Fearless Freedom Read online

  Had there been no political interference, Divya might have overcome the disapproval of her parents much more easily. But instead, the rabble-rousing very likely led to Divya’s father’s suicide—and that tragedy was then used as fodder for a campaign that ended up unleashing violence and creating the emotional pressure and guilt that Divya was unable to withstand.

  In another incident in Tamil Nadu, twenty-one-year-old Dalit youth Gokulraj was reportedly hacked to death in October 2015 for speaking to a girl from the intermediate Gounder caste in a Thiruchengode temple. The main accused in the murder is Yuvaraj, leader of the Dheeran Chinnamalai Gounder Peravai—a Gounder organization. The Kongu Nadu Jananayaga Katchi (KJK), a party aiming to consolidate a Gounder base, also weighed in on the incident. In an interview, K. Gopal Ramesh, the Tamil Nadu convener of the KJK, said:

  As a Dalit, he [Gokulraj] should have understood his birth-based limitations. We all should maintain the ‘Lakshman rekha’ for a peaceful coexistence. We in the Kongu Vellalar caste take a lot of pride in our women. The girls in our families are our ‘princesses’. We nourish them and pamper them since they are the ones who nourish our traditions and customs. How could you expect us to get this sullied? I consider that education for a girl beyond the age of nineteen pollutes her and her family. It gives them [girls and their parents] a false sense of financial security and a high social status. But, unfortunately, what they fail to realize is that it [education] threatens the very existence of our caste’s pride and decorum. We are spreading the message of ‘caste purity’ and individual discipline among our youngsters . . . Girls’ education should be encouraged only up to the age of eighteen. They should be married off then. Those who wish to pursue higher studies can do so after getting married . . . I am not justifying the death of Gokulraj. But at the same time, we will never permit any act that pollutes us.19

  It would be wrong to label the PMK or the KJK as ‘lunatic fringe’ groups. While these are relatively small parties in Tamil Nadu, they hold considerable influence. Both the PMK and the KJK supported the BJP and Narendra Modi in the 2014 parliamentary elections. In 2017, the KJK merged with the BJP.20 The PMK allied with the BJP in the 2019 parliamentary elections as well. The Tamil Nadu government, too, had acted to protect neither Dalits from violent mobs nor inter-caste couples. The AIADMK government under the then chief minister J. Jayalalithaa had unleashed a crackdown on the Dalits of Dharmapuri when they wanted to observe a memorial day in July 2014 on the first anniversary of Ilavarasan’s death. Dalits were arrested and charged under the National Security Act, their villages were surrounded and raided by a huge police force, and eventually only Ilavarasan’s family members were allowed to pay their respects to his memory.

  Shameless Women, Shy Women

  In a 2014 tweet, S. Gurumurthy, a co-convener of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) organization Swadeshi Jagaran Manch (and appointed a part-time director of the RBI by the Modi government) expressed the Sangh’s version of the ‘either Madonna or whore’ categorization in a catchy phrase. He tweeted: ‘Few shamelss [sic] women speak for shy women. Target is to make a shy society shameless [sic]. The more shameless one is the more modern he or she is.’21 Gurumurthy, here, is branding feminists who demand and assert autonomy as ‘shameless’ (besharam), while the ‘shy women’ are, of course, the good women. In a sense, he is right. The women who raised slogans demanding fearless freedom on the streets in December 2013–14, or the ones who reject patriarchal restrictions packaged as ‘safety’, are, in fact, ‘shame-less’. They assert their freedom from the special burden of shame, which our cultures and languages describe as a desirable attribute for women. Hindi–Urdu uses the term ‘sharam–haya’ or ‘naari sulabh lajja’ to describe the shyness that is supposed to define women. In Tamil, naanam (coyness/shyness) is described as one of the four essential virtues of women, along with acham (timidity), madam (innocence) and payirpu (aversion to men other than one’s husband), as the adornments of a woman. The women who assert the right to loiter on the streets and protest discriminatory hostel rules22 are, in fact, declaring that there is no shame in women seeking pleasure, risk, adventure and freedom; that rape is not a punishment for ‘shamelessness’; and that, in fact, shame should be allocated to those who are violent to women and deny them equality.

  Shamelessness is a quality women should embrace with pride. I was lucky to have a dad who poked fun at the notions of women needing to display ‘acham naanam payirpu madamai’ and walk with eyes modestly downcast, and, instead, brought up his daughters quoting the Tamil poet Subramania Bharati, who celebrated modern women who ‘walked with her head held high/Looking everyone boldly in the eye’.23 Bharati had declared that rather than ‘shyness and fear’, it was ‘veera sutantiram’ (brave freedom) that better suited women!24 Bharati died in 1921—but unlike many of his contemporaries, he made a conscious choice to stand by women who wanted ‘brave freedom’. Today, nearly a century after Bharati’s passing, here we are, still struggling to make our country and society realize that ‘brave freedom’—fearless freedom—is our birthright as women and human beings.

  If women are ‘naturally’ shy and modest, why the need to keep reminding them that they must be shy and modest? If ‘lajja’ (shame) is really ‘naari sulabh’ (that which comes easily to women), why do women keep needing to be ‘disciplined’ for their lack of shame? If ‘shyness’ and ‘modesty’ are descriptions of women’s nature, why is it that so much energy is expended by the gatekeepers of patriarchy on prescribing shyness and modesty to women?

  Today, the RSS and its outfits use violence to try and discipline women whom they see as autonomous—i.e., in their eyes, wayward and shameless.

  Organized Political Terror against Interfaith Couples

  Any random Internet search with the keywords ‘Bajrang Dal’, ‘ABVP’ and ‘Valentine’s Day’ will come up with news items, year after year, where these outfits ritually harass and humiliate lovers on Valentine’s Day, often getting them to forcibly tie the rakhi to declare the couple brother and sister.

  In 2006, Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) strongman Babu Bajrangi of Gujarat boasted to a journalist of having ‘rescued’ 918 women from his Hindu Kadwa Patel caste who had eloped to marry men outside their caste or faith. He used the stark image of daughters as bombs to make his point:

  In every house there is a live bomb that can erupt at any time. Do you know who that is? Daughters are the honour of the family and the community, and to protect that is our Hindu duty and Hindu culture. . . . Come, and let’s unite to save bombs . . . I don’t believe in love marriage. We have to marry within our own community. These girls go to college, make friends with some lafanga [loafer], roam with them on their bikes, fall in love, and then run off and get married . . . We bring them back and convince them that they are ruining their future. They stay with me for a while and then return to their parents.25

  This was the same Babu Bajrangi who was caught on the Tehelka sting operation boasting that he ‘felt like Maharana Pratap’ after committing gruesome murders of Muslims, including that of a pregnant Muslim woman in the 2002 Gujarat pogrom.26 Bajrangi, who terrorized and inflicted violence upon Hindu women to keep them captive as properties of their castes and communities, was unsurprisingly eager to inflict violence on women as well as men of the ‘enemy’ community. Bajrangi was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in 201227 and released on bail in 2019.28

  In 2006, the term ‘love jihad’ was not yet in vogue. But Bajrangi’s imagery of the beti as bomb was trying to do exactly what the term ‘love jihad’ does: try to link patriarchal surveillance and violence against daughters with a spurious anti-Muslim brand of ‘nationalism’. For Bajrangi and the Sangh Parivar, the borders of castes and faiths need to be policed for infiltration from the enemy with as much vigilant surveillance as the borders of the nation. Just as the Sangh drew invisible ‘borders’ in cities like Ahmedabad, marking Muslim ghettoes as ‘Pakistans’, Bajrangi is trying to mark the
borders of every (Hindu) family as the border of (an imaginary Hindu) nation in microcosm. He wants Hindus to feel, however, that the borders of their family and community are lined with explosives from within. In Bajrangi’s imagery, the focus is not on the Muslim ‘jihadi’ seducer alone, it is on the daughter herself, whose sexuality is the source of terror, who is the bomb that might explode at any time. And the unruly sexuality of daughters, every time it breaches the borders of caste and faith, calls into question the very foundation of racial purity on which the ‘cultural nationalism’ of the ‘Hindu rashtra’ (Hindu nation) rests.

  Bajrangi’s Gujarat model of terror against women has by now been replicated all over India.

  In October 2015, the media portal Cobrapost released recordings of its sting operation.29 This sting operation caught (on secret camera) a range of leaders from the BJP and a variety of Hindu majoritarian outfits explaining in detail how their network works all over the country to separate Hindu women from their Muslim lovers/husbands.

  For example, in that sting operation, one leader, Sanjay Agarwal, who had been a BJP candidate in municipal elections in Muzaffarnagar, explained how they got Hindu women to disown their relationships with Muslim men: ‘If she doesn’t listen to us, we hit her. We get her beaten up. We misbehave (poori badtameezi karte hain). Such a girl is treated with a wooden board (bilkul, phatte se bajwate hain). Are we wrong to do so?’ Another leader, BJP MLA Suresh Rana, explained how violence is used to force a Hindu woman to agree to falsely accuse her Muslim boyfriend or husband of rape:

  A girl is a girl after all. It has always been said about them that they change in five minutes according to the circumstances . . . They insist, ‘No matter what, I will stay with him. I won’t go without him.’ If she is taken aside and given two slaps, then she herself goes and gets the FIR registered claiming, ‘They sexually assaulted me . . . He has been doing it for a month.‘ Then she will tell the whole story and slap a case on him. You can mould a girl the way you want.30

  Ravish Tantri, the chief of Hindu Unity Forum in Kerala, made open threats to kill interfaith couples:

  When the girl goes from the ‘conversion centre’ to the court, we warn her that if she does not give a statement on her parents side and does not marry the guy prescribed by us, then the moment she and her husband step out of the court, they will be killed by our people.31

  BJP MLA Sangeet Som describes how his followers exert emotional pressure on Hindu women to make them renounce Muslim husbands: ‘Most importantly, we exert on her emotionally that her mother will die, her father will die and brother might even commit suicide as he would not be able to face the society.’

  Agarwal states that lawyers who are also RSS members act as their informants:

  A lot of advocates are swayam sevaks [‘volunteers’ or members of the RSS]. They keep an eye to see if a Hindu girl registers at the city magistrate or the SDM’s office for marriage and the date given. They find out who her lawyer is and if she is in the lawyer’s chamber. Then they call us. We go there with our whole team . . . fifty, sixty, seventy people.32

  The Cobrapost sting also revealed how, in Kerala, the Hindu Helpline offers services of administering drugs to girls who have been ‘rescued’ from ‘love jihad’. These drugs cause temporary amnesia and are used to bring the girl under control if she is ‘being too aggressive’, said Cijiith from the Hindu Helpline in Ernakulam, Kerala. He claimed that parents brought their daughters from as far away as UP and Maharashtra for ‘treatment’ in Ernakulam, where the women were held captive and drugged in a hospital.

  Jagdish Shenava, a lawyer and the VHP’s Mangalore district working president, said interfaith marriages may be legal but his organization is still committed to preventing them: ‘Legally, it is right, but in that there is no legality for us. We won’t allow.’ The BJP member of the state legislative council (MLC) in Mangalore, Captain Ganesh Karnik, said that even the police in a Congress-ruled state backed them because it was infiltrated with RSS workers: ‘We have tried to send some of our boys into police. So, when we need help there are a lot of karyakartas, RSS [sic]. Sixty per cent of the young constables are our students.’

  Few, perhaps, can withstand such organized political violence. In the few cases where women’s parents support them, of course, the political terror is foiled.

  When I was in my twenties, I recall a couple of my friends planning to get married. The woman was Hindu, the man Muslim, and both went to the registrar’s office to apply to get married the next month. The same night, the woman’s father got a call from a stranger, asking him if he knew his daughter was eloping with a Muslim man. The father, to his great credit, was furious with the caller, and insisted on pursuing the marriage application in the registrar’s office himself, and pointedly distributed sweets in the office on the wedding day. But the point is—someone in that office was trying to instigate opposition to interfaith marriages. If the father had happened to respond by opposing the marriage, surely the Sangh outfits would have descended on him to try and separate the couple and whip up communal tension.

  Such violence has only got bolder in recent years. In December 2017, Mansoor Harhat Khan, an MBA, married Nupur Singhal, a doctor, at a Ghaziabad court under the Special Marriage Act and held a reception at Nupur’s parents’ house in Ghaziabad. The BJP Ghaziabad city president, Ajay Sharma, led a mob waving BJP and Bajrang Dal flags and shouting menacing slogans to protest outside the house. Sharma declared that the families had not taken ‘permission’ to hold the marriage and it was a case of ‘love jihad’! Pushpendra Kumar, the father of the bride, told the press that he had been ‘receiving phone calls for the last two days to stop this marriage’ but had decided to stand by his daughter’s decision and organize the reception.33

  The same forces also unleash pressure on Hindu victims of ‘honour killings’, trying to brand Muslims rather than patriarchy as the problem. When Ankit Saxena of Delhi was killed by the family members of his Muslim girlfriend, various Sangh outfits tried to use the incident to sow anti-Muslim hatred and harvest violence. Ankit’s friends and his father, Yashpal Saxena, stood tall and dignified in grief—determined to fight hatred rather than fuel it. Four months after Ankit’s murder, Saxena organized an iftar with his Muslim, Sikh and Hindu neighbours, inviting them to join Muslims in breaking the Ramzan fast.34

  But for women whose parents are not so supportive, the political terror, custodial torture and violence unleashed upon them, on top of parental and community opposition, can be overwhelming. The community and communal groups that oppose inter-caste and interfaith love treat women as the ‘property’ of the caste or the community, rather than as individuals with the right to take decisions for themselves. What does it take to stand up to such violence?

  3

  Profiles in

  Courage

  In the face of such immense family and community pressure, compounded by a hostile and violent political climate, it takes extraordinary courage for women to stand their ground.

  Alok Dhanwa’s poem Bhagi Hui Ladkiyan has a powerful line: ‘How visible the shackles of the home become/When a girl runs away from home’ (घर की जंजीरें/कितना ज्यादा दिखाई पड़ती ह/जब घर से कोई लड़की भागती है). The shackles, always present but disguised and invisible, become visible only when a daughter exercises her autonomy and falls in love. But when political forces in India today reinforce those shackles, running away is not easy.

  Shalu: The Mayella of Meerut

  In the first week of August 2014, the ‘Meerut love-jihad case’ exploded in print, electronic and social media. In video interviews to the media, twenty-year-old Shalu, an English teacher at a madarsa in the Sarawa village of Meerut, UP, said she had been held captive in madarsas, gang-raped and forced to convert to Islam. Based on her statement, several Muslim men were arrested. Several news media reported that Shalu’s fallopian tubes were missing and had been removed
in an operation. The truth emerged later that she had been operated upon for an ectopic pregnancy.

  The Sangh and the BJP in August 2014 were still heady from the dramatic victory of Narendra Modi in the May that year. For their cadres, the Meerut ‘love-jihad’ case was just the fodder they needed to whip up a frenzy of prejudice and violence directed at the Muslim minority. Large crowds of cadres of various Sangh outfits, including the BJP, the VHP, the Bajrang Dal and the Hindu Behen Beti Bachao Sangharsh Samiti, held menacing rallies, raising slogans that intimidated and threatened Muslims. The ABVP formed the Meerut Bachao Manch to ‘raise awareness’ among Hindu girls about ‘love jihad’. The case ticked all the hate-campaign boxes: a young Hindu woman ‘victim’, Muslim male ‘rapists’, madarsas as dens of ‘forced conversion’ and violation of Hindu womanhood, and rallying cries to save Hindu daughters from Muslim ‘love-jihadi’ predators. The young Muslim man, in these campaigns, was cast simultaneously as a lustful seducer and a dangerous jihadi. The Hindu woman, of course, was always cast as a gullible victim, incapable of knowing her mind, needing obsessive surveillance and control to keep her safe from Muslim seducer–terrorists.

  On 30 August, less than a month after the Meerut ‘love-jihad’ case sensation broke in the media, journalist Neha Dixit (on behalf of Al Jazeera) visited Shalu’s home and spoke to her. Dixit found that Shalu, far from being a gullible girl, was a confident young woman, who ‘had financially supported her family since the age of fifteen by taking tuitions in the neighbourhood’.1 However, Dixit found that Shalu was being held captive in her home; her mobile phone had been confiscated to prevent her from communicating with anyone without her parents’ permission and surveillance. Shalu told Dixit that she had met Kaleem through a friend and fallen in love with him, especially because he was so supportive of her ambitions as a teacher.