Rohtak Rape: Why We Need to Look Outside the Lens of Privilege

Poverty may or may not be a factor, but the deeply ingrained patriarchal structures which influence decisions, are.

On 13 May 2017, in Rohtak district of Haryana, a 10-year-old girl was found pregnant after being repeatedly raped by her stepfather.

The incident evoked widespread outrage on social media but two days later, it grew even more, when news emerged that the girl’s mother wanted her husband to be set free.

Please set my husband free. These NGOs and activists promising big things will not take care of me and my children for life. They will go within two-three days. My husband will take care of us.

She told the Hindustan Times

She further added that a private doctor offered to kill her daughter for Rs 20,000.

We are poor people, from where will we pay Rs 20,000? I didn’t really want to kill my daughter anyway.

She told the Hindustan Times

Not justifiable at any cost. But the problem is something else.

We Have an Upper Class Privileged Lens

When I saw the link on a Facebook page, the comments below the article were demonising the mother for supporting the husband. Not unusual, given that a woman in India is often blamed for being raped, and in this case, the blaming and shaming focused solely on the mother. But when I shared it on my timeline, a couple of friends had similar views. One commented “no amount of poverty can justify this”.

True, no amount of poverty can justify a brutal crime, but unfortunately, poverty isn’t the only angle which may have influenced her decision. It is critical to apply an intersectional lens here. Her background, her caste, her education, none of which we are aware of, are possible axes which may have subconsciously “trained” her to have such thoughts.

This raises a few questions:

Can we really understand her rationale through our upper class privileged lens? For once, just once, can we not dig deeper and understand why is she saying this?

But the problem is that we want to find quick-fix solutions. Just like politicians promise more CCTVs and Kadi Ninda after every rape. Similarly, blaming the mother was the easiest thing to do and that’s just what people did.

Poverty may or may not be a factor, but the deeply ingrained social norms and patriarchal structures, which dominate and influence decisions, are. The mother’s subconscious mind wants to maintain the status quo. And clearly, this has not much to do with education or income levels.

To draw parallels, consider the recent case of Neha Rastogi, an NRI in the US, who was a former software engineer at Apple. She was physically abused and tortured by her husband Abhishek Gattani, who was a CEO of a Silicon Valley startup. In an interview to The Daily Beast, she said she did not end the marriage, in part because of her upbringing in India, where nobody she or her family knew was divorced and where it would have brought shame on all involved.

There you go. Patriarchy 101.

Textbook Example of Patriarchy 101

She didn’t end the marriage earlier not because she wanted to live with an abusive man, not because she didn’t want to be independent – but because of her “upbringing”, a textbook example of how the patriarchal power structure works. Rastogi felt that “family honour” took precedence over her freedom and dignity.

This came from a woman who worked at Apple. I didn’t see anyone blaming Neha when the story broke out, and rightly so. Given her background, one would have expected that a woman like Neha would be able to come out of an abusive marriage as she was highly educated and financially independent, but clearly it wasn’t so. Her successful career and income, clearly, weren’t able to convince her to leave her husband earlier.

Similarly, in this case, it is unjustified to blame the mother without understanding her background. It is obvious that her mindset and thoughts were shaped by her patriarchal upbringing, the gendered power structures which surrounded her throughout her life and her limited bargaining power within the household.

I do not support her stand in any way, but I would not blame her directly. There is a clear difference between the two of them. Therefore, rather than going into binaries and doing an “us v/s them”, it is critical to understand the nuances and the layered nature of such issues.

(Devanik Saha is an MA Gender & Development at Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)