Silence Around Minority Identities In Sandeshkhali Violence Is Grim

The morning tabloids of the Nation have been filled with the burning issue of violence in Sandeshkhali since mid-February. The violence has been in the form of protests, with grave allegations of sexual abuse, land grabbing and misuse of political power by the Trinamool Congress strongman, Sheikh Shah. It all started with a raid by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) on a multimillion ration scam in early January and soon spiralled into a frenzy where hundreds of women took to the streets to voice their grievances against the Zilla Parishad Member, Shahjahan, and his close associates Uttam Sardar and Shiboprashad Hazra. After a long period of absconsion, Shahjahan was finally arrested in the last week of February.

The Grim Silence Around Gender-Based Violence Of Dalits

The media enquiries have brought to the forefront the hold that Shahjahan had over Sandeshkhali, a subdivision of Basirhat in North 24 Parganas. The ED raid opened gates to the realities of the small village, vandalised by the politically reinforced and power-drunk goons. The verdicts that have surfaced on the interposer-drunkenly how there were regular searches by the Party boys to locate “beautiful and young brides” in the village. Women were raped, kept captive for days at the end at the local party office, threatened with murder of themselves and d families, and even given assurance of government jobs if they were able to satisfy the men. After the disclosure of the entire racket, the Calcutta High Court via suo motu cognisance, took up the case and rebuked the implemented section 144 that was used by the local leaders to restrict the entry of opposition into the area. 

There has been an uproar in the nation with conspiracy theories of the opposition parties framing these men to adversely affect the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. It has taken the shape of a political battle between the ruling party in West Bengal and the ruling party in the country, thus undermining the overarching truths of this incident. The truth of the women in the area are mostly Dalits and Tribals, women from marginal communities are gruesome crimes against these minority communities have been reduced to two paragraphs in the game of the current political circus which is enough for us to feel pity for the victims, but never enough to hold the perpetrators accountable. 

These crimes in the popular narrative of the Bengali media have been reduced to being only gender crimes and the oppression of the rich on the poor, with the question of their caste identity being coveted. This can be traced back to Bengal’s legacy of whitewashing caste as a class under the hegemonic rule of the CPI(M) Government for 34 long years. This internalisation of class identity, superimposing caste, has percolated to every aspect of the Bengali Bhadralok community, transcending governments and finding their roots in the very culture of Bengal, which oppresses Dalits under the pretext of caste simply existing in the fabric of the state. 

The issue with labelling the assaults as simply a gender issue obliterates the perils of Dalit women, who face triple oppression of caste, class and gender. Sharmila Rege, a pioneer of Dalit women studies in India, states how the masculinization of Dalithood has resulted in the erasure of Dalit women from the narrative. Since the focus of studies in ouDalitntry has always mainly been about post-colonial domination, the roots of caste, class and geo post-colonial discrimination remain unexplored. According to the National Crime Reports Bureau, out of all the reported violent crimes against women, 26% are only those of Dalit women being raped. Other government data highlights how at least 10 Dalit women are raped every day, with thousands of others that go unregistered.

Karen Boyle in her studies of the various forms of violence that women face, lists the uneven power dynamics of gender in society as the leading cause of all violence. Violence is not enacted through individual acts of aggression, it is embedded in institutional structures and discourses that make up the traditional belief systems of the world. It is normalised and legitimised within social systems of culture, law, and media. Violence, before taking a physically manifested form, gets transferred from one generation to the other by dormantly existing in society as internalised norms. 

Having been displaced from their native places, Dalits are exposed to several social and economic vulnerabilities. Dalit men are also often required to leave their homes for jobs in the urban centres which leads to the women in the family being open to various forms of exploitation. When the dominant castes being or gender believe that the “lowborns” have violated rules, one major form of punishing them is carried out in the form of violent crimes against the women to show the community their worth and their social standing.

The nuanced reality of ‘caste gendercide’ in Sandeshkhali gets exposed when women are told that they will never be accepted by their husbands since they have been violated. The men in Sandeshkhali have propagated through their actions that a Dalit woman’s body is not hers- because what is her body if not Dalitker of honour of the family and community? For them, it is their right to rape a Dalit woman to fortify who belongs where.

It becomes important for Dalits to address the duality of gender and caste in caste-inflicted violence because these women who form the lowest section of class, caste and gender face the brunt of it all. Their dilemma of choosing which criteria sets them to face more oppression, their gender or their caste, will only end when we look at these rapes for what they are- not just a way of attaining biological gratification for men, but also a tool to feel superior based on caste. 

Sandeshkhali was a unique example of Dalit women reclaiming their autonomy and demanding justice for what is rightly theirs. The state and the national media were coerced into taking up the issue and providing the deserved space to the brave Dalit daughters of Bengal. Real justice will be served when they are identified not just as women, but as women from the marginal communities who were able to raise their voices above the noise created by the media and political parties filled with people from the highest echelons of the society. 

Authored by Debarati Mitra, M.A Sociology, Ambedkar University Delhi. 

Views expressed are the author's own.