[Reader-list] Raped Twice

[asit das]

*Raped Twice*

*By Inshah Malik *

21 December, 2012
*Countercurrents.org*

The gruesome gang rape that happened recently in the capital city New Delhi
of India has knocked off the imagination of Indian Nation. The college
going ‘girl’ was gang raped in a private bus, six men reportedly in a
drunken state are involved in the crime. The barbarity of the incident of
shoving iron rod in the private organs of the girl has sent jitters down
the spine of conscious young people in the country. This news perturbed me
quite irately. I went on to pour condemnation messages all over social
media, very emotionally until I remembered Shabnam.

Shabnam was standing near the bus stop, when I arrived in a small local
car. She was dim, her face was pale and wrinkled while she was just in her
late thirties. In north of Kashmir, a twin village site, Konan-Poshpora
which is known for the ‘mass rape’ of some 62 women in early 1990’s by the
Indian army, every woman here has a gruesome spine chilling story to share.
But Shabnam, She is a symbol of ‘existence’, she exists, quite plainly and
different from the rest of the ‘mass’.

She escorted me to her tiny little house by the edge of the green fields
that belong to the farming villagers. As I entered, a strange sense of
apathy overwhelmed me, Shabnam’s five year old son sat across the room. The
room was cold, dark and a repugnant smell engulfed it. This is a room,
where Shabnam has lived all her married life, her best and probably the
worst moments happened under this roof. As I was sensing it, Shabnam
intervened, “I hate this house, i never want to live here. Last year, I had
a terrible fight with my husband and first thing I wanted to do is burn
this house down”. I almost did, she laughs and continues, “Just five
minutes on this straight road from here is an army camp”, and she abruptly
fell silent staring the road from the hole in her wooden window. I didn’t
know how to progress the conversation in such a situation and I asked, ‘you
fight with your husband’. She said in an irritated way, ‘of course, men
never understand what happens to us’ and in the same breath, but my husband
is an angel, if he was not there for me, I would have killed myself. No man
can accept his wife back, after she is ‘raped’.

I was silent for a while, trying to imagine, what must have happened in
this place, when in late hours the Indian army men entered each and every
house, when there were shrieks of women coming from all the corners. Women
were calling all the higher spiritual forces to come to their aid, as I am
thinking now of the helplessness of a Delhi girl clutched by barbarians
lone in a moving bus while hurt her friend severely.

Shabnam continued sharing her ordeal, ‘how can a man be happy with a woman
who can no-longer satisfy his sexual urges, a woman whose genitals are
electrocuted’. This detail surprised me because in the mass rape there were
no reported instances of torture. She continued, “I was interrogated and
raped again, a year after the mass rape happened in this village, they
arrested me because my husband’s brother was a militant. Twelve army men
raped me and after then gave electric shocks in my genitals. Even after
this my husband took me back, for me, isn’t he a prophet? But, I am no
longer an able person; he earns little and pays all for my medical
treatments”
I was speechless; this was first time for me to face the reality of our
political situation as well as my feminine self. I had by now forgotten all
lessons of research and knowledge generation that my university prepared me
with. I sat unmoved, thinking and listening.

She continued, “that year when the mass rape happened, it was my second
year of marriage, a day before that myr husband brought me some gifts and
we were still in love, now perhaps I don’t know what we mean by love, it
has become such a grave realization. That night they dragged all the men of
the village out in a crackdown to hunt militants fighting them for freedom,
and they dragged my husband out of the house, it was winter they made him
sleep on a six feet high heap of snow. I was watching from the window, I
could not see my husband in this condition. I came out of my house and told
the army men to leave my husband. My husband became furious and shouted at
me, “don’t you see what they are doing to women? Get inside and lock the
door. Let me die”.

‘A strange realization dawned on me, my sister who was still unmarried was
in the house, I asked her at once to leave the house from the window. This
irritated the army men. I ran inside and closed the door, they broke open
the door, they were ten or twenty or more, I have no consciousness of that,
I just remember, I was bleeding all through the way to hospital. I wish,
they assaulted my memory too. I did not have the burden to remember it or
narrate it’, she said
I slowly made my way out of that room, which was beginning to appear a hole
of dingy darkness; I walked slowly, leaving behind Shabnam with her
constant struggle with her memory.

The incident in Delhi that has perturbed us all alike, rape is not merely
an assault on a body. Every such violation is an assault on memory which
often forces women to shift from ‘living’ to merely ‘existing’. In fact
when a woman is raped, she is raped twice: one of her body and another by
silence of others. Today, the conscious young women of India must ask
questions for Shabnam too because uniform does not remove the barbarity of
neither the masculine militaristic state nor the patriarchal mind. In fact,
Uniform furthers just these very aspects of cannibalistic colonialism

Inshah Malik is a PhD scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru university