Why Men Rape: An Indian Undercover Investigation

by Tara Kaushal

“It is perfectly okay for young men to walk around displaying their genitals, whereas women have to cover up at a much younger age. Men grow up proud of their genitals and with the ability to publicly display them,” Dr Ravi Verma, regional director, Asia, of the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW)

The oft-discussed50 crotch-scratching habit of many Indian men can be seen as a consequence as well as a symbol of this penis privilege. When the heat makes nether regions itchy, it permits men to scratch, even in public. It also allowed the three of my subjects who were aroused when we were discussing the intimate questions to obviously, overtly touch themselves in my presence†. Penis privilege also empowers men to perpetrate rape with and in front of their friends in public sans shyness—and even with pride!

I was given an on-the-ground crash course. Central to this complex system is respect for older males, whether relatives or community elders. These are some of the codes of conduct: the senior of two elders in the room must never be addressed. An elder brother can never see the face of his sister-in-law. If a child falls over, you cannot pick it up in front of the elder, the elder will. A husband or wife must never be spoken to in front of the elders. The mother must be honoured in precedence over the wife, who has the lowest standing in the household. “There is a lot of shame in the display of feelings. Showing love is quite embarrassing, and never done directly, especially in front of an elder. Only elder sons are ever shown affection,” Amit explained.

Love is not normal, neither normalized. A man who loves is disdained, seen as less of a man. All male-female love with romantic and sexual overtones—even within the socially approved union of husband and wife—feels almost illicit, steeped in shame, somewhat dishonourable even, and private time is limited to hidden fumbles in the dark. Men are expected to be more attached to and prioritize their natal families over their wives and children—which many do.

For five of my seven subjects who were or had been married, their parents were evidently more important than their wives.

Gyandev admitted that, growing up, the girls were given less food. Dipu, with the breathtaking lack of self-awareness typical of a child so spoilt, believed that everything had been split equally between the siblings—though obviously the women ate after serving his father, then him. And it was he who got to choose what to watch when they sat to watch the TV they had recently acquired. (Action films mostly, Sunny Deol was his favourite.)

“If she wants food, she is a glutton. If she wants sex, she is a slut,” Jess Zimmerman writes in her sharp essay ‘Hunger Makes Me’53.

Since boys rule the world and girls are weak, boys are prevented from showing any feminine interests or qualities. Boys can’t display love, pain or other nuanced emotions, and anger is the only acceptable emotion they can show. They don’t learn to share or empathize. These rules cripple and degrade even those that patriarchy apparently favours54.

“French parents believe that hearing the word ‘no’ rescues children from the ‘tyranny of their own desires’.”

Not one subject had had ‘the birds and the bees’ talk with their parents, ever. “You’d be mad to bring sex up in front of parents, you’d get a proper beating. The mother and daughter have such a relationship that the daughter can ask her mother about anything related to those things, but the boy can’t ask his father anything,” a subject who was the father of a son and two daughters described the norms, in the present as they had been in the past.

Boys tend to receive their knowledge from proverbial locker-room talk, from friends as clueless as they are, and from porn and sex workers. Healthy knowledge about and the language for their own privates, the bodies of women and sex stays more inaccessible and taboo for men than women… And this, when we live in an increasingly sexualized society.

Alongside their half-baked knowledge of sex, the older boys also passed along their highly misogynistic ideas about women, gleaned from porn, Bollywood and the socioreligious environment. According to Dipu, most women were kaam chalau*, to only be used for sex. It was hard to find a loyal woman who would love you and only you (whatever your roguery may be). Women had an insatiable sexual appetite; that’s what they really wanted when they laughed or talked with...

As Dipu told me: “Krishna had 108 gopis*, but for Radha he was the only one,” ergo, “A boy can never be shamed even if he goes around with ten girls. He will also be praised for it. But it will be the exact opposite for a girl.” He told me of a girl, with whom he had had sex the very first time they met. He met her a couple of more times until he learnt that “woh doosre ladkon ko bhi life de rahi thi.”† She was that type of girl—he had no idea! So he had confronted her—hit her, hurled abuses at her—and then never saw her again. “She showed me her aukaad‡.” “No, no,” I explained. “I meant friends who are female, who you can—you know—chat, eat, drink and laugh with.” He’d never had or even heard of those.

Tellingly, Dipu would never make a “setting” with a friend’s sister—because premarital sex defiled the girl and the ‘honour’ of her male relatives, and you just didn’t do that to friends. He wouldn’t want any one of them, even those that were caste-appropriate, to marry a sister of his either—bro-code that demonstrates what haramis* you know your friends are.

The vulnerability of women outdoors is greatly determined by the physical and social environment, and is much worse where the communities (and law enforcers) have strong beliefs in male superiority and entitlement to sex. (Put simply, it’s the difference one feels between a Mumbai street and one in rural north India.) Girls, understandably, need protection with boys like these ones around, and the my-brother-strongest festivals of Raksha Bandhan and Bhai Dooj are very important in this region, which has the most reported rapes in the country61. Dipu’s father told me that several Dalit women tied him rakhi*, a sure-shot way to avert the sexual attention of and buy security from a richer, higher-caste aggressor.

It’s interesting to note that joining the police or another ‘belt force’—as uniformed law enforcement is called—had been a burning childhood ambition for Abbas, as well as two other subjects from similarly disempowered backgrounds.

After he beat up Rakesh and then joined his gang, he was no longer a nobody. “I became more and more famous in the school, got involved in a lot of fights and stopped studying.” He’d do things to prove his daring—riding pillion with one foot each on two bikes like Ajay Devgn did in Phool aur Kaante, racing bikes and other acts of delinquency. “I got respect and validation. So doing it felt right, because as a teenager, the more izzat† I got, the more I wanted.” The simmering property dispute with the uncles’ families, instigated by his parents, had culminated in a public clash of the clan where members of both sides were jailed. This had brought him even more disrepute.

Eventually, Abbas and his friends had started using their notoriety to go to places where people were gambling and ask for hafta. They’d snatch money from the gang that took hafta from the bus drivers, eventually taking over that business. They’d make shopkeepers in the area pay a monthly fee for protection, as much from themselves as from other gangs. They’d steal. They’d pick pockets on buses. They took over territories and businesses; squatted in houses. This friendship with Rakesh would continue for nearly a quarter of a century until a falling out over commission collection a year before we met.

It was a habit he had developed young to vent his helplessness against his father, which could be used conveniently to accuse rivals of hurting him and the police of brutality. “We were more afraid of our father’s beatings than the police’s.”

The idea had been to punish Pintu through the gang rape of his wife, the premise being that the ‘honour’ of the family lies in the vaginas of its women. That ‘honour’ is seen as inseparable from the chastity of women holds true even when she exercises sexual agency. From a patriarchal perspective, rape is a crime against the ‘owner’ of the woman—with her ‘honour’ sullied, her ‘virginity’* robbed, the goods spoilt. It is a familial and societal shame.

Pintu’s punishment for delaying the return of four-five thousand rupees to Arjun had been the public gang rape of his wife. (I’ll allow you a moment to take that in.)

anthropologist Kate Fox explains in a BBC article64, the effects of alcohol on behaviour are determined by cultural norms, not by the chemical actions of ethanol, a fact proved repeatedly by cultural and scientific studies.

India is clearly of the ‘instant asshole, just add alcohol’ belief system—as evidenced by the drunken antics of Dipu and his cousin, four of my eight other subjects, and the perpetrators of the Delhi Gang Rape; the Geri* cruising culture of Chandigarh; and so forth. Munna, Dipu’s father, told me of a murder he had committed; I asked him why. “When men are drunk at night, they are in a state of vipreet buddhi†,” he said. “So if someone provokes us at this time, the first impulse is to kill them.” When drinkers are stigmatized and situated within a good-bad binary, it leads to a self-perpetuating cycle.

Dipu had recently been married. His bride’s parents had not been told that he drank; several months married and she still didn’t know how much. “Her parents wouldn’t have married her to a man who accepts that he drinks. Because, if you mention such a thing, people assume you’re a drunkard even if you drink rarely, or that you blow all your money on booze like my father. But I don’t! I like drinking, but not all the time. Only once in a while—that too either with friends or to enjoy with some good fish.”

Though we received a warm welcome at his home, it was only after a quick conversation in Dogri with my source to confirm our caste-appropriateness that Bhaskar could serve us the delicious paneer pakodas* his wife and sister-in-law had made. He would later explain the curse of the kuldevta that was conjured if milk from the house was served or sold to castes any lower than theirs. Once, a servant had eaten a ghee roti from the house, and it had caused their cow to die.

There had been a couple of red flags during the day. When he had come to our hotel in the morning, he had expressed surprise that Amit and I had different rooms. In his worldview, it seemed everyone had an indiscriminate sexuality; and men and women couldn’t have non-sexual relationships. Another discomforting point, which, to me, indicated deep and dark power and empathy issues: he narrated how he had beaten a thief he had caught, and made the man drink his pee, direct from source. (The humiliation he had meted out made him laugh, ha, ha.) He had also displayed abject insensitivity to a little boy we met at the bride’s house, narrating the boy’s story of being abandoned in his presence.

It was just as well we’d made the exit plan. Basking in the winter sun on Bhaskar’s terrace the next morning, his façade yielded to my probing. This little man before me was one of the most prolific serial sexual offenders I had met (basis: their confessions). Many women from his small village had been his prey. Yet, far from being behind bars or even ostracized, here he was, central to the community, playing the VIP role of matchmaker! On top of this, he was aroused by me, and had no compunction about touching himself. Amit and I had been right; I would’ve been next. At exactly four o’ clock, when the three of us were in the taxi returning from an excursion to the Indo-Pak border, Sahil called with the ‘news’ that my grandfather had passed away. I passed off my tears of relief as grief—“Kya acting kari thi aapne!”* Amit marvelled later—and we were out of there.

Roshan was fair and light-eyed, and some would think he was good looking. (He certainly did—especially when he had been fit and bothered with his clothes.) His first love had been of the ‘aankhon hi aankhon mein ishaara ho gaya’* variety. The paper plate factory was located in a chawl†; as he worked, he would exchange glances with his neighbour Yamini through the window, much to the jealousy of his colleagues who liked her too. “The boys around me were all dark—these Madrasis, they look like boars. I was the only fair one amongst them. She would tell all her friends I was Shah Rukh Khan. Eventually, everyone started calling me Shah Rukh.” Fifteen days of gestures and small talk later, he had decided: “Main ussko bhaga ke le jaaoonga.” This is a more macho idea than ‘to elope with her’—it translates, literally, as: ‘I would run her away’ or ‘I would make her run away with me’. Then, he found out that “maal bigad chuka tha, til lag chuka tha”‡, that she had had relations with other boys and was not ‘pure’ or ‘clean’.

“Public harassment became a bona fide entertainment device in the nineties with every teen romance having at least one song where the girl was ‘eve teased’ in college corridors.” Govinda and Shah Rukh Khan were stalkers, one endearing, one scary, in Raja Babu and Darr respectively. Tere Naam (2003) “turned the obsessed lover into an object of sympathy for his one-sided passion and a kidnapping victim into an unwitting provocateur.” The tradition continues: in 2013, Shahid Kapoor chased an annoyed Ileana D’Cruz singing, “Khaali-peeli, khaali-peeli rokne ka nahi, tera peecha karoon toh tokne ka nahi. Hai tujhpe right mera…”† Of course, she helplessly fell in love as well.

A 2017 study looked into the disparities between the male and female characters in over 4,000 Bollywood films. It found that male leads are most described as “wealthy”, “strong” and “successful”, whereas female characters are “attractive” and “beautiful”. Men are introduced through profession-driven descriptors, but women, through their appearance or relationship to a man. And while male leads get to beat, kill and shoot, the verb most associated with females is “marries”68!

Women are situated in the ‘good woman’/‘bad woman’ Indian/Western binary that some cross when they revert to saris and sabhyata* for the hero, like Parveen Babi and Zeenat Aman for Amitabh Bachchan in Deewaar and Dostana (and Sunanda for Roshan). Modern women are made to repent in the end, says Moudgil, “by a twist in the plot or the ever-dependable slap with a one-liner that this disciplinary measure should have been taken a long time ago.”

Sunanda had disappeared; Roshan couldn’t find her. He had heard she was now a bar dancer and lived with a rich older man. Roshan wanted to find Sunanda. Because Roshan wanted to kill Sunanda. “I am going to kill her, madam. No matter what. I’ll be Sunny Deol.”*

They say no upar se*, but deep down they want to do it. That’s how it really is,” said Bhaskar Prajapat.)

Consider this: traditionally, every Durga Puja idol must have some mud from the doorstep of a brothel74. The most accepted explanation is that this mud is very pure, as men leave all their good qualities at the door when they visit sex workers. The most vulnerable of women, with little means of defending themselves, are exposed to the violence of men.

Roshan Tripathi, who had been visiting the red-light areas of Mumbai since he was around eighteen, shrugged when he stated that many sex workers had told him they had been trafficked by their husbands. “It’s not like you couldn’t have screamed when your husband sold you into prostitution. All these stories are fake and old.”

My subject from Bhopal believed that the only reason women turned to sex work was because they liked sex, that’s it: “They just like sex, so they aren’t really working. They have capacity. But they are poor so those who have sex with them support them.”

Promundo’s Dr Gary Barker minces no words when he shares his views on the matter: “I don’t think there is any research to show that it keeps rapists off the street by giving them an outlet. On the contrary, where we create the notion that there is a subclass of women who are there for the sexual service of men, we contribute to rape culture, not diminish the chance that rape happens. We often see that men who tell us they have paid for sex are also more likely to have carried out one or more forms of violence against women, including sexual violence.”

W]hatever the negative impacts of pornography in the West, it is likely worse here. We simply don’t know the extent of it,” asserts author Ira Trivedi in senior journalist Ravi Agrawal’s rigorous book, India Connected: How the Smartphone is Transforming the World’s Largest Democracy84.

Pornography can cause men to be violent towards women as it causes the depersonalizing of and desensitizing towards women and female sexuality; perpetuates rape myths; increases acceptance of interpersonal violence; propagates the belief in male dominance in intimate relationships; etc. When scores of boys learn about sex primarily if not exclusively through pornography, and that too a lot of it, these negatives are exponentially amplified.

Renowned activist and academician Dr Ranjana Kumari of the Centre for Social Research is quoted in Agrawal’s book85 as saying: “Young boys from the villages are moving to the cities to work. They often live together in cramped rooms with little to do. With their smartphones, they end up gaining access to the most extreme, violent forms of pornography. You have to realize, these are uneducated village boys who have not seen a female body in full form. They have no supervision. They’re learning about basic biology and sex through violent pornography. It’s normalizing the abnormal. That’s got to have an impact.” If addiction is characterized by desensitization to the subject, it follows that, for sex to work in real life, it would need to be extra—more intense, more violent...

Since he had transitioned to being zimmedaar for the household, Abbas Mirza had made sure that his sisters were always escorted on the rare occasions they left the house. “I am afraid that boys might harass them or more, so I always have one of the brothers go with them … We might check out someone else’s sister, but we don’t want anyone to look at ours.”

The Accused Inmate writes in a letter: “Mere exposure seems to make no difference to some men’s mindsets. If they have been exposed to the suffering/pain/humiliation of women they love, at the hands of another, it seems to have no bearing on their later interactions with women.”

When the popular feminist slogan urges men to see a woman as ‘someone’ as opposed to ‘someone’s mother/sister/daughter/wife/possession’, it takes things even further. To imagine a generic woman as an individual like himself is to imagine that her worth is as much as his own. It takes empathy and awareness to imagine anyone being as important as oneself—but that’s all it would take to have him ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’

In the masterly article ‘Beastly’87 in The New Yorker, professor of psychology at Yale University, Paul Bloom, discusses this notion with respect to literature about slave owning and the Holocaust, quoting the psychologist Herbert C. Kelman, “‘The inhibitions against murdering fellow human beings are generally so strong that the victims must be deprived of their human status if systematic killing is to proceed in a smooth and orderly fashion.’” We therefore talk about the ‘dehumanization’ and ‘objectification’ of women—the denial of women’s autonomy, agency and humanity—as the cause of sexual violence. (It follows that we cannot accept the humanness of the perpetrators of violent crimes—but more on that later.) “The thesis that viewing others as objects or animals enables our very worst conduct would seem to explain a great deal,” says Bloom while introducing a new wave in critical theory about violence. “Yet there’s reason to think that it’s almost the opposite of the truth.”

A leading thinker in feminist philosophy, Cornell University philosophy professor Kate Manne applies this theory—that “people may know full well that those they treat in brutally degrading and inhuman ways are fellow human beings”—to sexual violence in her book, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny88. Where iconic radical feminist theorist Catherine A. Mackinnon asks “Are women human yet?”89 while listing the atrocities committed against our sex, Manne proposes: “Often, it’s not a sense of women’s humanity that is lacking. Her humanity is precisely the problem.”

(Although he would not have thought so if they had been married—he believed a wife did not have the right to deny her husband sex.)

The final time had been in anger, in a protracted fight that began because he suspected her of cheating on him as he found another man’s number on her phone. “Indian men aren’t romantic compared to other parts of the world,” Dr Ravi Verma of ICRW observes. “Egalitarian expectations of romance last only till they are assured of control in that relationship.” The rape had been to teach her a lesson, for her refusal to be claimed as his property—but Sunanda hadn’t taken this lying down. She had stabbed him, got her brother and fifteen to twenty others to beat him up, and tried to file a police complaint against him. (‘Tried’ being the operative word: more on that later.)

Many were of the she-said-no-but-actually-meant-yes variety: “In her heart, she wants to have sex. She’s just saying no. If I’m removing her clothes and she’s doing nothing then in her heart she wants it. Then, what’s wrong with that?” There were rapes by coercion: “I threaten her and of course it happens.” There were marital rapes, sometimes with violence, sometimes without, of both wives. (No wonder the one who could leave had left!) All because “sex is the thing a man can’t live without.”

Clearly, here, as with Roshan Tripathi’s final rape of Sunanda, and Dipu Yadav and co’s gang rape of Pintu’s wife, expressing righteous anger and asserting power were the perpetrators’ motivations. And, in their seeking to cause their adversaries pain, anger, shame and trauma, there was recognition that the victims were capable of feeling these emotions—ie, that they were fully human.

After the gang rape incident, the elders in the family had decided it was time to get Dipu Yadav married because, Amit explained, “usske bigadne ke chances the.”* Marriage is perceived as a settling, corrective agent in a rogue boy’s life—whether for the loving influence of a woman, the millstone of responsibility or, simply, the promise of regular sex. (The various forms of the word ‘sudharna’ have no perfect translation into English, ‘straightening out’, perhaps?) But how would they get anyone to give their daughter to the remarkably ineligible Dipu, with no prospects and this time- and money-consuming court-kacheri ka chakkar†? “Through lies and deceit,” laughed Gyandev, his cousin. “The reality is only revealed after marriage. That’s how it is.”