Lust and envy in the city

If the Juhu groping had happened in Bihar or Madhya Pradesh the more evolved amongst us might have had a good time feeling aghast at the primitiveness of rural India. A scandal is a public occasion for a people to feel superior to the perpetrators of the given crime. Those who live in Indian cities regard themselves as having arrived in comparison to our braying cousins from the cow and other cloven belts.Unfortunately, there lives, as the Juhu incident shows, just under our skin, the hairy ape, our venerable forefather, ready to jump out at the first scratch.
But the public reaction to the rogue event was as if Mumbai had never witnessed such gender specific violation before. Just 72 hours prior to the mob in Juhu jogged their groins and began thinking with the long end of their by now seemingly shared shlong, a lone woman travelling by bus from Boisar to Behrampur was raped by the conductor and was forced to perform fellatio on the driver. The story was out the next day. But no one seemed particularly shocked. It was not a "social" event. The victim was a truck driver's wife. Perhaps that explains the seeming inevitability of her fate.
More to the point though, there has been a series of rapes and molestations in Mumbai as in the case of a city college student who went to cheer the victorious 20/20 team and got waylaid by a mob. Earlier last year a police constable raped a rag-picker at the Sahar airport grounds. The year before, a South African model was gang raped for two days in a hotel room. The same year saw a man posing as a health officer raping a housewife in the bustling Bandra-Kurla Complex.
Clearly, Bombay is a landscape littered with ruins in female form and resonates, if only you are tuned in to the frequency, with muffled screams of those whose grace has been broken by force. And surely, even in these days of demented memory and fleeting attention span, we all can still recall the rape of a minor girl on August 15, 2002, on a late-night Churchgate-Borivili train?
According to one study, Mumbai registered over 300 rape cases last year. That's almost a rape day. And no one is yet counting the unreported sexual assaults and violations. Or for that matter the hundreds or thousands of incidents of sexual abuse and domestic violence. Clearly, the scandal is the norm, not the exception.
That the Juhu molestation happened in the early hours of the New Year is incidental. Given the conditioning cultural myth that on New Year's Eve every one must be in good cheer, an incident like this would naturally have more shock value. That it happened right outside a five-star hotel in a kind of five-star area in the presence of so many people adds to the scandal quotient of the night.
But shorn of all frills, the incident is an endorsement of a strengthening pattern of male behaviour. According to statistics from the National Crime Records Bureau the "incidence of rape has grown at a far higher rate than any other category of crime in India in the past 53 years''.
In the 2002 Burt Reynolds movie, Snapshots, a young girl (Carmen Chaplin) is saved by her woman friend from a situation potent with gang rape possibilities in a bar. "Why do they do it?'' she asks her saviour who replies, "Oh, that's the way men behave.''
A bunch of charged up male hormones in pants do not see a woman even if they are looking at her. They see a body. There is of course a difference between the body and the individual who wears it. But in these days of the Body Cult, the distinction between body and being has been rendered nearly redundant. The male gaze breaks a woman down to her body parts.
The overall urban context, of movies, ads, the thoughtless-winner-take-all-good times, extenuate the need for an ethical perspective on achieving what you want, even if that is something as silly and as imperative as an orgasm. We live in times when everything is permitted and nothing is true. Why not grab some free fun from two NRI women who happened along? Which is why the burkha goes down - and over - as a good idea with many women.
Several burkha-clad women have gone on record saying it empowers them to be themselves, impenetrable as they are from the male gaze. It might also explain why Islam is now the fastest growing religion in a country as material as America.
The answer to rape is not Islam, of course. It is more security for women, perhaps even licence to carry weapons for self-defence. Certainly, more moral control for men. But a mob doesn't think in terms of ethics. The Juhu mob coalesced and moved forward, organised around the instinct of sex. At the sight of two women, a random crowd had sensed in the sleepless city a kind of amoral freedom to flash its tumescence. Who cared what happened next? In material times, future is now.