Mumbai has awoken again to a spectre that’s never really asleep. On November 7, a Spanish exchange student was raped in her flat. A day later Aryanka Hosbetkar had a corrosive chemical thrown at her face. These two women have been scarred for life, but they are luckier than Pallavi Purkayastha, who was not just savagely molested, but also murdered this August. All three were around 26 years old and were home alone in the early hours of the morning. They were not exceptions but a fact that we aren’t allowed to forget – shamefully, angrily, helplessly. These cases, and the legion of lookalikes, remind us that the liberating metro is only a sham. The new breed of smart independent women think they can live by their own rules, but they continue to be trapped.
And the city itself is an accomplice, now built in a way which ensures that they are lonely in a crowd.
All three of the recent victims had assumed that they were as safe as a house. The Spanish woman lived in upscale Perry Cross road; Aryanka in Worli, the bridge between the seduc-tive poles of SoBo and Bandra; Pallavi’s Wadala is swiftly shedding its rags to emerge as the latest aspirant to flashy urbania.
Mumbai was the first, and for a long time the only working-girl-friendly city. But its new breed of career women can no longer have the relaxed conversations that their predecessors shared with their neighbourhoods. The Lost Mohalla is an inevitable sub-plot of the narrative of upward mobility.
High-rise residential towers match the ambitions of these young women who come to ‘shake the pagoda tree’ of globalisation’s neo-colony. They stride through the landscaped podiums of these housing townships, laptop satchels swinging with their shiny manes. They work late, and then they latchkey into their company-rented flats. Sometimes there are partners, but mostly their boyfriends come and go, like their part-time maids, to service specific needs. They guard their privacy fiercely, because that’s what protects their new and most valued asset, independence.
But like all Faustian pacts, this now comes with a chilling price. They don’t want to know their neighbours, preferring to barricade themselves in Manhattan-like isolation. They have no use for the camaraderie of the borrowed onion. They have neither time nor inclination to bond with the homemakers who gather every evening in the garden; they remain aloof in the gym. They lack that automatic ice-breaker, children. These new habitats too are intrinsi-cally impersonal. They may be multicultural, but it’s a mix, not a blend. So by choice and circumstance, these young women become the bigger outsiders in a community of strangers.
But they can also become victims of a more insidious set of rules. They may be able to safeguard their privacy, but their ‘bindaas’ independence is compromised by the mindset of their potential predators. Chafing caution becomes the most important tool in their survival kit. They have to be constantly conscious of the way they dress, of when they come home and with whom, For, in the building’s public spaces, they are exposed to security and maintenance staff, mofussil men unused to the metro’s insouciant matrix.
Pallavi had a live-in partner who wasn’t at home when the building’s watchman carried out his well -planned attack. He had tinkered with the electric supply, walked in with the electrician she had to summon, and pocketed her keys with which he made his second entry to rape. To him, this attractive lawyer who co-habited with a man not her husband seemed fair game. The break-in thief who saw the Spanish girl in bed found her sexually eligible simply because she was a foreigner. Aryanka’s attacker belonged to her own cycling group, but he didn’t think a woman had the right to refuse his overtures; she ‘deserved’ to pay for her defiance. As did the Mona Chowdhury, whose jilted lover hired six goons ‘just to slap her’, but one of whom slashed her face with a blade a week before the two recent attacks.
Sexual harassment is also increasing on the prowl. Conducting a straw poll in two very different audiences, Alyque Padamsee discovered that not a single woman had been spared, prompting him to launch the Izzat Ki Fauj. In Sheila Dikshit’s Delhi, such humiliations remain so endemic that no one even questions the innocuously dismissed eve-teasing unless it descends into molestation and murder, and even then eyebrows are raised at the fuss, and finger pointed at the victim.
In Mamata Banerjee’s Kolkata, ‘the sexual is the political’, a ghoulish mockery of early feminism. Bangalore’s sudden metromorphosis is doubly disastrous for its career babes eager to embrace the new global culture; they are targeted by, both, local diehards and the lumpen hordes who have poured in criminally to exploit its new riches.
The urban dream on which the country has posited its future needs smart young women in equal measure. They have risen impressively to fulfil it. Should we punish them for it by turning our cities into a sexual nightmare?
Nirbhaya. We can give the unnameable Delhi victim a symbolic name. We can turn her into an icon and make a shrine of the hospital bed from which she fights so awesomely to live. But no media burnishing can dim the atrocities inflicted on that hapless girl who, after all, did nothing more reckless than take a bus home. Our young women face every living being’s most fearsome prospect: the end of ordinariness.
In an annus horribilis, the good news is that it is about to end not with the whimper of cowering victims but the bang of massed outrage. The fearless 23-year-old, whom the TOI has christened ‘Nirbhaya’, was so bestially violated that her entire intestine turned gangrenous and had to be removed. Across the entire year, across the entire country, the bodily security of women has been under worsening attack, and there seems to be no way, no desire even, to yank out that rot.
The 21st century was touted as the women’s century. It may be, but each advance is countered with a steeper decline in status. We talk bravely of liberation, but each day’s headlines (and often several of them) emphasise the reality of Virginia Woolf’s warning: “The eyes of others are our prisons, their thoughts our cages.” We talk smugly of empowerment, indeed, see its evidence in the confident strut of the new genre of career women. But threats prowl across every opportunity, and the strongest are helpless against their leering, sneering violators.
This year mocked with greater cruelty, sardonically reminding us that the more things change for India’s women, the more they remain in chains. Delhi, uncontested Sty No. 1 of male chauvinist swine, has always unabashedly wallowed in this swill, forcing its women to negotiate an obscene minefield every time they step out of their homes – or even when they don’t. Disturbingly, this year’s statistics show that the next two unsafest cities don’t come from a similar cesspool. They are Bangalore and Hyderabad, urban idols whose new global persona as much as their traditions should have buffered them against the filth.
In culturally lofty Kolkata, 2012 began with the February Park Street gang rape; the response of its woman chief minister was a greater atrocity. On July 9, on a busy Guwahati street in broad daylight, a 20-year-old woman was groped and thrown to the ground with impunity for a full 30 minutes as a TV crew filmed without intervening; its reporter, Gaurav Jyoti Neogi, was subsequently charged with actually instigating the mob. Seven days later, Mumbai produced its own shocker. For the first time, several policewomen were molested by the lumpen among those protesting the alleged atrocities against Muslims in the northeast. Then, as the wounded year staggered to a close, the city’s roll-call of dishonour nailed the sham of it being the friendliest to women.
August 8, Pallavi Purkayastha raped and murdered by building watchman. November 2, Mona Chowdhury’s face slashed by a goon hired by her spurned boyfriend. November 5, a Spanish exchange student raped by a cat burglar. November 6, a corrosive chemical attack on Aryanka Hozbetkar, again by a rejected male friend. December 17, the very day after Delhi’s tipping-point gang rape, Sonal Lapshia’s skull and shoulders fractured with a sickle by a vengeful man who mistook her for his estranged wife. December 21, a young Nepali who had come to Mumbai in search of her husband, raped thrice in succession by the men to whom she had turned for help. December 22, as the capital’s most august citadels were being stormed, a 21-year-old stabbed by her ex on the staircase of their Bandra college. The frequency beggared belief.
We must look back in anger on 2012, and leave the shame to men.
A former student at Wesleyan University in Connecticut has filed a federal lawsuit against the school claiming it failed to protect her after a sexual assault at a fraternity’s Halloween party two years ago.
A Maryland woman identified as “Jane Doe” in the 27-page lawsuit filed Friday in a U.S. District Court in Connecticut charges Wesleyan with violating Title IX, thefederal gender-equity law. She claims the university failed to warn students about the troubling past of the Mu Epsilon chapter of Beta Theta Pi fraternity. The lawsuit claims the frat was a known “Rape Factory” on campus, according to the Hartford Courant.
“[Wesleyan] acted with deliberate indifference towards the rights of Jane Doe and other female students to a safe and secure education environment thus materially impairing Jane Doe’s ability to pursue her education at Wesleyan in violation of the requirements of Title IX,” the lawsuit claims. It adds the university failed “to warn or otherwise take corrective action” against the fraternity that could have prevented the assault.
The Courant reports:
The lawsuit says that Wesleyan warned students in an email in March 2010 to stay away from the fraternity, saying that the school “could not ensure students’ safety on the premises.” Jane Doe, a freshman in the fall of 2010, was unaware of that warning from seven months earlier and went to the frat house’s Halloween party on Oct. 30, 2010, and was raped in a locked room, the lawsuit says.
The lawsuit says that she told the resident assistant in her dorm about the assault the next day, Oct. 31, but that the resident assistant did not call police, campus safety officials or school administrators. Jane Doe was unable to officially report the assault until Nov. 1, 2010, because the student health services were closed on Oct. 31, 2010, which was a Sunday, the suit said.
The university’s administration advised students in campus-wide emails in November 2010 and in 2011 not to attend parties at the Beta house.
In February 2011, Wesleyan targeted the Beta house when it announced, “Students will be prohibited from residing in – or using for social activities – houses or property owned, leased or operated by private societies that are not recognized by the university.” FIRE, a free speech advocacy group, criticized the decision as a “threat to freedom of association.”
After the incident, UPI reports thatDoe’s identity became known, and protesters picketed outside her dorm. Doe transferred to another school.
John O’Neill, who’s accused of raping Doe, was guest of the fraternity that weekend and did not attend the university. O’Neill pleaded no contest to lesser charges and is serving a 15-month sentence.
The Courant reports the lawsuit also names the Mu Epsilon chapter of the fraternity and the Raimond Duy Baird Memorial Association, owners of the fraternity house property.
A Wesleyan spokesperson declined to comment Monday when reached by The Huffington Post.
UPDATE, 5:35 p.m. — The national Beta Theta Pi office based in Oxford, Ohio released a statement condemning O’Neill’s behavior as “horrendous” and said he “affected in an extremely negative manner both a young woman in the prime of her life and 64 Beta Theta Pi students unassociated with and unaware of his atrocious actions.” Senior staff leadership flew to Connecticut Sunday.
Beta Theta Pi has long prided itself on the respectful treatment of all women – at all times. With hundreds of women serving as chapter advisors, house directors and educational faculty to 8,000 undergraduate Beta students across North America – a practice fully employed by the Fraternity since inception of Beta’s award-winning Men of Principle initiative in 1998 – and a full roster of women working in senior-level management positions at the Fraternity’s international office in Oxford, Ohio, Beta has a long-standing culture and reputation of inclusivity, respect for all and a pointed focus of developing character and integrity in its members. Beta’s five core values are explicit and have been public since 1879: Mutual Assistance, Intellectual Growth, Trust, Responsible Conduct and Integrity.
Wesleyan junior and Chapter President Elliot Albert pledged their frat will treat women with “respect and dignity” at all times.
“The deplorable actions taken by Mr. O’Neil, a non-member, do not align with the attitudes and values of our Fraternity,” Albert said. “We offer our support to the victim and will continue to partner with Wesleyan’s Sexual Assault Response Team (SART) and Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) in order to stress the value of positive and healthy relationships on our campus and in our community. Our thoughts and prayers are with the victim.”
