(by G Waugh)
Pick any social or cultural phenomenon of today and try to analyze it. If your analysis does not involve the economic aspect underlying it, you are probably not analyzing it enough. The world of today was not the world we saw a couple of decades ago. The Chennai I grew up in the 1990s has very little resemblance to the Chennai of today. The quantum of change the city has undergone in the last two decades or so is much, much higher than that which happened during the four decades preceding the advent of neoliberalism that hit us in 1991.
This amount of change that happened in almost all aspects of our lives including those of psychology and culture post India’s embrace of neoliberalism was simply too huge and complex to understand that it continues to bewilder both common people as well as public intellectuals even today. On my part, I will try to analyze through this essay the only aspect of increasing rates of criminality happening in neoliberal India with special focus on sexual crimes perpetrated on women.
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Even if the general public is not willing to engage with these phenomena critically, there is no easy escaping the overwhelming flood of news that invade our living rooms through smartphones and televisions bringing gruesome stories of rape, murders, extortion and drugs. Most people would like to dismiss stories of crime as something that has always been part of our societies and that today’s proliferating number of news channels and web-portals greatly exaggerate them as to capture and hold the attention of viewers in order to ward-off competition. But in my opinion, this explanation is hardly sufficient.
India before 1991 was never witness to crimes such as child-rape and human trafficking on a scale that is being witnessed today. The dangers of today to children and women of our families are quite real and staying in denial mode, unfortunately may no longer be an option. However our middle classes especially young and educated ones often overestimate their ability to provide simple solutions to extremely complex problems such as these. One solution offered and the most famous among all of them is the awarding of capital punishment for the incorrigible sexual offender. Some offer less brutal yet more sophisticated punishments such as chemical castration, which might in my humble opinion play only a very rudimentary a role in curbing these crimes.
There are two types of rapes in India to put it broadly – one carried out by persons possessing enormous social and economic power and another carried out by people who have literally nothing of that sort.
Explaining the first kind is quite simple since it is very much a traditional phenomenon in Asiatic countries like India. The case of farm workers and daily wage-labourers being violated by Zamindars and traditionally wealthy elites in rural India has been happening for more than three or four centuries and strong ties of the offenders with local rulers and men in law enforcement offices have often ensured their unchallenged immunity from legal punishment. This class of elites has undergone a radical change in their composition post-1991 with new actors joining their ranks with stupendous rapidity.
Ever since India’s natural resources were opened to private acquisition as part of economic liberalization in 1991, the rewards achievable by being involved in politics grew bigger by the day. Close links with politicians could get hefty rewards for you through mining contracts, permits to run private hospitals and educational institutions which were all these years under the domain of the government. Mining, education, healthcare, real estate and defense were the key sectors in India which created an altogether new class of entrepreneurs whose exponential growth of fortunes in the neoliberal age stunned even people belonging to the traditionally wealthy elite. These new entrepreneurs had so much money at their disposal and found it expedient to cultivate connections in almost all departments of the government. Those involved in law enforcement started making a killing out of these new deals with business elites and were only glad to become their unofficial foot soldiers in dealing with local dissent and trade-union menace. Judges, government doctors and journalists hitherto reasonably immune from the corrupting influence of vested interests were also not spared. As a result, the size of the power-wielding elite grew to unprecedented proportions whose adjuncts employed in the echelons of state power were only too happy to collude in the machinations of the new-born, 21st century Indian capitalist.
This nexus that strung the businessman, the law-enforcer, the law-maker, the judge, the press reporter and the state medical official together was made possible only with the help of the blueprint furnished by the new economic policy adopted by the government in 1991. Those affected by this nexus directly or indirectly had no means to apply for justice since no part of the state’s grievance-redressal network was spared by these new class of entrepreneurs. This is one important reason why the number and gravity of crimes perpetrated by this class grows unabated every passing day as evidenced by the recent sexual crimes reported in Pollachi.
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The second type of rape carried out mostly by poor and lower-middle classes is slightly more complex to understand. To get a hang of it, one needs to understand the economic changes that swept individual lives in post-1991 India. Agriculture, India’s traditional occupation that employed more than 70 percent of India’s workforce in the early 1960s was completely strangulated by the government through a series of market-oriented measures aimed at deregulating the sector from 1991 onwards. India witnessed a massive shift of labour from agriculture to service industries coupled with an unprecedented number of farmer suicides right from the beginning of the new millennium. Millions of workers and their families hitherto directly engaged in farming and related activities were forced to move out of their traditional professions and learn new skills to fit into and survive the new order.
The virtual disappearance of jobs in the agricultural sector was not sufficiently compensated by newer opportunities in other areas. The government also post-1991 declared a virtual ban on state as well as public sector recruitment. Permanent employment was no longer the norm in organized sector while newer forms of less-secure, grossly underpaid contractual employment began to appear almost everywhere.
Glitzy malls selling expensive fashion items, food, films and other forms of recreation cropped up all over the urban centres in India where the disenfranchised rural poor had recently migrated to make a living. Almost all facets of urban life were centered on unbridled consumerism while the ability to acquire expensive commodities, regardless of their purpose and utility was touted to be one of the final goals of modern, civilized existence. Needless to say, neoliberal capitalism of the 21st century for the most part made use of attractive-looking women as the easiest way to sell their wares through advertisements in newspapers, televisions, malls, hoardings and smartphones. Most magazines even before the advent of neoliberalism in India had the habit of making use of scantily-clad women to boost their circulation irrespective of their relevance to the published content. The same trend was adopted by advertisers and film-makers of the 21st century whose role in defining the tastes and attitudes of poor and middle classes cannot simply be overstated.
****
The individual who hitherto had safely belonged to his agricultural community in pre-reform India whose values and norms he easily understood received his first shock when he was driven out of his traditional profession. The pressure to adapt to an altogether new way of life in order to survive must have been, no doubt unimaginably huge. Add to it the paltry number of opportunities that were open to him for survival in the new city or town. To top it all, the cultural alienation after having been relocated to a vastly different milieu that brought together with it a completely different set of social and moral standards must have made things even more difficult for him.
Acquiring a job with a fairly decent income has always been the pre-condition for an Indian male to secure marriage from time immemorial. And marriage has always been the only ticket for an entry into the secretly guarded world of sex and carnal fulfilment in a still culturally feudal India. Cities and towns under the influence of neoliberal capitalism through advertisements and pop-culture phenomena, never stopped issuing seductive appeals to both his carnal as well as hitherto dormant consumerist impulses. But this uprooted male never came close to achieving even a dignified form of life which in turn made his chances in the marriage market bleaker and bleaker. Those males who immediately fell to the whims of their consumerist impulses were able to land plumb opportunities in the burgeoning world of organized crime. Organized crime in the form of kidnapping, extortion, drug-peddling, human trafficking were crucial to the smooth functioning of the neo-liberal economy and the rewards and remuneration involved here were too alluring to say the least. The world of organized crime was pretty much a crucial component of the newly-constructed capitalist power-elite described in the previous part of the essay and being part of it brought rich rewards for men in the forms of access to the hitherto-forbidden world of expensive commodities, high societies and glamorous women. Anurag Kashyap’s Sacred Games helps one to understand this world where societies of the powerful elite live in a state of mutually beneficial harmony with those in the dark underworlds of slum-infested cities.
These men part of criminal gangs through their lucrative association with police authorities as well as influential politicians and businessmen were often tempted to run parallel empires of unchallenged domination which helped them get away with ruthless sexual violence against easy prey such as middle-class college and office-going women. Parents and relatives of these victims had virtually no means to secure justice in this newly-rearranged world of ubiquitous corruption and moral depravity.
Even if sexual criminality of males belonging to criminal gangs and mafia underworld appears quite easy to understand now, there is another often-confusing phenomenon of lower-class males without any of these aforementioned ‘legal protections’ indulging themselves in rapes and other sexual crimes. As observed previously, males belonging to the newly uprooted sections in India especially those who had failed to land opportunities in the tricky world of organized crime, continued to languish within the margins of urban society unable to withstand the pulls and pressures of their smoldering impulses for carnal fulfilment. Even married men with families are often found to be guilty of these sexual crimes which can partially be explained by their physical and emotional estrangement with their families living hundreds of miles apart in their native villages and towns.
All of this is not to imply that only men belonging to the migrant population are responsible for increasing rates of sexual crime in India. Neoliberal India has not only affected those belonging to the agricultural profession but also those involved in their traditional professions such as weaving, pottery, handicrafts and other manufacturing sectors. Introduction of capital intensive equipment into the manufacturing sector by big industrial houses has brought the cost of these hand-crafted goods to historical lows. Thousands of small and medium businesses were as a result shutdown and the displaced workforce were again placed at the mercy of the all-powerful market. To say that this neoliberal phenomenon has in many ways jeopardized the survival of the entire Indian workforce is simply not a wild exaggeration.
Males belonging to these sections of population form the majority in India who on account of a myriad factors such as lack of proper means of livelihood, lack of well-knit families on account of their perennial economic uncertainty coupled with new forms of ‘culture-shock’ due to radically altered male-female equations in a society of financially liberated women were subjected to unforeseen levels of psychological pressure. Bonds created through well-knit families that depended on a reasonable level of social dignity and economic well-being have for centuries together acted as levers counteracting the criminal and aggressive tendencies of men. Middle-class morality in India with its own flaws and contradictions was sturdily built on a strong foundation of financial adequacy and family bonding as a result of which men belonging to these classes, for generations together had their inclinations to violence and criminality strongly tempered by their commitments to family well-being and future economic advancement.
Consequently, uprooted males who belonged neither here nor there, having been completely unmoored from long-term commitments to family bonds in a tricky neoliberal environment of insurmountable financial volatility, realized that they had nothing to lose due to moral overstepping goaded by relentless appeals emanating from the glitzy superstructure of neoliberal capitalism.
Baradwaj Rangan 
Jeeva Pitchaimani
April 10, 2021
Eerily, this scene resonates with what I have written in the article. This scene is from Emmy Award winning series Delhi Crime that focused on the Nirbhaya case.
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Madan
July 13, 2020
vijay: “I would imagine rape was probably much more institutionalized back then and many more could get away with it” – Indeed. Forget pre-1991. My grandfather grew up in Pudukottai in 1930s and he said a professor there was nicknamed kannukutti because he raped a calf. Yes, like, a calf of the bovine variety. So great was his lust for sex that he unleashed it on an animal.
Jeeva: While I am not fully convinced of communism as a solution for India’s problems, I think the economic issues are valid and well worth discussing. BUT the conflation with rape is going to make a lot of readers ignore that altogether. I am not convinced either about the link between neo-liberalism and rape. I am not convinced we can call what we had in India as a pure neo-liberalism. Liberalisation of factor markets is STILL awaited though the govt used the lockdown to slip in labour reforms quietly. The only thing they changed in 1991 was no longer requiring companies to seek permission from govt for what to produce, how much to produce and how to (like what colour etc). India never was a full fledged socialist economy before 91 and is still not a full fledged capitalist economy now. Neither will the govt give up that much power nor while incumbent industrialists give up their hold on govt completely.
BECAUSE of the way media was organised pre-1991 (vijay has already explained how, barring a reasonably free press, our media apparatus resembled that of a communist state, if anything), we can’t do an objective comparison of sexual assault crime between the two eras. HOWEVER, the fact that in the face of continuing rape and other sexual assault crimes, women keep joining the workforce and keep liberating themselves from cultural shackles, suggests that relative to the past, India is either as unsafe or slightly less unsafe than before, but unlikely to be more unsafe, at least not radically so.
Take films as a proxy. Even though the loosu ponnu trope survives on and on, you cannot have a Singaravelan Kamal Haasan lecturing Khusbhu for her to promptly turn up in a sari and blush while Thoodhu Selva rings out. That trope is dead and is now beyond the pale. It was never so mainstream a trope in Bollywood and definitely isn’t now. If these were all flagrantly against what the depraved youth from the countryside struggling in the city believes, you would see a pushback but there isn’t one.
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librascaleblog
July 13, 2020
I encourage everyone to watch The Death of Stalin, available on Amazon Prime. Quite pertinent to all this discussion of Communism & sexual assault.
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Enigma
July 13, 2020
So what is it that you want Jeeva:
State control of all businesses and industries
Licenses for buying television
Three-month waiting period to buy cars
One state-run television channel
No computers in banks
Bank employees recording debits, credits, receipts and payments in thick ledgers
Trekking to the nearest public sector bank branch to withdraw 1000 bucks – in that process taking a token and waiting for hours before your number is called out. Just when you are about to approach the counter, being asked to wait longer as the teller is about to take a tea break.
One landline
Dealing with corrupt/inefficient public sector employees
The neoliberalism, that you accuse of being responsible for the increase in rapes in India, brought us the little develpment that we have seen and has lifted millions out of poverty (agreed, this is an anectodal figure but I’ve read many economists say this). Rape is a serious crime, in fact the worst, and rapists deserve nothing less than capital punishment. But communism is not the solution, we have seen how inefficient communist states have been. Before you cite China, I would like to point out that China embraced free market economic system much before India. We need to work towards reducing inequality and making our cities and villages safe for women. But let us not think of the discredited system of communism as a solution.
PS: Of all the studpid and ridiculous things that commies and their unions have done, the worst should definitely be their battle against computerisation and automation. How stupid can they be.
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librascaleblog
July 12, 2020
@Jeeva P
Is this the book you wrote?
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Jeeva Pitchaimani
July 12, 2020
Hi All
I just need to explain two broad things here.
1) I did not give enough stats here as I assumed and still strongly believe the increase in crime rate especially that of sexual crimes is real and only to some extent exaggerated. Anyhow if so many of my readers are asking for it, I wish to take the criticism seriously – I should have written it better and more convincingly with stats.
There is only one reason why Mirnalini B thinks using rapes as a tool to criticize neoliberalism is disingenous – my failure to back my argument with stats and not certainly that there are no rapes due to this economic phenomena.
People who have been studying neoliberalism seriously such as Arundhati Roy, Jayati Ghosh or Naomi Klein would have been surprised at Mirnalini’s comment, for all of them strongly believe that the link between crimes/sexual crimes and neoliberalism is quite self-evident.
For someone who sincerely believes in Marxism as me, any social phenomena is directly or to a great extent indirectly related to the political economy of the country at a particular instant is something that is quite axiomatic. This field of thought is also called economic determinism. To relate any social phenomena in order to explain it to economics, is in my opinion is extremely crucial and this is the foremost reason behind me writing this essay.
I have also given a few names, countries out in my previous comments. Readers might like to google their names and see what they have been saying on neoliberalism and their links to crimes in their respective countries.
2) No part of my essay suggests that rapes and sexual crimes are something like a neoliberal invention. To interpret it like that and to try to divert all attention to our cultural relics like victim-shaming, the lack of education or male chauvinist mindset looks too strawman to me.
And I am yet to get one valid denial of my story about workforce displacement and estrangement of families both physical and emotional from anyone of you. Don’t any of you think these consequences of neoliberalism would have played atleast a peripheral role in increasing sexual crimes? You can either think that this kind of massive workforce displacement did not happen at all or if you believe they did happen, I don’t think you can deny the role they had played in increasing crime rates.
And none of you have said anything about my point about the new invention of the neoliberal age- the politician-businessman-judiciary-doctor-mediaperson nexus that plays a key role in ensuring greater and greater impunity for the perpetrators. Similar to what I have told above, you either say there is no nexus of that kind or if you think it exists, you cannot deny their role in increasing rates of sexual crimes in India. A network that enjoys so much power must be foolish not to commit crimes at all.
P.S – Vimal Kumar, when I admitted that I am a communist sympathiser, I was well prepared for this age-old, overused weapon of using Russia and China to deny the moral validity of communism. I will be the first person to accept the massive human rights violations that happened in Soviet Russia on a scale comparable to Hitler’s Germany. And the crimes that happen to Uighur Muslims in today’s China which includes sexual crimes as well cannot be denied at all. As a communist sympathizer and a firm believer in Marxism it is my duty to condemn all of them and not side with the international ruling ‘communist’ parties. I have even written a book on it.
Since I have done here my share of duty of admitting these crimes made by those working under the banner of Communism, I expect to see a semblance of the same level of honesty from my opposite camp. Running the risk of digressing from the topic here, I would like to see atleast one unconditional confession from the camp that espouses capitalism of having been responsible for massive human rights violations that it carried out during its hegemony during the imperial era in India, Africa and Latin America by companies that goaded their freedom-loving governments in Europe to expand their markets. I would like to see what were these freedom-loving capitalist countries doing behind the backs of the local governments when Chile, Bolivia, Indonesia were butchering millions and millions of working people for none of their faults. What was freedom-loving America doing in Iraq and Afghanistan two decades back bombing residential areas and taking over all assets of these countries for free? Can any one advocate of capitalism come and make a plain confession like I did?
PPS- Since this is my second post saying the same thing all over again, I cannot reply to any more comments/questions/quips from my readers with regard to the same topic hereafter. I sincerely request my readers not to waste time trying to give a rebuttal to me.
Thanks for your interest.
Jeeva P
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librascaleblog
July 12, 2020
@Jeeva
Since we’re on a film blog talking about rape & Communism, have you watched The Death of Stalin?
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Vimal Kumar
July 12, 2020
As far I remember, people (and the government) willing gave up the stupid Soviet economy model. Yes, there were and are growing pains with the cultural shift and it does have social economic impact but let’s not fool ourselves or be led by the opinion that there is a direct relationship with neoliberalism.
Rape is and has always been about control and should be looked at as crime first.
Regarding communism – I’m sure the author can provide squeaky clean stats from the world’s beacon of hope – China – on how rapes are non existent due to total transparency of the governing model and equal distribution of power.
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Honest Raj
July 12, 2020
For whatever it is worth,rape as a staple item depicting villian’s badness which was pretty much there in one out of every 3 masala films back (Even big star ones like Paayum Puli, sattam oru iruttarai, kaidhiyin diary,24 mani neram etc. etc)
These are Rape and Revenge films (there’s no rape in Paayum Puli). But I can see the point. SAC made a career out of such films. It was a ‘must-have’ feature in his films.
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vijay
July 12, 2020
“I thought the number of crimes, different shades of them that happen in India, the collusion of legal structures in making them happen are quite an open secret and I felt there was no need back my argument with stats”
of course you need some stats. when your title starts off as “why so many…” you need to back it up. Any other published column in a reputed magazine or online platform would have done so. Otherwise “so many” doesn’t convey anything. even back in 80s I could argue there were “so many” rapes.Adjusting for population, as a percentage has it increased? do you have any proof to support it? Otherwise, as somebody pointed out, your premise itself is faulty that the supporting argument of economic inequality under neo-liberal regimes becomes moot. Take it as a suggestion.
(On a different note, since this is a filmy blog, at least the instances of rape being a feature of masala films I would argue has come down drastically in current times as compared to 80s. For whatever it is worth,rape as a staple item depicting villian’s badness which was pretty much there in one out of every 3 masala films back (Even big star ones like Paayum Puli, sattam oru iruttarai, kaidhiyin diary,24 mani neram etc. etc) then is shown much less on screen these days. )
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krishikari
July 12, 2020
Hi, not disputing because it rings true perhaps. Compounded by India’s male female population imbalance due to female infanticide and selective abortion? The surplus males having no chance of being paired up even if they could earn a living, coupled with ingrained attitudes of male supremacy and entitlement lead to a rape culture. It exists in other countries too but nowhere else I’ve been feels so threatening for women.
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vijay
July 12, 2020
Jeeva, economic inequality did not have anything much to do with the Telangana rape (where a doctor was raped by truckdrivers wo were drunk) or the Nirbhaya rape, just to name a couple of high-profile cases?. The perpetrators weren’t rich or influential. It wasn’t pre-planned. Since your title suggests the emphasis on rapes, lets focus on that and not digress on whether communism or liberalism is the cause for economic inequality. That’s not the point here.
Coming to rapes, there’s the caste factor(esp. in villages). There’s the rape videos-being- circulated-in-cellphones-to-millions-of-youngsters provocation factor. There’s the lack of deterrence factor. There’s the mindset factor (brought about due to lack of education/upbringing). There could be many more. A combination of such factors in various proportions. what do the child rapes in churches in the 60s/70s in the West got to do with economic inequality? you got to hear about them only 20 yrs later. Rape is a different beast altogether. Let’s not mix up things
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Mrinalini B
July 12, 2020
@jeeva writing an article about how rapes are increasing to decry liberalization is disingenuous.
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Jeeva Pitchaimani
July 12, 2020
Hi all
There is no denying of underreporting in the past as well as present. Victim blaming and sexual assault at homes have always been present.
The only area which this post focuses on is the economic causes behind increasing crime rates in India for which I didn’t think it essential to give statistical evidence. I thought the number of crimes, different shades of them that happen in India, the collusion of legal structures in making them happen are quite an open secret and I felt there was no need back my argument with stats.
If this argument reeks of a strong antipathy towards the rich and the influential, it is becos of reasons explained above. Their role in bending systems of justice to suit their petty ends is quite historic but there has been very little focus on how directly or indirectly responsible they are in the way they have corrupted the society sparing no institution. But all our focus has been unfortunately on the symptom rather than the disease. The disease is steep income inequality and all other issues are just symptoms.
@vsrini I have never denied in my essay that rapes occurred in the past. If you choose to read again, I have mentioned the atrocities committed by the upper caste elite and landed gentry who had such a terrible records of sexual crimes in the past with much impunity.
@All why have none of you tried to dispute my views on economic issues I have elaborated throughout the essay like destruction of agriculture, the burgeoning of migrant population suddenly in the 21st century, their horrible states of lives that have reached a peak during this pandemic infested times ? Without disputing them, I don’t think sufficiently brush my analyses aside.
Thanks
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vsrini
July 12, 2020
I see a lot of text and very little hard non-anecdotal numbers-based evidence. I expected better from BR’s blog. A better article could have been “Why were there so many unreported rapes in yesterday’s India?” Denying that systemic sexual assault occured in the past, without offering evidence, just doesn’t seem fair to me.
Also this whole article reeks of mansplaining.
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librascaleblog
July 12, 2020
@Jeeva Pitchumani
I would like you to answer Mirinalini R’s comment as well
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Jeeva Pitchaimani
July 12, 2020
@vimal
I wrote this essay.
Of course I am a communist sympathiser and most of my essays have never hid it. You can check crime details of countries which have embraced neoliberalism – Greece, Chile, Argentina, Thailand, Bolivia, Indonesia, Russia post Soviet Collapse. Neoliberalism goes hand in hand with crime. You can read accounts of Yanis Varfouakis, the former finance minister of Greece and those of Naomi Klein who has written widely on these subjects. The more the economic inequality, the more societies plunge into crime. This is what neoliberalism has taught us over the years.
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Vimal Kumar
July 12, 2020
What is the author trying to convey? It’s very convenient to lay the blame on so-called neoliberalism and post-1991 syndrome. Communism konda maraikaama theriyudhu..
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vijay
July 11, 2020
“India before 1991 was never witness to crimes such as child-rape and human trafficking on a scale that is being witnessed today”
How would you know? You wouldn’t get to hear about it on doordarshan or all india radio for sure. There weren’t media outlets screaming about these things back then..I would imagine rape was probably much more institutionalized back then and many more could get away with it.. Reg child trafficking/rape the child rapes at ISKCON homes happened in the 70s/80s,for starters.
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Mrinalini B
July 11, 2020
Faulty premise. Less reporting does not mean fewer incidents of sexual assault. Also does not touch upon the persistent flaws in the police and judicial systems which lead to a major lack of consequences for rape, and the culture of victim blaming and sexual assault within homes.
Where are the crime statistics?
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