Sexual violence in rural India draws on hierarchies of land, caste, patriarchy

 source : indianexpress.com

Hierarchies of caste, class, and gender intersect to form a cocktail of horrors for the women of rural India — we must understand these nuances in order to form any policy that meaningfully tackles gender-based violence in India.

Since the Bhanwari Devi rape case in 1992 and the Khairlanji rape and massacre in 2006 to the Hathras case in 2020, successive Central and state governments have failed to address sexual violence as the multi-dimensional issue that it is. Hierarchies of caste, class, and gender intersect to form a cocktail of horrors for the women of rural India — we must understand these nuances in order to form any policy that meaningfully tackles gender-based violence in India.

Caste is the fault line that runs through rural India, the parts I call home. My constituency is in the rural and agrarian district of Ambedkar Nagar, with parts that lie in its much more famous neighbour, Ayodhya. I grew up in the Ambedkar Nagar (then part of Faizabad district) of the 1980s, where gunda raj was the only raj. A lot of that has changed now, due, in part, to an increased police presence and a steady urbanisation of people’s aspirations. But what has remained constant is rural India’s obsession with the caste order. This is how society has functioned for millennia: The lower castes have served the upper castes as potters, labourers, masons and cleaners, while the upper castes work to keep the status quo, adopting a few lower-caste families along the way as serfs in the world’s oldest feudal system.

In the political economy of post-Independence India, land is the currency that reigns supreme in the hinterlands. Land is class, power and honour. Its exclusive ownership is the basis of maintaining the caste order. The dominant castes in a particular region have traditionally been the largest landowners, and the benefits of the Green Revolution and the neo-liberal economic order have disproportionately benefited them and seldom the landless labourers who belong overwhelmingly to the lower castes.

But the post-Independence politics of Bahujan-Dalit mobilisation began challenging these ancient hierarchies. The reservation guaranteed by Babasaheb Ambedkar witnessed an emergence of a politically and economically influential sub-caste of Dalits in each state of the country. With the advent of Bahujan politics in Uttar Pradesh, oppressed castes found themselves represented in positions of power. This was an affront to the existing order. As a highly coveted resource, land is a flashpoint of conflict: In the Khairlanji rape and massacre, the upper castes retaliated brutally and bestially against the Bhotmanges, a Scheduled Caste family in the village, after the Bhotmanges filed a police complaint in relation to a land dispute.