An advocate at the High Court in Delhi, Aaliya Waziri lives with the horrors of the 2012 Delhi gangrape. In the aftermath of the Nirbhaya case, the J.S. Verma committee’s recommendations led to amendments in Indian criminal law. But why do women still live in fear? Waziri’s collection of essays, In the Body of a Woman, takes stock of the progress that has been made and the long road left to cover, even as she pushes for gender-responsive law-making. Excerpts from an interview.
A majority of women and girls live in some sort of fear — they fear for their safety in buses and trains and sometimes even at home. After the Nirbhaya case, a stringent law was put in place. What more needs to be done to make women feel safe?
As women, we carry pain and fear for our safety. Ask any woman walking the street after sunset how many times she looks over her shoulder. Nirbhaya was the tipping point for our insecurities related to our safety. It was also a watershed moment in terms of pointing out the lacunae in the legal framework. It would be false to state that things haven’t changed since Nirbhaya. For example, we now have vulnerable witness deposition complexes in district courts, victim compensation schemes etc. but there is much more to be done. We can do more to strengthen our laws and have a robust system in place that does not allow for procedural lapses. We must have a judicial gender-sensitisation training system that ensures victims are not subjected to re-victimisation. We need to allocate more resources and personnel to fast track courts and precipitate the specialised redressal mechanism in place. We can expand the definition of consent to make it more gender responsive by affirming what consent is.
Why should consent be at the centre of all discussions on gender sensitivity?
Talking about consent is perhaps the most important conversation when it comes to gender responsive law-making. Right now there is a grey area of offences that are not punishable by law because deciphering consent is tricky. Marital rape is one such example. The law defines consent in negative terms. At the same time, we have a statutory definition that talks about how consent must not be tainted with fear or duress or coercion. But this definition talks about all that consent is not instead of a definition that affirmatively defines what consent is, which is where the problem lies. Without a definition of what consent is, we are all shooting in the dark.
In a poor country like ours, why is it important for women to be equal beneficiaries in every sphere of life?
The answer is parity. Women are not a homogenous group. We are unevenly and disproportionately placed on the starting line. To give women a fair chance at competing with men, we have to first put them on an equal footing with men. Only then can we hope to ensure women are equal beneficiaries of the Indian success story. Unless women are equal recipients of state welfare mechanisms that form a conducive environment for women to participate freely in the open market, how can we expect women to enter, re-enter and exist in the work space? There is no one-step-panacea to put women on an equal footing with men but what is important is to identify and plug operational loopholes with affirmative action, no matter how much some of us might dislike the phrase.
Why do you want the focus to shift from a gender-neutral approach to a gender-responsive one if society and mindsets have to be transformed?
A gender-neutral approach might seek to bridge the differences between different genders. But what we need is an approach that acknowledges and addresses differences between genders and works towards parity and inclusion as opposed to homogenising them. I am not sure if the collective mindset of our society can be changed, that’s a pipedream, but we can take concrete steps towards smaller goals. Law is a mirror to our societal fabric and by inculcating a gender-responsive approach, we recognise that within the subcategory of women, we are not an analogous group, we differ in terms of our access to welfare services, the impact our geographical and marital status has on our socio-economic identities, and so forth. The goal is to target disadvantages that women face, simply by virtue of their gender, and equip them to better respond to these challenges.
In the light of the ‘sulli deals’, what should be done to prevent such cyber bullying?
The anonymous non-confrontational form of violence against women and girls, devoid of physical contact, in cyber space, must be viewed as an impeding factor to gender justice in the 21st century. Essentially, if women are at the receiving end of systemic gender-based violence in real life then the same will translate into an inequitable cyberspace.
With that in mind, we have to first understand the fact that the landscape of violence against women and girls has changed with the advent of technology. To counter this, what we need is targeted legislation that criminalises cyber violence against women and girls. In the absence of any special legislation, both the IT Act and the Indian Penal Code are interim solutions inadequate to contain the magnitude of problems brought on by digital technology.
In The Body of a Woman; Aaliya Waziri, Simon & Schuster India, ₹499.
sudipta.datta@thehindu.co.in
