Michael Khouli, MD
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” These words have been attributed to one of America’s revolutionary founding fathers. They are no less relevant to a group of revolutionary women in rural India today. In this case, it was not the proverbial tree of liberty that was watered with a tyrant’s blood, but rather the literal marble floors and walls of a district courtroom. According to a report in The Guardian by Raeka Prasad, on August 13, 2004, a group of 200 women from a local slum in the city of Nagpur fought back against Akku Yadav, a gangster and rapist who had operated with impunity in their slum for a decade, collectively stabbing their persecutor to death rather than watch the court set him free through yet another misappropriation of justice. Instead of punishment, these women deserve our admiration and support in the struggle against endemic gender-based violence.
It is always lamentable when oppressed peoples must resort to violence to resolve disputes or protect human rights. Nonetheless, “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.” These women so long ignored or oppressed by criminals, police, and their own government have justifiably resorted to force to defend their rights and lives.
As Americans, we should have a native sympathy for the struggle of these women. Our own country was founded on similar actions and principles. Many American revolutionaries would have preferred to maintain ties with Britain, to trust the existing institutions to guard their security and heed their political voice, and to avoid bloodshed with a people that shared their language and culture. Yet repeated violence, theft, and political disenfranchisement convinced them that they had no alternative to war. British contemporaries branded the revolutionaries as criminals, but today they are heroes and pioneers for democracy and freedom.
The abuses of these women from the slum of Katurbar Nagar are clearly worse than anything our founding fathers suffered. Not only are they subject to political disenfranchisement and routine physical assault against their property and person, but they also suffer structural violence from a lack of education, pollution, poverty, and gang rape. Moreover, it was not foreign soldiers or a distant king which threatened their liberty but their very own municipal government and police force. Usha Narayane, a local women and leader in the slum, speaking with journalists, said “Often, people went to the police to complain, and then the police arrested them…One woman went to the police to report that she had been gang raped by Akku Yadav and his thugs; the police responded by gang-raping her themselves.” The police subsequently arrested Narayane for the murder of Akku Yadav even though she was not present at the courthouse that day.
Partly, these women were ignored because they were Dalits, untouchables, but gender discrimination is indisputably at the heart of the problem. One may dispute statistics. However, given the difficulty in obtaining accurate statistics on gender-based violence in an industrialized and computerized nation like the U.S.A, the striking global statistics are also bound to be an underestimate. The UN Development Program estimates that girls between 1 and 5 years old in South Asia are 50% more likely than boys to die from various types of gender discrimination. Nobel-laureate Amartya Sen calculates that worldwide 107 million girls are “missing” from the world today, dead from neglect or killed every year because of their gender. Even here, one in six American women suffer sexual assault according to the National Violence Against Women survey.
It is too easy to dismiss the women of Nagar as radicals or criminals or exceptional cases, but this would be a mistake. Gender violence is endemic everywhere. Many societies and governments continue to ignore the systematic abuse of half their citizenry, even after laws are written prohibiting these abuses. In such circumstances, the first step toward righting such injustice is transforming cultures of female docility and subservience, so that women find the courage to fight for themselves, sometimes literally. Those of us already empowered must speak up, demonstrating that we support them as they struggle for justice and liberty. We can start to collectively pressure leaders but must also individually pledge our support of organizations by local women for local woman such as Prajwala in India or #MeToo in the USA. These women have learned that “we must all hang together or we will all surely hang separately”. We must hang with them as well, men with women, the free with the oppressed, or we all suffer.
- Kristof, N. D., & WuDunn, S. (2009). Half the Sky. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
- Prasad, R. (2005, September 16). “Arrest us all”: the 200 women who killed a rapist. Retrieved January 21, 2018, from http://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/sep/16/india.gender
- Sen, A. (1992). Missing women. BMJ : British Medical Journal, 304(6827), 587–588.
- Tjaden, P., & Thoennes, N. (1998). Prevalence, Incidence, and Consequences of Violence against Women: Findings from the National Violence against Women Survey. Research in Brief. Retrieved from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED434980
- United Nations Development Program. (2016). Human Development Report 2016: Human Development for Everyone. Retrieved from http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/human-development-report-2016-human-development-everyone