What killed Keenan & Reuben?

So Justice ForKeenanandReuben is trending on Twitter. Some people are hoping the media will pile on the pressure (to make the courts punish the culprits, I’m guessing). Others are suggesting that we move from Twitter to traffic signals because ‘they must see our power’.

A general cluelessness seems to be afloat. ‘They’ who? The state? Is the ‘state’ supposed to be responsible for the attack on Keenan and Reuben? The two young men were stabbed by another bunch of men, which followed an argument, which followed a threatening comment directed at the girls accompanying them. So what are we hoping to accomplish through a show of strength on the streets? Will future ‘eve-teasers’ look at our ‘power’ and swear off any future attacks on girls, and the male friends they hang out with?

I’m also surprised at how ‘shocked’ everyone else is. They say they’re ‘shocked’ that such a thing could happen, and that it could happen, not in the northern badlands, but in Mumbai.

This sort of thing does indeed happen up north. In October, a man called Harish Chander was attacked in Ludhiana. Earlier this year, a man was killed while trying to protect his wife from molesters in Delhi, and three men were attacked in Mohali when they objected to harassment of female guests at a family function.

But it also happens in other parts of India. In 2008, in Gujarat, a man called Keshav Vishwakarma was set on fire for protesting harassment. In Howrah, Manu Ram and Babla Bera were stabbed for trying to protect a 14-year-old schoolgirl. To borrow the words from an oddly-named NGO website, ‘eve teasing is an inseparable part of every girl’s life causing much avoidable mental agony to her. This in turn adversely affects her family and her friends’ (sic).

It not only affects family and friends, it also leads to tragicomic situations where people assume that any girl who is approached by any boy needs to be rescued! Last month, an unfortunately headlined item — ‘Eve-tease dilemma for cops’ — informed us that, in Patna, some people beat up young men. “The girls were celebrating a friend’s birthday when some boys approached them with birthday greetings. It was quite obvious that the boys and the girls knew each other. Some residents saw them talking and thought it to be an incident of eve-teasing and attacked the boys.”

Justice for Keenan and Reuben is necessary, but the outrage seems deflected so that, as usual, we blame institutions and not ourselves. The police have already arrested at least four people.

Assuming, the murderers are convicted, will we be satisfied? Will there be no more Keenans and Reubens? As far as I’m concerned, the question to ask is not how such molestation-related murders could have happened in Mumbai, but why this happens so routinely in India.

It happens because millions of men do not respect women’s bodies. It happens because parents don’t teach their sons that there are proper ways of approaching the object of their (sexual) desires. It happens because boys are not taught to take ‘no’ for an answer. It happens because we have fostered a demonic culture where women have no control over their sexuality: they must either be given away to men in a pre-approved, community-sanctioned fashion, or they might be attacked. In such a culture, a woman is seen as fair game unless her protector-men — husband, boyfriend, brother, father — can physically beat off all assailants.

As long as these attitudes towards women and their sexuality persist, young men like Keenan and Reuben will continue to die.

Annie Zaidi writes poetry, stories, essays, scripts (and in a dark, distant past, recipes she never actually tried)