To reclaim the night as our right

When a friend visited Kolkata for the first time, she marvelled at the women walking down the streets laughing and talking “so freely and unself-consciously”. She noticed that pedestrians stepped aside for pregnant women instead of bumping against them. “This city is kind and respectful to women,” she pronounced. “In Delhi, we walk with our elbows jutting out for protection.” We hadn’t noticed our city!

Now Kolkata’s reputation has taken a beating. Never has its image been so sullied with the recent series of crimes against women. Is Kolkata going the Delhi way, its citizens wonder. They are confounded by rising statistics on crime against women: 1,811 in 2012, from 438 in 2005. Jutting elbows are no longer enough: young women are now advised a range of self-defence strategies, from judo to pepper sprays.

Undoubtedly, the media has come a long way in covering crimes against women. This reporter recalls how in the 1980s, few lines were grudgingly allotted to the inside pages of newspapers about incidents of stoves bursting, burning young brides to death. Today, front pages are replete with eye-caching headlines, photographs, graphic representations and detailed descriptions of the harassment and how the City of Joy is turning into the City of “bhoy” (fear). The most recent incident was about a biker gang harassing a group of young men and women who were dining at a popular roadside dhaba. The lead front page article of an English daily reported the harrowing experience of the young girls with graphics narrating the sequence of events, while associated stories with headlines like “We could have been raped and killed…” continued in the inside pages. In another incident in July, two French nationals were chased at night in an upper middle-class locality by five men shouting, “I want to **** you”.

An English daily, for two consecutive days reported this as lead stories, including photographs of the building where the woman hid from her stalkers and a route map of the chase. Yet, the same daily did not find news of national importance front-page worthy the day it reported the two incidents of violence against women. Reports of recent communal riots in Muzzafarnagar in UP were missing the day seven people were killed; similarly, it devoted only five lines in the front page to the 27 children who died of food poisoning in Bihar’s school mid-day meal scheme.

In reporting crime against women, has media coverage helped to raise awareness that
women have unconditional right as equal citizens to public spaces like streets, parks, marketplaces, transport and restaurants? The fear of violence in public spaces is real, but is a certain kind of media coverage further closing the options for women to access public spaces? If violence is the real concern, why is the media conspicuously silent about the private sphere where, studies and research reveal, women face the most and extreme forms of domestic violence? 

At times, this voyeuristic and excessive focus on crimes against women rather than understanding the reasons behind the increasing violence and aggression, causes paranoia resulting in a backlash against women. The immediate reaction is to hit the panic button, sending families into protection overdrive, restricting the movement of their girls, censoring their clothes and curtailing their outside activities. The danger of protectionism is that it engenders another form of violence that is little recognized by society; it normalises the restrictions on women. Moreover, the near-effacing of domestic violence by the media makes the violence in the public sphere even more visible and sensational, harming the hard-won gains women in Bengal have historically enjoyed to public spaces, pleasure and work.

The safety of women in public spaces cannot be viewed in isolation; it is only conceivable when other social groups and communities, especially the poor and marginalised feel safe. When a rag picker was raped bleeding to death, she did not classify under “protection worthiness”. A policeman commented: what was she doing in an unsafe area? In the case of the French woman the police responded with commendable alacrity.

Society, moreover, is yet to accept the idea of women enjoying themselves in public spaces without being judged for what they were doing, and with whom, or the clothes they were wearing. In February 2012, when Suzette Jordan was raped, she still smarts at the humiliation she met with when she told the police she was drinking in a nightclub with friends. Even the Chief Minister insinuated she was a liar, and the Transport Minister asked sarcastically what a divorcee with two children was doing drinking late at night.

Yet, women in Kolkata refuse to be cowed into submission despite the daily violence they face. Rather than depend on police protection, they move on with their lives, simply reclaiming the public spaces. Just as young lovers in parks continue to brave both monsoon downpours and police harassment, women hawkers, workers, students and nurses continue with their nightly commutes in suburban buses and trains, negotiating and fending off all kinds of harassment. The Kamduni villagers persist — despite the Chief Minister calling them Maoists — braving lathi charges and arrests in their fight for justice for Basanti (not her real name), a student from their village who was brutally gang-raped and murdered. Suzette continues to fight the stigma of being that “Park Street rape victim”, swinging between despair at the turn of events in her life — “Sometimes I feel I am not me anymore!” to renewed optimism, exhorting women not to let the fire in us die out.

“Keep up the faith and hope we have rekindled!”, she messages me with a smiley. That sums up the trauma — and the triumph — of the women in our city.

The writer is a Kolkata based journalist