Undoing Impunity
Speech after Sexual Violence
The Sexual Violence and Impunity in South Asia research project (coordinated by Zubaan and supported by the International Development Research Centre) brings together, for the first time in the region, a vast body of knowledge on this important - yet silenced - subject. Six country volumes (one each on Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and two on India, as well as two standalone volumes) comprising over fifty research papers and two book-length studies, detail the histories of sexual violence and look at the systemic, institutional, societal, individual and community structures that work together to perpetuate impunity for perpetrators.
In this remarkable and wide-ranging study, activist and historian V. Geetha unpacks the meanings of impunity in relation to sexual violence in the context of South Asia. The State's misuse of its own laws against its citizens is only one aspect of the edifice of impunity; its less-understood resilience comes from its consistent denial of the recognition of suffering on the part of victims, and its refusal to allow them the dignity of pain, grief and loss.
Time and again, in South Asia, the State has worked to mediate public memory, to manipulate forgetting, particularly in relation to its own acts of commission. It has done this by refusing to take responsibility, not only for its acts but also for the pain such acts have caused. It has denied suffering the eloquence, the words, the expression that it deserves and papered over the hurt of its people with routine government procedures.
The author argues that the State and its citizens must work together to accord social recognition to the suffering of victims and survivors of sexual violence, and thereby join in what she calls 'a shared humanity'. While this may or may not produce legal victories, the acknowledgment that the suffering of our fellow citizens is our collective responsibility is an essential first step towards securing justice. It is this that in a fundamental sense challenges and illuminates the contours and details of State impunity, and positions impunity as not merely a legal or political conundrum, but as resolute refusal on the part of State personnel to be part of a shared humanity.
About the Author
V. Geetha is publisher and co-director of Tara Books, Chennai and a well-known scholar working on feminism and caste. Some of her path-breaking works include Patriarchy (Stree 2007), Gender (Stree 2002) and Towards a Non-Brahmin Millenium (Bhaktal & Sen 1998). She is currently researching the works and thoughts of Dr B.R. Ambedkar.
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First published by Zubaan 2016
Copyright Zubaan 2016
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This project was undertaken with financial support provided by the International Development Research Centre, Canada
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Zubaan is an independent feminist publishing house based in New Delhi with a strong academic and general list. It was set up as an imprint of Indias first feminist publishing house, Kali for Women, and carries forward Kalis tradition of publishing world quality books to high editorial and production standards. Zubaan means tongue, voice, language, speech in Hindustani. Zubaan publishes in the areas of the humanities, social sciences, as well as in fiction, general non-fiction, and books for children and young adults under its Young Zubaan imprint.
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Contents
Urvashi Butalia, Laxmi Murthy and Navsharan Singh
Zubaan Series on Sexual Violence and Impunity in South Asia
An Introduction
Urvashi Butalia, Laxmi Murthy and Navsharan Singh
The Sexual Violence and Impunity project (SVI) is a three-year research project, supported by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada, and coordinated by Zubaan. Led by a group of nine advisors from five countries (Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka), and supported by groups and individuals on the ground, the SVI project started with the objectives of developing and deepening understanding on sexual violence and impunity in South Asia through workshops, discussions, interviews and commissioned research papers on the prevalence of sexual violence, and the structures that provide impunity to perpetrators in all five countries.
The project began with some key questions and concerns. We noted that recent histories and contemporary political developments in South Asia had shown an exponential increase in sexual violence, particularly mass violence. And yet, even as such violence had increased across the region, so had the ever-deepening silence around it.
Why, for example, had the end of 25 years of violent conflict in Sri Lanka in May 2009 not resulted in an open and frank discussion about sexual violence as a weapon of war? Why had the International Crimes Tribunal (ICT) of Bangladesh, set up in 2009 to investigate and prosecute suspects for the genocide committed in 1971 by the Pakistan army and their local collaborators, paid such little attention to the question of mass rape, despite it being widely acknowledged that it had happened and many women having spoken out about it? Why did discussions on Kashmir in India or Swat in Pakistan, simply ignore the question of sexual violence? Why was caste violence, violence against sex workers and men and transgender persons barely spoken about?
Nor was silence the only issue here. Crucial to maintaining the silence wasand isthe active collusion of states in providing impunity to perpetrators, sometimes under the guise of protective laws and special powers to the armed forces, at others under the guise of nationalism. So heavily were the odds stacked against women that, until recently, very few had dared to speak out. Backed by culture, and strengthened by the state, and often with the active collusion of non-state actors, impunity then, remained largely unchallenged.
We asked ourselves if these conditions were specific to the South Asian region. Elsewhere in many parts of the world, we noted, rape was increasingly being discussed and accepted, not only as a weapon of war, but also as a crime against humanity and as an instrument of genocide. The 1998 Akeyesu judgment by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) provided a clear definition of rape and delineated its elements as a crime against humanity and as an instrument of genocide. In the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) jurisprudence pioneered the approach that used acts of rape and other forms of sexual violence to include elements of other international crimes such as torture, enslavement, and persecution, which previously had not been litigated in the context of gender violence.
