrisy.In this context, Krishnan argued that useful women’s movements have to pose complex problems and emphasisethat there are no “short-cut” answers. She felt India’s anti-rape movement had demonstrated that feministmovements could retain complexity even while being accessible and engaging in public dialogue. “We had a hugeresponse when we unpacked [the issues] and people were grateful to hear what we had to say—people aren’t onlylooking for simple sound bites,” she added.Throughout her talk, Krishnan shared images from the movement on the streets of India, including photographsshowing Kashmiri students protesting custodial rapes; women holding up posters calling for the death penalty forthose convicted of rape; and activists remembering Soni Sori and Bilquis Bano, rape survivors who did not seeadequate justice. She also described how unprecedented anti-rape protests occurred on January 26, India’sRepublic Day, which is usually given over to patriotism. According to Krishnan, seasoned women’s rights activistswere hesitant to protest on Republic Day, but many first-time protestors were insistent that they wanted to take to thestreets on that day, “to put the public back in the republic”.Krishnan also called for the women’s movement to be seen in broader contexts. She pointed out that gender-basedviolence in India is often explained in Marxist terms that point to feudal legacies as the structural basis of genderinequality and rape. But Krishnan called for this argument to be problematised, and said that gender-based violenceshould be seen in the context of neoliberal economic policies, whereby sexual violence facilitates the way for globalcapital to exploit Indian women’s labour by playing on their specific vulnerabilities, including sex, caste and poverty.She also called for this kind of gender-based violence to be acknowledged as a global phenomenon, citing recentexamples of comments by Republican Senators in the United States and ‘slutwalks’ in Canada.To conclude, Krishnan asked how the anti-rape movement could be sustained as a political agenda. To startanswering her question, she suggested that the movement’s call for ‘freedom’ should be about more than womendressing as they please without inviting rape—“it should be about other kinds of autonomy, looking at freedom indifferent contexts.”Copyright © 2016 London School of Economics2/2

Freedom without fear: reflections on India’s anti-rape movement

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