After the Gujarat Riots of 2002, I remember a perplexed Muslim friend asking, “I don’t understand it: they won’t touch our food or enter our homes, and yet they rape our women. How? Why?” It’s because the collective, political agenda of rape here is power-assertion and to instil fear; it also includes generous doses of anger. Criminologist Dr Vijay Raghavan tells me, “In the Indian context, where we have caste and religious diversity, one of the reasons for rape is to assert power over communities. Women are the gatekeepers of ‘honour’ of a community, the key to social status, and if they are
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