New Delhi: Mihira Sood has been litigating in Delhi for the past six years and is currently pursuing her LLM at Columbia Law School.
Here, her take on the Delhi gang-rape case.The horrific rape and murder of a young girl last year shook the country. People were angry, laws were amended, change was in the air. A year later is a good time to evaluate what, if anything, has really changed, and what direction we need to take.
Discourse has changed. Whether on online fora, through the mass media, conversations with the auto driver, within families, there is a renewed vigor with which gender issues are discussed, a broader vocabulary and range of ideas, a heightened assertiveness and a visibly more supportive environment for women's rights.
There is a welcome political correctness being generated. The media has redeemed itself in large part, from the days of prurient details of clothing and sexual history, to a conscious effort to be responsible and sensitive.
Women are gaining the confidence to speak out when they have been harassed or violated, challenging not only the men who count on their silence, but also the stigma that silence breeds. Yes many women prefer anonymity even when they are being vocal, but that is more out of concern for their privacy than for their reputation.
However, the willingness to change which initially seemed to carry the power of a revolution, is now revealing itself to be rather limited. Yes women's safety is important, but safety and protection are not ends in themselves, they are (one of) the means to empowerment. Unless we shift the conversation from protection to empowerment, we will be doing the cause of gender justice a great disservice.
The path of baby steps carries the enormous risk of having fought for too little, and having to settle for what we asked for, till the next tragedy that evokes such outrage.
Our laws, though improved are far from perfect. Of course no law can eliminate crime altogether, but laws reflect and guide social evolution, and provide a moral and legal framework in which to articulate our rights.
A law that says husbands have the right to rape their wives, that defines adultery as the seduction of another man's wife, that only procreative intercourse is legal - tells us what the State thinks of the rights of women, the nature of men, the concept of sexual autonomy, of equality and liberty.
Another worrying trend has been the assumptions that seep into our discourse (classism and heteronormativity in particular). Every political struggle needs an identifiable constituency, and it is easy to fall back on those tried and tested stereotypes to focus the battle.
But when the point of reform is to dismantle identity barriers altogether, it is important to step back and consider what stereotypes we are reinforcing in our bid to destroy them. When we try to paint a rape victim as someone who could have been one of us, could have been our daughter-sister-wife, a lawyer or a journalist, we are trying to humanize her, we are trying to make people empathise. But we are also saying that rape matters only when she is one of us. If she is from a different community, a different upbringing, if she is a prostitute or a homeless person or a lesbian or an ex-convict, it is not our problem.
We must be conscious of the fact that gender intersects with many other oppressive factors for people and creates different combinations of inequality - whether it is sexual lifestyles, economic class and opportunity, religion, caste, appearance, geography, social circumstances - and accommodate that consciousness in our conversations.
The only size that fits all is the language of human rights, and it is important to stick to that, even while acknowledging that different people may be affected in different ways.
All too often, women are blamed for not carrying forward the torch of feminism, and we are told that if even women don't support other women, then there is no reason for men to. Just as men can be feminists, so too can women be sexist, but the goal is to dismantle the system of sexism and patriarchy, not pit people against each other.
Feminism isn't about women's rights alone, or about turning a patriarchy into a matriarchy. If men feel victimized that the women get ahead at the workplace by 'sleeping their way up', they should understand that the problem isn't women, the problem is a system that treats women as sexual objects, i.e. patriarchy.
If men are denied paternity leave because childcare is seen as a woman's responsibility, it's not because women are getting preferential treatment, it's because of a system that demands men provide and women stay at home, i.e. patriarchy.
If adultery laws unfairly punish men when the woman was a willing partner, the problem isn't women, it's a system that doesn't see women as sexual agents, i.e. patriarchy.
Feminism isn't a struggle by women to get greater protection from the law, it is a struggle for greater agency and freedom, accepting the responsibilities that come with that.
Patriarchy, or to use the broader and more accurate term, heteropatriarchy, dictates roles for both men and women, and while the punishment for deviating from that role is higher for women, truly breaking down the institution requires freeing gender from these oppressive stereotypes altogether.
The recent setback in Kaushal v. Naz is as much an issue for gender equality as the rape case was, as the laws against adultery have been, much an issue for anyone who believes in equality of genders, and the groundswell of support for women's rights in recent times must broaden to embrace that understanding.