In November, a twenty-seven-year-old woman in Hyderabad was brutally raped and murdered by a gang of four truck drivers.
Yet, instead of confronting the issue of yet another instance of male violence against women in a deeply patriarchal society, several Hindu nationalists framed it as an act of Muslim violence.
Despite the fact that three of the accused perpetrators were Hindu and only one was Muslim, hashtags asking for the Muslim man to be hanged trended on Twitter. These reactions weren’t just from rogue elements of Indian society either; they were reinforced by media outlets and political leaders.
Suresh Chavhanke—chairman, managing director and the editor-in-chief of Sudarshan News, and anchor of the TV show Bindas Bol—questioned whether the three Hindu suspects had been arrested under pressure to “balance the arrest of the Muslim man”. BJP MLA Raja Singh from Goshamahal, Telangana posted a video saying he expected that someone with an Islamic name would be named as a suspect. Amit Malviya, the BJP’s social media leader and head of its IT Cell, tweeted only the name of the Muslim man accused when referring to the incident.
Similar Islamophobic elements were observed in the 2018 Mandsaur and 2019 Aligarh cases, in which two girls–seven and eight years old –from Hindu families were raped by Muslim men, with the eight-year-old being murdered. In the aftermath of both events, there was not only deserved and widespread condemnation of their acts, but also an outpouring of Islamophobic sentiments.
The fear of mob violence forced many Muslim residents of Mandsaur and Aligarh to flee their homes. Simultaneously, numerous Hindu civilians propagated the false narrative that the media, ‘feminists’, and ‘seculars’ only care about violence against women when the victims are Muslim, despite the fact that the perpetrators were widely criticized, and that local Muslim leaders called for the death penalty and vowed not to make any land available for their burial.
Conversely, in Kashmir’s Kathua district in 2018, an eight-year-old girl from a Muslim family was raped and murdered by eight Hindu men. Yet, hand in hand with several lawyers and members of the Hindu public, the right-wing Hindu Ekta Manch, along with two former and one current BJP minister, demanded the release of a special police officer (SPO), one of the eight accused.
The National Crime Report Bureau (NCRB) does not publish data on violence against women that categorizes the religion of perpetrators. However, by looking at the 2017 NCRB report and 2011 Census, one can determine state-wise percentages of both religious populations and crime against women. The data shows that the religious makeup of states does not correlate with an increased or decreased rate of violence against women. The five states with the highest percentage of Hindus and the five states with the highest percentage of Muslims are equally represented in the list of ten states with the highest and the ten states with the lowest rates of violence against women.
Are outrages about Muslim violence against women really about women’s safety then?
Such reactions merely serve to propietize women, wherein an attack on one woman is seen as an attack on the community to which she “belongs”, rather than as an attack on women specifically as an act of gender-based violence. Thus, victimized women are seen as a religion, caste, or ethnicity first, and women second, and violence against women as a group is thus buried under a facade of minority violence against women.
This can be placed within a wider, global phenomenon whereby people belonging to higher sections of a social hierarchy use acts of violence against women by minority and marginalized communities as an opportunity to justify their xenophobia, racism, or sectarianism.
In 2017, US President Donald Trump implemented his ‘travel ban’, otherwise known as the ‘Muslim Ban’, restricting the movement of citizens from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen to the USA. One of the aims of the ban was to reduce Muslim male violence against women, placing special emphasis on honour killings.
Yet, multiple states in the US allow a “crimes of passion” defense, whereby several men have had their punishments and charges softened and reduced, despite killing their partners “after being irrationally angry with them”. There is little difference between an honour killing and a crime of passion, yet the former is used to perpetuate the falsehood that Muslim men are uniquely violent towards women, while the latter is largely ignored.
Similarly, during the campaign trail preceding his inauguration as President, Trump labelled Mexicans as ‘rapists’, among other vile insults. Such views formed the basis for his hardline immigration stance, in which he has reduced refugee admissions, increased arrests of unauthorized immigrants, and cancelled protections under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which provides work authorization and deportation relief to unauthorized immigrants brought to the US as children.
Consequently, women have become pawns in communal conflicts, wherein violence against them is framed as an issue that is uniquely perpetuated by marginalized sections of society, rather than as a worldwide phenomenon of male violence across borders, religions, castes, and ethnicities.
In fact, the World Health Organization (WHO) reports that 35% of women worldwide have experienced sexual violence, both from partners and non-partners.
Within its report, it places the following countries in the ‘high income’ category: Australia, Canada, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the United States of America. These countries are commonly considered to be more liberal and women-friendly; however, they report slightly higher incidence rates of non-partner sexual violence against women than countries in Africa, Central America, South America, and Asia.
While it can be argued that low incidence rates in developing countries are due to under-reporting, at the very least, it is established that male violence against women is a global epidemic, regardless of the incidence rate.
This pattern of male violence exists within a broader patriarchal framework whereby women’s bodies are appropriated to magnify communal divisions even in instances without violence.
For example, Muslim women are often framed as being oppressed for how they dress, be it in a hijab, niqab, or burqa. They are contrasted with non-Islamic women, who are said to be able to dress as they choose, unencumbered by patriarchal restrictions.
While that may or may not be true, this narrative has resulted in burqa bans in Austria, Denmark, France, Belgium, Italy, Latvia, Bulgaria, the Netherlands, one canton in Switzerland, in Xinjiang, China, and for public sector employees in Germany and Quebec, Canada. Similar proposals in Australia and the United Kingdom failed, despite overwhelming popular support.
This ‘white knight’ syndrome, wherein men from non-Islamic countries and cultures forcefully co-opt Muslim women into their supposed culture of tolerance and freedom to save them from oppression, is wrought with contradictions and ulterior motives.
A major argument for burqa bans is their cultural ‘unacceptability’ or ‘incompatibility’. Regardless of one’s opinions on Islam, or indeed on any culture or religion, if the countries that have banned the burqa are so tolerant and respectful of women’s freedom of choice, how then can they simultaneously impose restrictions on what women can wear?
Thus, people from the upper echelons of social hierarchy–be it white people in the USA, Canada, Europe and Australia; Hindus in India; or the Han Chinese in China–have appropriated women’s bodies in order to entrench their position of social dominance by widening communal divisions, and undermining marginalized and minority communities.
Their actions are less about the protection of women than they are about attempting to homogenize their societies by sowing seeds of conflict.
Ultimately, whether women are pawns or collateral damage in communal conflicts is a rhetorical question. As author Caroline Criado Perez asks in Invisible Women, in a world where workplaces, education and transportation systems, medical devices and treatments, tax structures, consumer products, and even smartphones are designed for a male prototype, are women merely an afterthought? One might suggest that this question is equally rhetorical.
Are Women Collateral Damage in Communal Conflicts?
Women’s bodies are used as political pawns in communal conflicts.
December 5, 2019
IMAGE SOURCE: CHANDAN KHANNA / AFP / GETTY IMAGESWomen have become pawns in communal conflicts, wherein violence against them is framed as an issue that is uniquely perpetuated by marginalized sections of society, rather than as a worldwide phenomenon of male violence across borders, religions, castes,