Why Men Rape: An Indian Undercover Investigation

by Tara Kaushal

“According to the Vedas,” said a subject who called himself ‘a Vedic Brahmin’, “girls have more energy for sex than a normal boy. A girl can have sex with eight people at a time.” The Accused Inmate too heard: “They feel more ‘sex’ [urge] than us. You can never satiate a woman’s desire.”

That women have unfettered, irrepressible, unquenchable sexuality promulgates the idea that, as he was told, “Any woman who is stroking your arm, poking you or joking around sweetly basically wants you to stuff it inside her: they are always asking for it.” Even if she says no...

“A very powerful evidence for gender discrimination in a given society comes from the language of that society. Each language abounds in expressions which are indicative of society’s differential treatment of women,” says one of India’s foremost linguists Basanti Devi, PhD, in ‘Women in the Mirror of Indian Languages’266. She provides several examples of expressions from across the country that describe women disparagingly: a Kannada proverb that says a woman’s intellect lies below the knee; a Malayalam one that says that one who heeds the advice of a woman lands in the street. Literature across languages has historically undermined our intellect as well—women have been depicted as physical entities with beauty, at best, and as sex objects, at worst.

There are also many proverbs that advocate the beating of women: the Assamese proverb ‘katari sikun xile tirota sikun kile’ literally means ‘a stone keeps a knife in good form and beating keeps a woman in good form’.

The Accused Inmate shares one I’ve never heard before: ‘Jisski maa ko chodo wohi tumko baap bolega’—literally, ‘He, whose mother is violated by you, will call you his father’; metaphorically, ‘Don’t be a pushover’. There are ‘madarchod’, ‘behenchod’, ‘haramzada’; familiar in English too, as ‘motherfucker’, ‘sisterfucker’, (loosely) ‘bastard’. And there’s the classic randi, slut, whore, that have universal appeal.

The story of a studious Brahmin girl living in the nation’s capital, who was returning from watching an English movie with a male friend when she was set upon by strangers in a bus—that hits its audience much closer to home. More relatable. Scarier. More worthy of outrage. More TRPs. Jyoti Singh Pandey was (almost) One of Us.

So it’s only when men beheaded their wives and took their heads to their local police stations in villages in Bengal273, Karnataka274, Orissa275; or when a young survivor of gang rape had her head shaved and was paraded through the streets as Panchayat-ordered punishment in the Gaya district of Bihar276 do these stories permeate the English media. The Kathua Gang Rape Case too came to the attention of the English media only after the chargesheet had been filed in April 2018, three whole months after the child had been horrifically gang raped over a week and then murdered.

“A truly ‘good’ woman,” Gilmore continues, “will never put herself in the path of such a man, but he may occasionally intrude upon her, even when she is being properly ‘good’. It is only then that she is a ‘real’ rape victim and can receive the sympathy a ‘real’ victim deserves.” If a ‘good woman’ follows the script—fighting during the rape and crying after, among other prescribed behaviours—she becomes a ‘real’ aka ‘righteous victim’; and the rape a ‘real rape’.

The Mathura Gang Rape Case¶ of 1972281 is seen as a turning point in the women’s rights movement in India. Two drunk policemen allegedly raped a tribal girl in a police station in the Gadchiroli district of Maharashtra. The Sessions Court acquitted the accused policemen because she was “habituated to sexual intercourse”. The High Court reversed the ruling and convicted. The Supreme Court then reversed that ruling and acquitted—because she raised no alarm and had no injury marks to prove there had been a struggle. Therefore, no rape. Things are improving, but slowly. The Supreme Court only banned the two-finger test282—an intrusive and unscientific test of a rape survivor’s vagina—in 2013!

Gilmore writes, “‘Bad’ women can’t be raped, and if they are, the supposed rape would not have happened if they had been behaving like ‘good’ women, therefore...

Kailash Ahirwar had come to believe that “everything about sex is normal” and that all women—even twelve or thirteen-year-old girls—wanted and had a lot of sex. “Many women are sex crazed but hide it only because of their reputations.” He took this to mean that ‘no’ from a sexually active woman was actually a negotiation, a part of the march of modernity: “Has it ever happened that the girl has said no and you did it anyway?” I asked. “So many times! I am a regular guy.” And, in his worldview, sexuality was indiscriminate: “The Nirbhaya Case… they were both drunk and it was late at night. They were having sex in the bus, so those four men also joined in. It was fine until they put that rod in her. Otherwise it wasn’t rape.” Because, “anyway it doesn’t matter to a woman…”

According to my sub-inspector source, one of the reasons for rape is “blackmail because of photos” that, he says, is happening a lot these days. It was one of the tactics Kailash and his team employed to force the women caught with their boyfriends—to first surreptitiously shoot them having consensual sex. Men are also taking photos and videos of themselves perpetuating sexual acts with consenting or unwilling women. Apart from personal gratification, of course, not all, but some of these pictures are circulated, and are used to blackmail the women for further sex acts or money, or to subjugate them into silence284. The Shakti Mills Gang Rapists had gotten away with it before, and expected to get away with it again, assuming that the threat to reveal photographs of her nude and violated body would ensure the survivor did not seek justice. (But she did, and the very photographs that empowered the men served to incriminate them.)

Sensationalism promulgates several other rape myths as well. The Accused notes that most of his fellow inmates believe, like Kailash and Abbas Mirza do, that one man alone couldn’t rape a woman—certainly not without a weapon. “If sex is happening, then it is not rape. Even if she says no. If the woman is not ready then sex will not physically happen… I believe sex can’t happen unless both parties want it,” said Kailash.

A website dedicated to Mahatma Gandhi had claimed that in a book titled The Mind of Mahatma Gandhi, he was quoted as saying, “I have always held that it is physically impossible to violate a woman against her will. The outrage takes place only when she gives way to fear or does not realize her moral strength. If she cannot meet the assailant’s physical might, her purity will give her the strength to die before he succeeds in violating her.”285)

‘Normal’ men don’t rape—certainly not your sons or lovers, brothers or fathers, chachas* or mamas†; neither do ‘respectable’ men from ‘good families’. Only gangs of monstrous strangers do. (In actual fact, approximately 95 per cent of rape survivors know their rapists.286) The streets are unsafe, especially at night, and certainly without chaperone. Home is the safest of the ‘sheltered’ spaces. Some clothes (or the lack of) cause...

“A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy,” says Mukesh Singh, one of...

Apart from Kailash’s gang rapes and rapes by coercion, there were statutory rapes: “Just because it’s illegal doesn’t mean it’s rape. A lot of things are rape according to the law, but that’s doesn’t mean the law is right. The younger generation is more active than we can ever imagine. We had to be taught; for them it is like they are born with it! It’s because of phones. A fifteen-year-old is quite old, she is quite old enough.” And there was, of course, voyeurism and other basic stuff.

A remarkable study291 by doctors at the General Psychiatric Hospital in the Netherlands notes: “a high proclivity to rape is associated with a semantic network in which concepts of sex and power are closely linked in such a way that power cues are necessary precursors of sexual feelings.”

Power penetrated all the gender violence he perpetrated, and I wasn’t surprised to note that he fit the ‘Power Rapist’ prototype of the Nicholas Groth Typology292 to a T. “For these rapists, rape becomes a way to compensate for their underlying feelings of inadequacy and feeds their issues of mastery, control, dominance, strength, intimidation, authority and capability. The intent of the power rapist is to assert their competency. The power rapist relies upon verbal threats, intimidation with a weapon, and only uses the amount of force necessary to subdue the victim.

“The power rapist tends to have fantasies about sexual conquests and rape. They may believe that even though the victim initially resists them, that once they overpower their victim, the victim will eventually enjoy the rape. The rapist believes that the victim enjoyed what was done to them, and they may even ask the victim to meet them for a date later.” Check, check and check! It was no wonder that he told me, “If sex happens, attraction will follow.”

Meanwhile, Saravjeet Singh—the man accused of verbally harassing Jasleen Kaur during a traffic fight in 2015 and summarily convicted by the media, with Times Now calling him the “darinda” of Delhi—was acquitted by the court after four harrowing years295. MLA Gopal Kanda, whose alleged victim and her mother committed suicide in 2012 and 2013 respectively, was being considered by the BJP to form the government in Haryana296. The court cases against Dileep, for the alleged rape of the actor in 2017297, and Tarun Tejpal, for the alleged rape of his employee in 2013298, are stuck in legal loopholes years after the incidents took place. The rape conviction rate in India stands at 24.21 per cent299. And the cultural causes of gender violence, the blame we bear, and the changes we must make in society, are never addressed.

Not that I was seeking confessions, but Kailash was only too happy to tell me everything I asked and more in our last conversation where the sexual questions kicked in, as I battled goose bumps and revulsion. He could’ve gone on; it was I who had to stop. He was getting increasingly aroused, making masturbatory gestures and touching himself openly; and asking me sexual questions in turn. We were alone in my hotel room, as Amit had abandoned me for an emergency. Though I kept making excuses—he’s just around the corner, someone is expecting me, “More chai from room service?”—and had pepper spray in my pocket, I felt I wouldn’t have been able to do anything if the moment had turned. He had already told me that punishment, even phaansi*, wouldn’t deter him from doing something he wanted to do; and that he could “take an army anywhere, 200 people can surround the building right now.” I was terrified.

However, some—like the once-respected feminist academic Madhu Purnima Kishwar—posit that Indian men will not shit where they eat, so to speak. She is quoted in a Guardian article as saying, “Most young men will not dare engage in sexual harassment in their own neighbourhoods or own villages. They will go to places where they are anonymous.”302

With all other subjects, I learnt about the rape/s they had committed through their survivors’ stories and/or the confessions of the men themselves. Sanjeev was the exception: Mantosh told me the details. One morning ten or twelve years prior, the neighbourhood had awoken to the sounds of a big fight. Twenty or twenty-five men were gathered in front of Sanjeev’s house, and were beating him up. He had been sleeping with the maid while his wife was visiting her parents, “shaadi karenge bolke”*. It was public now that she was pregnant, and the hollowness of his promise to marry was glaringly obvious, in plain sight—he was already married and a father. “Maar ke bhagaya”: he was beaten and banished, not even allowed to set foot in Sonarpur for eight whole years.

“Indian girls think that they have only one thing to give to the guy,” said Partho Bhattacharjee, the last of my subjects you are left to meet, also from Kolkata. “Once you’ve slept with a girl, if you are lucky you have a good breakup, otherwise there’s blackmail… Girls get drunk and horny, and have consensual sex but they claim non-consent for money and say, ‘Let’s go and get married.’ Indian girls love to harass boys … If sex is consensual, I need a video so I can prove it’s not rape; one has to be very alert about these false rape cases.”

Which is why he wore his poite† and made it a point to tell me he was a Vedic Brahmin, the highest of the highest, while simultaneously saying he was an atheist. (An aside: he also claimed he’d gotten baptized when he was studying theology “to eat non-veg food”!)

In India Connected307, Ravi Agrawal calls India a country “low on public trust”: “Indians assume that the system and all its components will let them down,” and, therefore, “Self-interest trumps compliance”.

Apart from all the examples I have shared, these are also some leads I did not pursue—of managers in garment factories in Bengaluru who demanded ‘sexual favours’ from workers to release their wages, as was revealed during #MeTooIndia310. And stories from sources—of moneylenders in villages in Telangana who demanded ‘sexual favours’ from the wives and/or daughters of those they lent money to; bureaucrats and ministers raping children in remand homes and orphanages in rural Maharashtra; and of a man who raped his girlfriend’s friend who had approached him for a loan when in dire straits.

Migrants are unable to distinguish the public roles of city women from that of rural women. “A decent girl won’t roam around at nine o’clock at night … Housework and housekeeping is for girls, not roaming in discos and bars at night,” says Mukesh Singh in India’s Daughter314. Physically and metaphorically, these migrants bring ideas and norms of what is accepted and acceptable in the hinterland to the urbanized modern world—where patriarchy and misogyny in thought, word and deed collide with women’s empowerment; as do social order and civic order; old and new; rural and urban…

Ankur Vikal, the sole male actor in Nirbhaya, Yael Farber’s extraordinary play about sexual violence, describes the piteous lives of these migrant men to me: “They come from the village without their women, and live ten-to-a-house somewhere on the outskirts. They get jobs where they are in extreme close proximity to women, as tailors, guards, drivers…” He goes on to describe the clash of cultures and clothes that they experience, not to mention the urges that accompany the porn they are watching: “They probably all resent staying together and are missing their wives, and they are measuring women’s busts or they are guarding them or driving them in auto rickshaws on extremely secluded streets…” My sub-inspector source too ascribes some rapes to the poverty and “majboori” of migrants.

They had separated within four-five months of marriage because, he said, “She ran away with another guy; people say she uses people.” And also (I paraphrase): ‘when she was rejected for a Singapore visa, [he] found she had omitted to tell [him] that she had an attempt-to-murder case registered against her for stabbing a molester in the village.’

“Women from her milieu and in her situation only leave marriages when they become unbearable,” he said, “because they pay a heavy price.” She had. Though she had a supportive family (which is unusual), she was unwelcome in the village because she had a) eloped b) with an upper-caste man c) from the village and—as though that wasn’t bad enough—d) she had left him. She now worked in the city and was with someone else.

Others’ coping mechanism is to normalize it—as my research assistant Priyanka Sutaria had. She’s an impressive poet; here’s an excerpt from a poem she wrote320: scene: my boss is interviewing me for the job I will eventually take up, and she asks me if I have ever experienced sexual violence. I say no. scene: it is my first day at work and my boss is still wondering how I have made it through life without experiencing sexual violence, and I tell her that I have never been assaulted, but I ignore the daily reminders that I am not safe in this world as a woman. flashback: my boyfriend and his friends argue about whether he should drop me home. when I ask why they are contemplating this so seriously, they eye my short dress nervously. flashback: I am walking back to my college hostel, a man follows me on his motorcycle asking me to fuck him the whole way back. it is the main road, in broad daylight. flashback: the boys in my college are friends with all my girlfriends, but whenever the girls are drunk, the boys hit on them in the hopes of getting lucky. flashback: a drunk man in a car propositions my flatmate and me outside a bar, and after we reject him thrice, he tells us we’re bitches and that we should fuck off. flashback: men take aim and fire leers and whistles and catcalls at me everyday, and the people around me swab my hands for gunshot residue. I am shocked back to the present.

My aunt was in a girls’ hostel during her college years. Men would come and masturbate against the boundary wall, despite repeated complaints to the police, leaving the girls feeling sick and powerless. Until they filled buckets with urine (patiently, over three days each) and flung the contents at the men on the wall. The incidents stopped. This was a practical solution—making those men realize that they couldn’t really get away with everything in a lawless land. It was also a solution that empowered the women against the few powers that men can still wield against us—the sexual and the physical.”