Rape is Political in India

Moumita Alam

If Corruption is one of the most used words in political Dictionary of India, then Rape must be another. It never becomes obsolete. It’s always there, always here and will be there. Rape, as the perception goes, should be aligned to shame and guilt for anyone, but for Indian men and their politics, Rape is always an unashamedly political weapon. The Kolkata law college rape case and the perpetrator’s closeness to the ruling Trinamool Congress government once again brought out the aspects of Rape as a political weapon. Rape is an immortal tool of the Indian men; they never let go of Rape.

They are never tired of Rape. They rape within marriage, they Rape outside marriage in school rooms, in colleges, in fields everywhere. They are pretty decent, non-classist, non-ageist in terms of rape: they rape 3 3-year-old child to 90 90-year-old woman. They are very secular in terms of rape: they might not take food from the hands of the Dalits, but they don’t have any problems raping Dalit women! The Indian Express reports that 10 Dalit women are raped every day in India. Dalits, Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Adivasis, upper castes–doesn’t matter. To teach the women a “lesson, to have power over the women” be it in family politics or politics of the macrocosm, Indian men never stop Raping. And to Rape, to get the chance to Rape with absolute impunity, Indian Rapists are close to the political parties, to the establishment. Whenever a rape is perpetrated, a political party or its leaders show up to either shield the perpetrators or trivialise the incidents of Rape. In the outrage against Rape lies the politics of power too: the Hathras rape victim never got the amount of attention as Nirbhaya did, the Bengali Bhadraloks come in the street to protest when something happen in the heart of the centre of or around Kolkata, they never take out a candle light vigil if something happens in Northern part of Bengal.

In 2019, the Karnataka assembly, a Congress MLA, K R Ramesh Kumar, said, “There is a saying that when Rape is inevitable, lie down and enjoy.” The assembly house burst out in laughter. Whenever Rape is committed, political leaders jump onto the bandwagon to save the perpetrators, either by victim shaming or by trivializing the crime. After the South Kolkata law college rape, TMC MLA Madan Mitra commented, “If that girl had not gone there, this incident wouldn’t have happened.” Kalyan Banerjee, the veteran MP from TMC, categorically trolled and bullied Mahua Maitra, another MP from the same party, as the latter protested against the misogynistic comments of MadanMitra and Kalyan Banerjee. The main perpetrator, Manojit Mishra is close to the ruling party, All India Trinamool Congress. He allegedly proposed the victim for marriage and as the victim rejected him, to show the victim a lesson, he, along with two raped the victim.

BJP is not an exception. The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party has never ending list of support for the sexual abusers and rape accused. From Pranjal Ravanna, Brijbhushan Sharan Singh, Kuldeep Singh Sengar, the rape accused of the Unnao Rape case and Kathua Rape case, Ankita Bhandari murder case to MLA Ramdular - the list is full of stellar casts. Political parties and political leaders standing by the rape accused or the rapists is not an aberration. The relationship between the rapists and the political parties is symbiotic. So, in every conflict, every genocide, every ‘no’ from the women, Rape is used as a tool to show the unflinching power of the powerful over the women.

So, the Rapists of the Bilkis Bano are garlanded, but the Hathras rape victim doesn’t get justice. In 2017, in a press release, the National Human Rights Commission reported that they found 16 women prima facie victims of rape, sexual and physical violence by police personnel in Chhattisgarh.

So if a Muslim writer or a Dalit woman intellectual writes anything that goes against the mainstream narrative of the establishment, the haters come with the ultimate tool–Rape.

It’s time to come out of a one-dimensional, facile gendered view of rape to focus on the multifaceted view of rape as a tool to oppress, suppress, and dehumanise the weak. Rape has always been a tool of those in power to torture, intimidate minorities, minorities of all types, that is, minorities based on gender, caste, class, religion, or power. Rulers have changed, but the scenario has never changed. According to NCRB data, crimes against women have increased 31% from 2014 to 2022 under the Modi government, rising from 3, 37,922 in 2014 to 4,45,256 in 2022.

In the Rwandan genocide in 1994, half a million women were raped and infected by the Hutu militia to ethnically cleanse the Tutsi Community. The same happened with the thousands of Bengali women in Bangladesh during the Bangladesh Liberation War.

In India now, it’s not a war against women by any foreign country. Indian patriarchy, boosted by the symbiotic relationship between politicians and rapists, is raging a war against Indian women. Remember the Kuki women paraded naked, remember the R G Kar medical college rape victim, Ashifa, Bilkis Bano and millions of others who are unnamed or killed are the witnesses. And in this war, Indian women are not losing their bodies but their souls too. When will the war end?

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Frontier
Vol 58, No. 7, Aug 10 - 16, 2025