Pull the plug on eve-teasing

WE revisited familiar territory in a classroom discussion while discussing the representation of women in film and language. The hostility displayed towards women in reel and real life is often couched in ambiguity. Public sexual harassment of women has been termed ‘eve-teasing’ and warnings against offenders were printed on the insides of New Delhi Transport Corporation buses. 

‘Teasing’, a politically inappropriate word, is now on its way out. However, ‘eve’ remains uncontested, in a  multi-cultural and multilingual country.  Written without a capital ‘E’, the word does not to the primordial Eve. ‘Christmas eve’ falls on an evening prior to Christmas, while ‘evensong’  describes liturgical evening prayers.

Ambiguous (unclear) printed instructions have had little or no effect on predatory males. Do men continue to harass women because both decency and language remain unfamiliar appendages? Despite statutory warnings that eve-teasing is a punishable offence, harassments have continued unabated. Do complicit men harass Indian women because they have names other than Eve? Perhaps they assume that harassment is permissible in daytime when the bulk of the female populace uses public spaces or public transport. 

Harassment in the evenings becomes doubly thrilling since it is forbidden. The high-profle lawyer in the film Pink declared that men roll down car windows and make advances towards women in the evenings, a proposition apparently unimaginable during the day. Although cinema halls resonated with applause, most women subjected to harassment would disagree with such a time frame. Either erroneous data was supplied to the scriptwriter or he was familiar only with ‘eve’ as a short form for ‘evening’.

 Maybe this is wishful thinking, because the elimination of ‘eve-teasing’ has   seen  no significant reduction. A student recounted that keepers of law and order occasionally  board buses and hand flyers to women containing advice on how women could keep themselves safe by being decently clothed,  remaining  in small group and breaking eye contact with hostile elements, and so on.

The issue here seems to be one of an excessive reliance on language to provide solutions. Policing and monitoring women now seems part of a national agenda. Would proactive  flyers, addressed to men stressing that women were equal citizens with equal rights and that  all men were required to be courteous and decent to all women, prove more effective?

This is an idea whose time is now! Instead of validating women’s rights, language continues to be used in the most opaque manner. Assaults on women have generated the most peculiar responses, calling for greater coercive control over women.  Censorships in print and film over issues pertaining to women remain the order of the day.

Nowadays, autorickshaws and taxis plying across New Delhi display messages such as: ‘This auto/taxi respects women’. No documented record of  suffering women, traumatised due to a lack of respect from vehicles, exists. Appalling disrespect towards women, who are victimised, violated and brutalised, verbally and bodily, often originates from the viciousness and meanness of men, not vehicles.

In these instances, diabolical men seem to relinquish all claims to ethical and  moral behaviour, having transferred this responsibility to vehicles. Such signage must be immediately rescinded. Women need to be empowered on a war-footing: They cannot be curtailed from or restricted to the use of lipsticks under their burkhas!