Why Men Gangrape!

I went undercover for up to a week each with nine men who had raped across the country, two of whom were involved in gang-rapes. Here is what I learnt.

- Tara Kaushal

Dipu Raja Yadav knew he was a Very Important Person from the moment he was born. Being the only boy of six children, he was the ‘raja beta’ everyone had been praying for. In the stolen moments I got with his mother, she spoke of the desperate fasts she had kept for a son. So when Dipu was born “by the grace of god”, the midwife beat a brass thaali in ecstatic announcement. Savitri was finally the mother of a son. And, the village pandit was summoned for as lavish a pooja and feast as the family could afford.

Eighteen-or-so years after Dipu’s birth, I travelled to the border of Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh to meet this man-child, out on bail for participating in a gang rape.

Let me give you some Rape 101: the dominant discourse about the cause of sexual and other forms of violence is that their perpetrators fail to acknowledge the humanity of others. This ‘other’ can be conceived of as another individual or group, or as the philosophical concept of ‘the other’ in relation to and different from ‘self’, which Simone de Beauvoir and others after have applied to the man-woman binary construct and sexual inequality.

Either way, the core idea behind this belief is that one can perpetrate crimes on others only because we do not see them as human, but as different from and less than human. We, therefore, talk about the ‘dehumanisation’ and ‘objectification’ of women—the denial of women’s autonomy, agency and humanity—as the cause of sexual violence.