A subplot within the ongoing nationwide youth protests has been the molestation of women participants by law enforcement personnel and under-cover lackeys of the regime. Both during the NEET paper leak agitation in June and the current protests against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar there have been several reports of women agitators and journalists being groped and inappropriately handled by male personnel. There is enough bystander footage of some of these incidents to merit a sexual harassment investigation against the men involved. But typically, the State’s response is to look the other way or stonewall the mandatory process that must follow.
On October 3, three women journalists covering the protests against Gyanesh Kumar at and around the legally designated site Jantar Mantar in New Delhi complained of sexual harassment/molestation by police personnel. At least one of them provided enough detail of her incident, naming an assistant commissioner of police for grabbing her breast when she asked for an explanation why protest leader Neha Bora was being taken into detention by male policemen. Subsequently at the Parliament Street police station, her effort to lodge a complaint against the officer was stonewalled.
After colleagues and bystanders pressed these three cases, the complaints were referred to the Crime Branch without an FIR being lodged. Two days later, even as the officer’s behaviour was under scrutiny, he was given a promotion of sorts, albeit without benefits, from which the officer excused himself in a show of submission to the norms of office.
This simulation of due process is unmistakably Kafkaesque and typical of the passive aggression of the male State. Its use of a melee as cover for molestation of women, the employment of sexual violence as a deterrent to dissent, and the glazed-eye response to any evidence furnished have been recurring motifs in all recent protests. The State correctly reckons that young women have been at the forefront of both the NEET and the SIR agitations, and surmises, correctly, that their participation is giving the cockroach movement credibility and legitimacy across constituencies. It fears that if allowed free rein, this party-agnostic opposition can become a moral challenge that it cannot browbeat or buy out. This State is afraid of women and youth, and young women frighten it twice over.
Law enforcement would have us believe that molestation during crowd control is the work of a melee opportunist, not a tactic of the system. Like the bottom-pincher in the bus, the State hides in the anonymity of chaos, and uses groping and grabbing as a tool of repression. They violate body dignity, trigger shame in the victim, and transmit menace to society at large, thereby making parents and peers counsel caution to the dissenter. When used against women journalists, they serve a double function. Not only do they deter the reporter herself, they serve to prevent recording of excesses against protesters.
Even if we allow the excuse that molestation of women protesters is the fault of individual opportunists, law enforcement institutions have to cop the blame for at least three factors. One is poor training of the entire constabulary, officers included. Second is the low priority given to treatment of women in crowd control manuals. A third, and most important, is institutional misogyny. Officers abet it by being indulgent, or ambivalent, towards the molesters amidst them. All factors in the service of the bottom-pincher State.