Colleen Braganza writes about why women do not hit back in anger each time any of them was compromised, was unable to go about minding our business without a wolf whistle, an innuendo or a misogynistic comment being hurled our way.
It’s difficult to look at the anger on the streets of India and not be moved. I do not refer to the hooliganism that has infiltrated the Delhi protests against the brutal rape and beating of a physiotherapist (who I will refer to as Patient X) last week.
I refer to the middle-aged woman in her fifties who wept for someone she doesn’t know even as she angrily shouted for justice at India Gate; I refer to the anger of a female student whose rage at being harassed every day of her college-going life has spilled over; I refer to the family of an abducted woman, now missing for a year and a half, who came to India Gate from a village in Uttar Pradesh to show solidarity with Patient X even as they look for their missing daughter.
It reminds me of the anger that consumed me while I commuted as a student in Delhi and then as a working professional who didn’t have the luxury of a car. These protests make me guilty that mine was an anger that I should have expressed more often and more publicly: the anger and helplessness I felt in retrospect for not smashing in the head of the middle-aged man sitting next to me who groped me throughout the 45-minute bus journey home; the anger at not being able to throw a boulder at a fancy car after its driver flashed me; the anger at being propositioned while waiting to catch a bus or an autorickshaw and not being able to do anything about it; the anger that I didn’t have pepper spray on me while being followed home by two men in a car in Mumbai.
Why am I angry about this now? Because there is a conspiracy of silence we women participate in with great encouragement from society and people who care about us. I am angry because I was and am complict in this silence too. We women take harassment in our stride. It is something we adjust to, like potholes in Mumbai or the extreme weather in Delhi. We don’t want to create scenes, we are afraid of the consequences: of being attacked, of being sacked, of being called troublesome, of being branded feminist, of anything.
Maybe if all of us women hit back in anger each time any of us was compromised, each time were unable to go about minding our business without a wolf whistle, an innuendo or a misogynistic comment being hurled our way, things would have been different now. This fight back would not have been beginning, it would be midway. It wouldn’t have taken this long for women to come out and say: ‘This is it, enough is enough. I am not taking your subtle harassment unchallenged. I’m not going to wonder if that was a pass or not. I’m going to hit you and hurt you where it hurts the most till you go down on your knees and beg for forgiveness.’
Maybe then all that suppressed anger wouldn’t have spilled over all at once and scarred the streets of Delhi. Maybe then, instead of battling for life in hospital, Patient X would have boarded a bus that Sunday night and reached home.
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