Why Men Rape: An Indian Undercover Investigation

by Tara Kaushal

Dipu had never and would never tell Sonam of his past affairs, let alone present ones, even when she had asked. But he believed she would never lie, and, therefore, believed his bride was a ‘virgin’. (As must Prachi’s and Rita’s grooms, I’m sure. All the men who told The Accused Inmate of their “interactions with young loose women from proper village households whom they encountered in their youth” had been fearful of the idea that their own wives, daughters and sisters could’ve been sexually active too.) Dipu was sexually experienced; how did he think Sonam was made ready for the suhaag raat*? “Her bhabhis† would have told her not to say no to me.”

I found it very telling that Dipu Yadav used the word “upyog”‡ for all marital and consensual sex—“Maine usska upyog kiya.”§ Women are used in the service of men and their needs. Here, in marital rape of the garden variety (ie, non-violent and not coming from a place of anger), objectification and dehumanization is clearly at play. Though establishing power is not the primary motive for such rape, its imbalance is the cause of it. When in doubt, he asserts his personal interests over hers. He is the entitled, superior human; she is denied the right to make an autonomous decision about participating in sex, and human rights in general. And power, though not the primary motive for such rape, is established by it. But when marital rape is about festering sores, as it sometimes tends to be, the wives are fully human again…

The reason all these men spoke easily about raping their wives, sans guilt or shame, is because they didn’t see it as wrong or as rape. “Shaadi ke baad rape kaisa?”† asked a genuinely perplexed man I met on my exploratory travels.

The socioreligious understanding of gender roles and interpersonal relationships is deeply rooted in patriarchy. Broadly, a ‘good’ ‘inside’ woman is seen as the possession of her father and other men in her maiden family, and later of her husband. She is allowed no agency, and none is ever ascribed. A man is seen as responsible for, if not the owner of, all the women in his family—sisters, mother, wife, daughters. He is attributed with all the agency in these relationships. Marriage is divorced from love, as child and forced-arranged marriages reveal. All sex within marriage is legitimate, entailing the obligation on wives to be sexually available virtually without limit.

Data journalist Rukmini Shrinivasan looked at the 460 cases that went to a full trial in Delhi district courts in 2013, and compared the initial complaint made to the police with what happened in court. She too found that the largest category—more than a third of cases—were like this, where the parents had used the criminal justice system to end the relationships. Many of these cases, she found, dealt with inter-caste or mixed-religion relationships. “Families are more willing to have the stigma of rape rather than having the stigma of their daughter choosing her own sex or life partner,” she is quoted as saying in the BBC Magazine97.

The other large category, nearly 25 per cent, were cases where the man had broken his promise to marry the woman after a sexual or live-in relationship, according to both, the Delhi Police and Shrinivasan’s comprehensive study. “The parents say, ‘You’ve lost your virginity, it’s going to be impossible to get you married, you file this case, he’ll get scared and marry you,’’ she says.

That ‘false promise to marry’ equalled rape had been a hotly debated provision in India’s rape laws. In January 2019, the Supreme Court unwisely ruled that consensual sex cannot be called rape after a relationship ends and the man declines to marry the woman, for whatever reason98. Conversely, legislators the world over are pushing for sex induced through fraud, deception or impersonation to be criminalized99.

A lot more men are getting away than the number of those getting falsely accused. Is it possible to ascertain the extent to which rapes are unreported—they are unreported, that’s the point, right? Data journalists Pramit Bhattacharya and Tadit Kundu compared data of the actual experiences of crime survivors as reported by the National Family Health Survey with that of crimes recorded by the police compiled by the National Crime Records Bureau to arrive at an estimate. It is 99.1 per cent of rapes that are unreported if you include marital rape; if you don’t—85 per cent of sexual violence committed by someone other than the current husband is unreported101. While these figures do not shock me and may not shock many of my female readers, odds are you, dear male reader, will need a moment to take that in*.

The other reason he hadn’t killed her, he told The Accused Inmate, was because it was not “manly” to kill a woman. Even in the “hierarchy of machismo of cases” in jail, murder is high, but the murder of a woman is low. This is revealing. We are seen as weak, and it isn’t manly to kill the weak. We are seen as inferior, too inferior to bother murdering and facing the consequences. We are seen as possessions, and it is not acceptable to destroy another man’s or even your own possession.

As a professor at the Centre for Criminology and Justice at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), and the vice chairperson of the Indian Society of Criminology, Dr Vijay Raghavan is one of the India’s foremost experts on the subject. He tells me: “Making a pass at a woman is normalized, seen as part of socialization, a transition to masculinity, acceptable. But when the same logic is extended, crossing the boundary to become rape… the rapist is granted a villainous identity. The otherization of the rapist, who is seen as a demon, is a loophole that exists in locating faults in the individual rather than analysing reasons for rape in society. The paradox is that quotidian violence against women is normalized, while rape is moralized.”

In this clash of cultures, I keep coming back to the wisdom in what that college boy said to me in rural Maharashtra many moons ago: “The problem is that no one knows what rape is.”

A case like the Delhi Gang Rape and murder was pretty black and white, and, therefore, united most of the country. “Do you know why the Nirbhaya Case was colossal?” theorized one of my subjects, a political henchman from Bhopal who marshalled his followers to a candlelight protest in the city. “It’s because of the rod.” He continued: “If the men wanted sex, they should have just done that and left, no? But it’s because they put that rod. No one would have cared otherwise.” For him, it was all about the brutal murder; the gang rape was a non-issue.

Roshan was an upper-caste Hindu man, and it seemed like every blow to the ancient Indian world order had been a blow to his place, their place in it. It was Satyug, perfect times, when he was young, when he could hit his sisters if they didn’t serve him water; in Kalyug, he would serve his girlfriend water. He believed women needed to be hit “a lot… to make them understand.” But things had changed so much! “Do you know why men don’t hit their wives anymore? It’s because, now, women pack their bags and leave if you slap them twice.”

Men’s homes were being broken because women were given freedom and support. “Before, women were afraid. They would be afraid to leave their homes because their parents wouldn’t accept them. Today, the brother will tell his sister to leave.” As Sunanda’s had. “This is wrong.” Even his ideas that “women who have many men tarnish the images of their families” and that “if women do have sex with someone before marriage, they should marry that person” seemed to be specifically about her.

“Men are afraid now, and women aren’t.” Dowry laws, rape laws, domestic violence laws, inheritance laws—they all favoured women! “It’s not that all women are always right and all men are always wrong, but that’s what th...

“Women should follow their maryada and stay in their culturally ordained place.” He thought we shouldn’t be in the workforce at all—“Men are made for the public. Women are made for the home … The career of having kids is the best thing for her.” And he resented women’s ‘erotic capital’ that we exploited to enter it. A woman was preferred as a salesperson because “the boss would get bored looking at the boy” and “lots of people come to see her.” Likewise: “Have you ever seen a company’s boss’s assistant being male?” Meanwhile, men were still expected to pay for everything: “I went to recharge my phone, that ten-rupee one. I told him I ne...

Roshan firmly believed: “Jis hisaab se banaayi gayi hai duniya, waise rakkho toh achchha hai.”† ***

In her essay in the profound book Too Many Men, Too Few Women: Social Consequences of Gender Imbalance in India and China121, Professor Patricia Jeffery finds that there are multiple marriage markets in the same region. One marriage squeeze operates against men without money or jobs, who experience a shortage of women; another favours “suitable boys” who are sought out as grooms. Tellingly, in a viral 2018 clip, Ram Kadam, a BJP MLA from Ghatkopar, Mumbai, is seen promising to kidnap girls for men if they rejected their proposals122.

Comparably, in the controversial book Marriage and Civilization: How Monogamy Made Us Human, William Tucker proposes that it is because of polygamy—that causes a similar surplus of young unattached men—that Islam has always been at war with itself and others. “When powerful and successful men are allowed to take more than one wife … as they are in a polygamous society, this creates a pool of unsuccessful men at the bottom of society who are constantly in conflict with the system.”124 This makes sense, even when you look at it from an evolutionary psychology perspective.

Women, empowered by sexual, self-esteem and feminist revolutions, are choosing who they want to have sex with. “In the past few years, a subset of straight men calling themselves ‘incels’ have constructed a violent political ideology around the injustice of young, beautiful women refusing to have sex with them,” writes Jia Tolentino in the alarming piece ‘The Rage of the Incels’131. They believe that ‘hypergamy’—an evolutionary principle that makes women seek males above their status—in a post-monogamy society means a tiny percentage of genetically superior men hoard most of the desirable women and hetero sex. Women, Tolentino theorizes, are socialized to respond to rejection and feeling undesired by blaming themselves—men, like women, tend to blame women if they feel undesirable. Not everyone who is an ‘involuntary celibate’ is an incel, however: “Incels aren’t really looking for sex; they’re looking for absolute male supremacy. Sex, defined to them as dominion over female bodies, is just their preferred sort of proof … What incels want is extremely limited and specific: they want unattractive, uncouth, and unpleasant misogynists to be able to have sex on demand with young, beautiful women. They believe that this is a natural right.”

When Chandran was four or five, the full-time help his working parents employed went on a weeklong holiday, and had left a stand-in. She must’ve been eighteen or nineteen at the time, a dusky woman with long hair who wore blouses and flaired skirts. After school in the afternoons, the maid would put his younger sister to sleep, and then take him to another room where she would sexually abuse him, using the promise of gifts to buy his obedience. “No penetration, but all of the rest happened.”

When Bhaskar Prajapat raped the cocky houseguest, and Dipu Yadav and company gang raped Pintu’s wife, the survivor was seen as fully human, and the assertion of power and expression of anger was the perpetrators’ primary motivation. And when the men raped women they were in relationships with, sans violence or anger, they objectified their victims for sexual fulfilment. Though not a primary motivation here, power played an enabling role; power was further established.

In Against Our Will151, Susan Brownmiller theorizes: “War provides men with the perfect psychological backdrop to give vent to their contempt for women. The maleness of the military—the brute power of weaponry exclusive to their hands, the spiritual bonding of men at arms, the manly discipline of orders given and orders obeyed, the simple logic of the hierarchical command—confirms for men what they long suspect—that women are peripheral to the world that counts.”

In 2008, the United Nations Security Council called sexual violence “a tactic of war to humiliate, dominate, instill fear in, disperse and/or forcibly relocate civilian members of a community or ethnic group.”153 This is what is called genocidal rape, and it was seen during the Partition and the Bangladesh Liberation War.

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 violated, the entire community is defiled.”

To establish dominance, instil fear and express anger was also the agenda in the following two cases from UP, told to me by the sub-inspector I’ve been chatting with for a few years. The son of a taxi driver had become a doctor in Mumbai, and married another doctor. When the couple visited his village, the local Thakur and his sons tied the wife to a tree and raped her in front of her husband because, as landed gentry, they “couldn’t handle a poor taxi driver’s son being an MBBS”. Although apparently comforted by her husband, she jumped from the train near Igatpuri and died. Another: in order to usurp a poor farmer’s land, a powerful landowner got five-six men to gang rape the farmer’s wife and two daughters. The family left the village.

As she lay in her hospital bed the night after her surgery, the resident doctor, the very one who had assisted in her surgery, had put his hand over her mouth and raped her. Terrified, and fading in and out of consciousness thanks to the painkillers and excruciating pain, she lay in her own blood silently haemorrhaging until the nurses found her in the morning. Several surgeries would follow, but the damage had been done.

In Men Who Rape: The Psychology of the Offender165, the Nicholas Groth Typology outlines three types of rapists. He says that ‘Sadistic Rapists’ have a sexual association with power and anger, where the infliction of pain itself is “eroticized”. They find their victims’ torment intensely gratifying. Among other characteristics, he believes such rapists’ assaults are calculated and pre-planned—as

It is even documented that one-year-old Louis XIII of France “laughed uproarishly when his nanny waggled his cock with her fingers”, much to the amusement of everyone present173.

In a business interview in the New York Times, the late Jeffery Epstein—probably the world’s most famous child predator at the time of going to press—“said that criminalizing sex with teenage girls was a cultural aberration and that at times in history it was perfectly acceptable. He pointed out that homosexuality had long been considered a crime and was still punishable by death in some parts of the world.”

My subject, the political henchman from Bhopal, was thirty-five years old, and freely admitted to having sex with (aka raping) adolescents. Here’s one of our conversations about it: He: “Even twelve/thirteen-year-olds have sex, more than even me. They learn early.” Me: “With whom? How old are the men?” He: “A girl that age will have sex with even a thirty-year-old! A fifteen-year-old would readily have sex with me.” A subject from Kolkata, who made no such admission, interrupted our interview in English to put it ineloquently in his Bengali-flavoured Hindi: “Fresh banna hua bread mein har koi chakhna chahega.”*

My late grandfather was a police officer in the Indian Railways. Sometime in the sixties, when he was in his thirties, he received reports of a constable raping young boys in the quarters. He did not immediately understand what this meant. Fifty years later, he remembered being shocked. “I did not know of either of these phenomena—where some men desire other men instead of women; or where children, especially boys, are seen as sexual beings.”

In MP, many Bachara tribals have prostituted their young girls181; Afghanistan has had a long history of sex with prepubescent boys182;

We live in an increasingly sexualized society. The knowledge that others are doing it allows more people to consider abusing children too. The effect is exponentially worse if the perpetrator is someone revered, like a movie star or a religious leader.

While researching this project, I sought child rape forums on the dark web, and found them more easily than I would’ve preferred. Of course, they’re not called ‘child rape forums’, though that’s what they are—they have names like ‘Child Lovers’, ‘Man-Girl Sex’ and ‘Little Lolitas’. I couldn’t see the revolting pictures or videos—the first and only time I tried, I had a visceral reaction and vomited right where I sat. That was more than even I had signed up for. What I did was spend a few hours—the most I could take—watching the chat. At any given time in any given chat room, there were a few active participants (those sharing links to child rape pornography). A vast majority of those ‘live’ were passive (consuming and cumming to the pornography being shared by the active users, I presume). What I noticed about the conversation was how many people talked about their depraved fantasies—wanting to fuck their little sisters, daughters, sons and students—that they couldn’t get themselves to act out. And how many people encouraged them to go ahead and just do it. “You’re not a freak, it’s normal,” said one user. “We’re all doing it, everybody’s doing it,” wrote another.

The Doctor, who raped my friend, could be a hebephile and/or a sadist who saw an opportunity… *** Her story would evoke horror as an impersonal news item or even in fiction… this is the real-life story of one of my closest friends. I cried and brooded for days after she told me—so much for our ‘fun’ girls’ holiday. Cut to ten years later, when I started the research for this project. I called her in the States, where she’s a super-successful career woman with husband and child, and asked her if she would tell me the real name of The Doctor. There was a moment of silence. “I don’t want to go down that route, babe… I have only ever told you and —,” she said, taking the name of her husband. I reassured her, and she told me everything she remembered about him. In mid-2018, I tracked him down to Pune and convinced him to speak to me. As I expected at the outset, studying The Doctor was the hardest thing I have ever had to do, exacerbated by the recent death of my beloved mother-in-law.

Those with antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) are simplistically described as having an extreme egocentricity and an abject disregard for other people. Among the most defining characteristics is that they “may be able to understand the emotions of others. But they don’t suffer any shame or guilt about the pain they may be causing.”188

To receive a diagnosis of ASPD, the person must be eighteen or older, though the onset could be as early as fifteen. Their behaviours must show a “pervasive pattern” of at least three of the following seven traits: Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviours as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest. Deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying, use of aliases, or conning others for personal profit or pleasure. Impulsivity or failure to plan ahead. Irritability and aggressiveness, as indicated by repeated physical fights or assaults. Reckless disregard for safety of self or others. Consistent irresponsibility, as indicated by repeated failure to sustain consistent work behaviour or honour financial obligations. Lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing. Those with ASPD are often angry, bored or generally discontent; and physical substance dependence or substance abuse are also common.

I agree with the feminist philosopher Kate Manne when she writes that calling men who rape ‘monsters’ has damaging results. “Monsters are unintelligible, uncanny, and they are outwardly frightening. What is frightening about rapists is partly the lack of identifying marks and features, beyond the fact that they are by far most likely to be men. Rapists are human, all too human, and they are very much among us. The idea of rapists as monsters exonerates by caricature.”194

Men from the upper echelons of society are also usually given the benefit of trust, at best, and doubt, at worst, allowing them to hide in plain sight. The woman Chandran had raped wouldn’t have ended up in his flat if he didn’t appear like a ‘People Like Us’ (a term I use carefully). And which nurse would’ve questioned a doctor choosing to be alone with his patient?

Although The Doctor kept reiterating, unsolicited, that, he, like his wife, Tanuja, was not “fanatically religious”—didn’t pray every day, celebrated festivals as part of culture, reverted to being vegetarian for animal cruelty and not religious reasons—there was tacit and insidious support for Modi’s Hindu-nationalist ideology. As someone incognizant of his privilege, who proudly called himself a “self-made man”, he was the poster child for upper-caste victimhood, those who feel their privilege is being snatched from them. He was against reservations on caste lines and criticized the secular centre-left Congress’s “minority appeasement”—the BJP has promised to address the affirmative action programmes that have generated deep resentment among upper castes*. As the lower castes rose from the bottom, at the top he was frustrated by the criminality, corruption and nepotism—in films, the Congress and business—that denied his sons pieces of the capitalistic pie.

“The psychopath who causes his parents hardship and humiliation by repeatedly forging checks and causes his wife anguish by sordid (and perhaps half hearted) relations with the housemaid, may gain a considerable reputation in the community by occasionally volunteering to cut the grass for the frail old lady across the street, by bringing a bottle of sherry over now and then to bedridden Mr. Blank, or by leaving his work to take a neighbor’s injured cat to the veterinarian,” writes psychiatrist Hervey M. Cleckley in The Mask of Sanity206.

Snigdha Poonam observes in Dreamers209: “Hate comes easy if you happen to be a high-caste Hindu man; you feel you have been cheated out of your rights in a series of betrayals going as far back as the first conquest of the country. You wish everyone else would see what you see—that you are India and every blow to its ancient order has been a blow to your place in it.”

“You could say we were close… not too close, but whatever,” said his friend Ananth flippantly. Chandran was always the odd one out, “a strange fellow” with an impulsive and violent streak. “I don’t want to meet more people over whose eyes he has pulled wool,” said Rashi, his sister-in-law. “I guess if friends are avoiding him, there must be a reason. He’s always got it at the back of his mind that he won’t be honest with you,” said a woman who had been a long-time friend-cum-flame. “He’s a smooth-talking con artist,” said his sister.

“Women drive him,” said Ananth. “He’s a player, he’s persistent.” But there’d been nothing of substance—one-night stands, a couple of weeks here and there, some sexual experimentation, a few massages with ‘happy endings’—for the past dozen-or-so years. “Women leave him when they see through him,” said his sister.

Whatever they did deduce about his behaviour, the men didn’t see him as a “creep”. Be that as it may, on the day of the party, Chandran opened the door for me, a researcher at work, wearing nothing but a towel. “Just remember, he’s a snake. Be careful,” his sister had whispered to me as I left her home to return to Bengaluru the night before. I pretended to get my periods and left the party while there were still people there. I did not want to be alone around a drunk Chandran.

“A woman who didn’t know her assailant, who fought back, who has a clean record and hadn’t been drinking or offering sex for money or drugs—that woman will be taken seriously,” Barbara Bradley Hagerty critiques the American justice system in The Atlantic235.

As Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan and Shilpa Ranade put it in the disruptive book Why Loiter?245, “When society wants to keep a woman safe, it never chooses to make public spaces safe for her,” and instead tries to limit her right to this space.

He was rather blasé about it—unsurprisingly, perhaps, given the popular Bengali proverb that goes: ‘A lucky man’s wife dies and an unlucky man’s cow dies.’246 A cow is expensive; remarriage is easy and comes with the added benefit of dowry! Not that Sanjeev was interested in marriage—in fact, he avoided it like the plague.

“Anyway, it doesn’t matter to a woman. She can have sex with four-five men. They can do it immediately one after the other. So, whether it is one man four times of four men once each, what’s the difference? Anyway, women want to have sex multiple times,” Kailash Ahirwar said to justify gang rape. It was no wonder he believed what he did about the Delhi Gang Rape…