Riot cheerleaders: The anomaly of Hindu women in violence
Once only passive witnesses to public violence, Hindu Gujarati women have taken a prominent role in the ongoing attacks on Muslims in the state. While the roots of this phenomenon are complex, many of them emerged from the social-political context of the past twenty years — in particular, the anti-reservation riots of the 1980s.
A disturbing feature of the ongoing communal violence in Gujarat has been the fervent participation of entire Hindu families in acts of arson, looting and brutality. The active involvement of women, especially middle-class, upper-caste women, needs explanation. Ahmedabad has been witness to the changing nature of communal violence correspondingly accompanied by the geographical spread of violence beyond the traditional confines of the strifetorn walled city to middle-class locales.
For some years, particularly after the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, it has been clear that communal riots were not the spontaneous outpourings of mass rage manifested as random acts of arson and looting and untargeted murder. In the current Gujarat case, this element of spontaneity has been ruled out to the extent that the bloodshed is being referred to as a pogrom against Muslims or ethnic cleansing.
Indisputably, such violence is accompanied by planned mobilisation. However, is the mobilisation of Hindu women by the Sangh Parivar sufficient explanation for the extent of women's attendance in the unparalleled violence in the state? Tanika Sarkar and others have provided valuable insights into the emergence of a women's movement within the Hindu right and have explained to some extent the tenor of change in the cultural world of upper-caste, urban, middle-class life. This has led to a reassessment of comfortable assumptions about women's relationship with violence, religion and politics. The limitation of such analysis is that it is locked into the specificities of Hindu right-wing ideology and politics in India beginning from the early 1900s. While this study is helpful in illuminating the large-scale contribution of Hindu women to the Ram Janmabhoomi movement (including the destruction of the Babri Masjid), it does not explain the degree of their direct participation in violent activity in Gujarat. How then can we understand women in their nightdresses coming out on to the terraces of their houses, egging their menfolk on, throwing stones at the houses of Muslims and turning a blind eye to the horrifying extent of sexual violence perpetrated against Muslim women? (A compelling account of the last is The Survivors Speak, Citizen's Initiative, Ahmedabad, 16 April 2002.)
The sight of women involved in riots leads to a questioning of some of the existing approaches to the understanding of Hindu women's militancy. Explanation for the normalisation of such violence as a social activity is needed. The transformation of women as political activists is not insignificant; their participation in communal violence is extremely disconcerting. In Sarkar's own line of reasoning, it is easy to explain the assumption of militant roles of women without a violation of the norms of 'Hindu' womanhood. This explains the consent to violence by the males in their community and female participation in public protests. It may even explain women's engagement as rabble-rousers in militant Hindu organisations. Nevertheless, it will stop short of explaining actual participation in violence.
This seemingly novel phenomenon has to be located in a social and political context, particularly the history of upper-caste, middle-class, urban mobilisation against affirmative action in the late 1980s and early 1990s and the liberal intellectual justification of violence in honour of merit, and the subsequent inclusion of merit as a component of the notion of rights. Add to this the propaganda which resulted in the dehumanisation of Muslims and the state's complicity in this demonisation and we are perhaps better situated to comprehend this anomaly. Integral to a holistic explanation is the socio-legal short shrift paid to the de-legitimisation of violence, particularly domestic violence, against women. In the Gujarat case, attention needs to be drawn again to the genocidal nature of the violence. The majority community, orchestrated by a controlled political organisation and backed by the connivance of the government, has retained the clear upper hand in the last few months. (see page 16) Hindu women, especially well-to-do upper-caste women, have nothing to fear in terms of retaliation. This perhaps enables their carefully contained acts of violence. After all, gender relations in Hindu households are unlikely to change as a result of this face of women's activity in the public sphere.
The first crucial footstep
When did the average middleclass, 'apolitical', urban, savarna Gujarati woman take that decisive step outside her house and onto the street as part of a collective? The late 1980s and early 1990s witnessed large-scale mobilisation of the upper castes against the Mandal Commission Report re-commending reservations for backward classes. While anti-reservation movements were not new to Gujarat, the anti-Mandal demonstrations were unique in at least two respects:
The first was the mobilisation (and participation in violence) of sections hitherto untouched by nearly a century of Gandhian mass politics and a women's movement. That was the first time that large-scale violence spilled outside the walled cities, onto streets located in the posh parts of town, outside the compound walls of the well-heeled. Violence against the state and against specific social groups was regularised, regarded as socially legitimate and not condemned.
The transformation of a reactionary mass activity into communitarian violence through the deflection of a rights' issue into a communal one was the second aspect. This displacement and the work of the Sangh Parivar perhaps explain the widespread participation of dalits and adivasis in the Gujarat carnage.
Neither of these two is unique to cities in Gujarat. Elsewhere, too, the anti-Mandal movement took in its wake the hep middle class, the apolitical yuppie, the staid middle class housewife and spread to affluent localities. The political linkage between anti-Mandal and pro-mandir is well-known. It happened in Andhra Pradesh and other states.
Liberal intellectuals gave further legitimacy to violence by overlooking the tasteless and vulgar aspects of the anti-reservation movement. In fact, the 'meritocracy' argument against positive discrimination still impedes equality. Both the anti-Mandal and mandir agitations took place during the early phase of market liberalisation, which itself has caused considerable damage to equality and social mobility.
The social profile of the savarna men participating in the anti-reservation movement is central. Dominating the mobs were sheltered youth who had no reason to be informed about the wider social and political context of their middle-class, upper-caste urban existence. Taking to the streets, burning their bodies, damaging public property was the only way their lives could be secured. Where was the understanding of social issues, structures or constitutional processes of redress? They quickly accepted the rhetoric of a 'shrinking pie' being endangered by reservations and the dilution of 'merit' in places that mattered by the onrush of less-meritorious beings. This oratory was given full space in the mainstream media and was applauded by sections of the intelligentsia. Once merit was narrowly defined and claimed as the preserve of the upper castes, existing caste and kinship notions of hierarchy were reinforced. The ideological bankruptcy of the movement was typified in the gross public caricature of dalit-bahujans and reflected in protest techniques such as polishing shoes and sweeping roads. It was clear that labour was the burden of the lower caste or the casteless, while more merit-demanding jobs were the monopoly of the dwijyas.
Most of the young men and women involved were extremely proud of their participation in the violent activities and one often heard accounts of specific violent acts, recounted with glee and pride. It was not only the first time that many of them had participated in public protests, but for many of them, it was the first time parental sanction had been given for participation in public activities. Parents, especially domineering fathers, were not only tolerant of their children staying out late to attend 'strategy' meetings, but also liberal with reports of their progenies' participation in acts of vandalism.
The socio-legal context
It is this negative sanction and the permitting of violence – the sanctioning of violent activities, as it were – that also perhaps explains women's violence as part of family violence. Women are not likely to face oppression as a result of partaking in violence against members of other communities. This is one activity where male membgrs cannot or will not impose restrictions. Just as fear of reprimand keeps women in check and ensures their conformity to established norms, the very absence of fear in this case makes them do things which they would otherwise not do. Perhaps the commission of violence is just catharsis, a release for these women. The extension of the normalisation of violence from the domestic to the public is not difficult to explain in such a context. Possibly, it also contributes to a feeling of empowerment. It may give women the feeling of 'being included' – into the family, and into a community – in whatever way it is defined.
More attention needs to be paid to the ways in which new methods of belonging and feeling of inclusion are produced for individuals by the Hindutva movement. As Arvind Rajagopal has argued, more emphasis has been given to the disruptive effects of these movements than to the possibilities of increased inclusion generated by them. The puzzle of increased participation in the Hindutva movement of dalits, adivasis, lower castes and women – groups that have traditionally borne the brunt of Brahmanical-patriarchal violence – is explained by an analysis of the inclusive nature of the Hindutva movement; the term 'Sangh Parivar' is especially instructive.
The lack of support structures for women is frequently used to explain why women are afraid to actually confront violence within the family. This does not however explain how women are able to overcome their antipathy to male violence and become active collaborators in communal violence. One reason is in the way in which violence against women, particularly domestic violence, is viewed by society. Despite the women's movement's struggles to highlight the issue, it remains at best a social nuisance, not a legal crime. Of course, Muslim women too suffer from domestic violence. However the larger social and political context explains their absence as perpetrators of communal violence. For Hindu women, the socio-legal context, where domestic violence is seen as normal and barely acknowledged as a crime, helps to partially explain the acceptability of women's participation in sociallysanctioned, patriarchally-controlled communal violence. If the legitimisation of violent action on Muslims has been crucial in facilitating women's participation in violence, the failure to de-legitimise domestic violence equally explains the active collaboration of women with the perpetrators of violence. The drawing of distinctions between types of violence and their acceptance becomes difficult.
This is partly an outcome of the way in which political parties have related to such issues. Even leftof- centre parties have 'ghettoised' the women's wings of their parties, refusing to mainstream women's issues, leaving them to be taken up by the women's mass organisations like the AIDWA and Mahila Dakshata. Many women's organisations affiliated to political parties have just not had the political support to launch struggles to change the law, even though there has been no dearth of attempts to do so. Thus struggles relating to women's issues are often reduced to 'social' struggles in the form of public awareness campaigns, or taking up individual issues for redress. As is also well known, women leaders in the Hindutva movement have themselves spoken about the 'normality' of male domestic violence and the need (for women) to 'adjust' to violent domestic life. Viewing domestic violence in this manner effectively takes it out of the sphere of law.
The combined effect of legitimising attacks on members of other communities and the failure to label domestic violence as criminal and illegitimate has thus created a situation where women may find it much easier to collaborate with their own oppressors in inflicting violence upon others. Social codes relating to violence and the meanings of legal codes are important in understanding why some people find it easier to indulge in violence compared to others. Again, while legitimacy and the knowledge that illegitimate acts will not be punished are significant in explaining why people are violent, socialisation practices, levels of exposure to violence, and political mobilisation – all determined by one's location in social space – are also equally important in explaining how people become violent actors. The transformation of women in this regard is critical.
Ideological support
Apart from the support for violence given by intellectuals and the media, other forms of propaganda have played a role. There is enough evidence of the inflammation unleashed by the Gujarati-language press by its reiteration of a past and a possible future attack on Hindus by Muslims and the need for Hindu men and women to train in physical 'self-defence' activities. In recent times, through rumours, pamphlets, public meetings and other such channels, fear has been created among Hindu women by providing mostly fictional accounts of sexual attacks by male members of other communities on women. The fear is now specifically focused on women's own bodies. This brings about a radical change in the attitude of women, who now have a greater sense of legitimacy and justification for violence and are now better prepared, at a personal level, to launch attacks on the 'others'. Legitimacy becomes a multifaceted issue here. On the one hand, it is implied that if a woman chooses to protect herself by joining the Hindu mob, her acts of violence thereof will be granted legitimacy. In return, she condones instances of rape and sexual assault that Hindu men perpetrate on Muslim women perhaps by justifying quite plausibly to herself that given the chance, Muslim men would target her similarly. The real attack then becomes a revenge for the attack she potentially faces. On the other hand, there is the consciousness that as a woman she cannot risk sexual assault for the consequence of that is that she will cease to have any legitimacy in her society.
Violence by women as part of a fundamentalist movement, and their complicity in male violence on members on other communities, reinforces their own oppression by patriarchal structures. This is despite the fact that some women may temporarily be given an exalted status for their participation in such movements, whether it is an anti-minority pogrom, or the movement which brought down the Babri Masjid. Fundamentalist leaders justify such action in the name of a particular normative order which justifies violence, and de-legitimises constitutional bodies and norms. Similarly, neo-liberal advocates shift the rights' discourse by justifying violence either by popular groups or the state acting in the name of a specific normative order. The overall shift in the way in which rights are discussed, the condoning of violent actions targeted at the marginalised, and the refusal to recognise certain forms of social and political mobilisation, all have contributed to an overall rise in legitimacy levels for violent actions by the powerful. It is in this larger context that one has to understand the participation of women in attacks on members of other communities. In the specific context of economic liberalisation and globalisation, intellectuals, media and political leaders must learn that rights are tied to specific ends – in terms of social justice; and that the choice of means is as important for realisation of rights and justice as the objectives themselves. As a colleague never tires of reminding me about Gandhi's approach to public issues – it is not just enough to be right, but one must be right for the right reason, for the right cause.