Of Indian male and his murderous machismo

Shiv Visvanathan

Shiv  Visvanathan

The Kathua, Aligarh, Bhopal stories have already become landmarks, both in the explosive history of violence and in the abysmal annals of childhood. There is very little serious follow-up on these reports. India has yet to produce an investigator like Truman Capote or Gregory Bateson to produce a full narrative and an analysis of such acts of violence as ordinary events and in fact the very nature of reporting makes us immune to such bestiality.

The first reports of Kathua, Aligarh or Bhopal are always matter of fact. A child is murdered, brutalised, often reportedly raped. The act of murder conveys a sense of machismo, of primordial power, where a nomadic girl is raped repeatedly while she is held captive in a temple, or a neighbourhood child is brutally battered and raped. The act of violence is described explicitly. In the Aligarh case, the body was battered and then thrown in a garbage pile, where insects completed their carnivorous task.

If the violence is profoundly brutal, a study of the narratives discovers that the follow-up is curiously predictable. What one observes first is not an attempt to investigate the cause, but an attempt to exonerate policy indifference or venality. In the Bhopal case, when the family complained, the police subjected them to violence, even suggesting the possibility that the girl may have eloped. There is almost an attempt to whitewash the case, erase the links of violence to power. All that stops it are desperate protests. In the Kathua case, two police officers were involved in the rape and murder.

The narratives take a tripartite structure. The first report is of the drama of brutality. The second stage is where we try to ritually or clinically cleanse local authorities of any responsibility. At the third stage, a morbid sociology enters in and one tries to explain away the violence as a majority-minority drama, a play of caste stereotypes, or a case of feudal patriarchy. Sociology provides the convenient labels under which one can black box the case. For the atrocities, the girl, whether minor, marginal or nomadic, is vulnerable by definition and basically dispensable. It is as if Indians, despite the Human Rights Commissions, do not see children, especially minors, as ‘human’. They are not even slaves or commodities, but lesser forms of life which are seen as dispensable and forgettable. The protest movements follow a filmi stereotype with VIP politicians and film stars asking for the harshest punishment. It feels more and more like a spoof, a play in stereotype and predictability because the perpetrator oozes power and studied indifference. Rape and murder seem as easy and natural as clearing one’s bowels and are seen as physically invigorating and cleansing. It is this fact that our reportage and analyses seems to ignore.

What is it about the Indian male across all castes, religious categories, that makes his sense of machismo so murderous? Why is it we make machismo sound so natural as if machismo and muscle are a natural accompaniment of power? The local reaction is more one of awe at the act which is almost endowed with a virtual power or status. One asks whether such brutal masculinity is pathological. Meekly, we read it as part of masculinity, thus condoning rape and murder. There is no ostracism of the act. Worse, there is no explanation of such behaviour. Why is a gang-rape, murder of minors, incest seen as natural and normal? What is it about this great Indian male that we let him get away with such murderous brutality? Law, bureaucracy and social science have few answers, and are literally coy about analysing unpalatable facts. We cauterise the event, whitewash but never analyse the nature of the act and the actors. The portrait that emerges is of a Hobbesian man, bestial, and as a result, the life of a child is “nasty, brutish and short”.

The attempt to ignore sociology and focus on law narrows the levels of understanding. Law oozes a sense of contract. Such relationships go beyond contract to the tacit structures of society. It needs a spring cleaning at a tacit level of culture and morality. Mere law warps society, diminishes the moral imagination and stultifies reform. Social media thrives on stereotypes and the gossip of hostility. It is our imaginations of childhood we have to work on.

The Indian male is desperately in need of psychoanalysis, especially when he projects his pathologies as normalcy. There is little sense of trauma or conscience. Rape could have been a minor burp in his system. In fact, there is a tacit celebration of such acts which serve as testaments to power, to unbridled violence. Every man becomes a monster as he confronts a child as minor. There is a sickness here we need to understand and that we banalise with labels like feudal or patriarchal. Maybe India is a sick society and one tolerates such sickness because it is read statistically normal, where rape and murder is a rite of passage, a reassertion of a pathological masculinity which our culture tolerates and even condones and celebrates. There is no sense of stigma. There is no social movement of condonation. Occasional protests emphasise the marginality of the protester. Mere law will not help as no sense of stigmata or pollution attaches itself to the perpetrator and audience as the latter often seals this action with approval. Wallowing between banality and normalcy, treated with awe, this male becomes a demographic disease. The sadness is no group confronts the sheer pathology of the crime. Society, like the Indian male, is also sick when it treats such acts as aberrations. Man and society become symptoms of a disease we have to narrate and eradicate. Justice and civility demand it. There is little hope when society, like a Khap Panchayat of the mind, ignores it. The banality of violence in India begins with the species we call the Indian male.