India: "Why did it need an incident so unspeakably brutal to trigger outrage?"

Vanguard February 2013

7 January 2013. A World to Win News Service.

(Above: Indian police suppress protests against rape)

The outrage in Delhi and other Indian cities (among women of all social classes and many men too) against the violent gang rape and subsequent death of a 23-year-old Delhi student is most welcome. This righteous response was met with tear gas and beatings from the Indian state. At the same time, to quell some of the protest the government has set up a fast track court and five men of the six accused have now been charged with rape, sequestration and murder. Usually, it takes years for a rape case to come to trial. Deliberation around the sixth is whether to try him as a minor or an adult.

The indignation over this crime has created a national sense of shame and a conversation in India: About the pitiful reaction to violence against women from the government, its courts and law enforcers. About how rape has gone on virtually unpunished, how blatantly anti-women British colonial laws from 1860s did not change after independence until a brutal rape case lead to the formation of a women's movement in 1983 and to the laws currently in effect, how the emphasis in Indian culture is not the violent attack on a woman's body but the honour that is stolen from her husband, how the police often themselves rape victims who report rape, how many politicians running for office have been accused of rape, how rape is ingrained in Indian culture, how families try to hide rape and tell daughters to accept it as part of the price for being a woman, and how earlier infamous rapes cases got swept under the rug after promises by authorities to ''sensitise'' judges, police, lawyers and other authorities who deal with rape victims.

Violence, oppression and male domination of women exists worldwide in all societies. It originated when patriarchy, the family, private property and classes came into being and persists in both "modern" and traditional ways, and often both at once. It is endemic to the functioning of all systems of exploitation. Only the forms are different and vary according to how different countries are integrated into the overall imperialist system of exploitation and oppression that dominates the globe.

Women (and their bodies) are viewed as lesser beings that should be covered for their sinfulness and punished in a myriad of humiliating and violent ways, as objects of sexual pleasure and as commodities. Women endure murder or rape by husbands, family members or partners, bride-burnings, honour killings, prostitution, degradation by a global pornography epidemic, female genital mutilation, rape by an occupying army or militias, rape of female soldiers by male soldiers of the same army, forced abortions of unwanted girl foetuses and death or illness from illegal abortions....  

(Above: Indian women continue with protests against rape)

The institutions of the state of the ruling classes cannot be adjusted in such a way that they can be relied on for fundamental social change. Police are a concentration of the kind of society they serve, the social and economic relations their job is to protect. Women are dominated by men because of the workings of the whole exploitative system. The ideas, culture and police apparatus are part of the superstructure that developed around the existing system, whether in "modern" capitalist societies like the U.S. or U.K. or countries in the third world. The ideas, values, and social relations are a reflection of how that system and society functions and serve to keep the ruling classes in power.

Inequalities and oppressive divisions between men and women as well as between classes, castes (an important particularity in India) and different nationalities can only be eliminated in a society organized around entirely different principles.

Change never comes about without intense struggle to fight injustice and bring more and more people into resistance against the existing ruling classes. It is with this kind of resistance that people can raise their sights and see the need to fight for a revolutionary solution. The fury in India should be applauded and go further to that fundamental ''reckoning''. Overthrowing India's ruling classes and establishing a new revolutionary state power is an essential step in eliminating the oppression of women in all its forms.