Sharing the Urban

IN 2005, I BEFRIENDED A GROUP OF YOUNG MEN in a resettlement colony on the northwestern edge of Delhi. Over several months, we had a series of conversations, often speaking about their experiences as young urban men. The boys were angry, and with reason. It had been less than a year since the only homes they had known had been demolished in the sweeping slum evictions on the banks of the river Yamuna. In ways large and small, that act of violence pervaded almost everything we talked about. But, more importantly, it also pervaded everything they did, planned, and believed in.

I was not in Delhi last December when the 23-year-old physiotherapy student was raped, or when she died. As I read, watched, and listened from a distance, a quiet and unsettling feeling of familiarity, almost like an odd sense of recognition, accompanied my anger. I realised that this sense of recognition came from echoes of my conversations with those boys, and from all the other structures of violence that stood exposed by the assault on a young woman in a city bus. There can be no doubt that it is vitally necessary to respond to this specific, brutal crime. But at the same time, I was also provoked to ask a different question: is there value in thinking about sexual violence as only one of the idioms of violence in everyday life in contemporary urban India—violence that is increasingly both present and accepted?

An idiom is an ironically gentle way in which to think about violence, but it reminds us that violence is in many senses idiomatic; violence speaks in ways that are often extremely local and that, over time, grow into something easily understood, something that is part of our everyday language—a shorthand, in other words. The young men understood violence this way—intimate, simple and obvious. To them, it was an inevitability. One was either an agent or a victim; often, one was both. Violence was not just a physical act. It was how urban life was organised and navigated—the idiom in which it was understood. It was a means of getting something—anything—done. “You have to fight for things,” one of them said to me, “whether it’s a water connection, a housing slip, or some work. You have to fight for it, otherwise everything will pass you by.” Violence—in different registers from inter-personal to structural, and to different degrees, but violence all the same—was, simply, the last remaining way of fighting. The young men seemed to be saying: “When they broke our homes, they were violent against us. It worked. This is the way the city works.” In their fight to be and remain urban residents, the young men remind us that in our cities, violence has become an increasingly common way to claim entitlements—whether they are legitimate yet denied entitlements such as those of the households of evicted bastis to shelter; newer entitlements of emerging economic classes in our cities to increasing spaces of leisure and consumption, for example; or, as in the case of masculinity and sexual violence, currently held entitlements, which are preserved and reproduced through acts of violence.

How does this relate to sexual violence? Acts of sexual violence—from harassment to assault to rape—are not acts of desire but of power. Power draws upon a set of claims—to the city, the night, the state, to wealth, space, family, tradition, property, caste, faith, individuals and bodies—that are deeply interconnected. For example, acts of power over others’ bodies cannot be separated from expressions of entitlement to the spaces in which those acts occur.

As violence generalises into a condition of everyday urban life—as it becomes shorthand—much of this increased urban violence, as feminists have long argued, will be and is inflicted on the bodies of the marginalised and, particularly, on the bodies of women. If one is to view sexual violence not as incomprehensible, brutal or somehow unrecognisable, then we can—as we must—examine it alongside other idioms and practices of urban violence.

One such reading, for example, locates sexual violence in the broader, structural violence of institutional failure in our cities. Put simply: if the institutions of everyday life do not function, violence seeps in between the cracks—slowly filling them until it becomes the only thing that holds the system together. When violence helps us accomplish every day what institutions do not, it becomes banal. More of us—the elite as well as the poor, the Left as well as the Right, the rulers as well as the governed—begin to see it as the means by which to act, to function, and to secure our rights. Land deals and real estate development projects mix consent and coercion equally to move forward. Water cannons can be turned on non-violent protestors because violent crackdowns are considered legitimate acts of policing and governance. Forced evictions across Indian cities have seen the use of armed police, bulldozers and even army personnel to demolish the homes of the urban poor in the name of enforcing Master Plans and restoring urban governance. Ordinary acts of cutting someone off in traffic can escalate to rage and death. Writing a dissenting view immediately leads to criminal charges of contempt and sedition or bans enforced by mobs, courts or an odd mixture of both. Punishments against love, difference, sexuality and choice are no longer even termed murder but “honour killings”, acts that offenders often claim publicly with pride.

Violence today enters our imaginaries faster than ever before in part because no other institutional remedies seem possible, let alone likely. Sexual violence then becomes one particular expression of a broader structure of violence, amplified by other entitlements of class, wealth, institutional authority, religion, caste, ability, sexuality and gender. In such a context, our understanding of and responses to sexual violence must broaden. The lack of safety for women on a city bus must not be separated from the devaluing of public transport in general—the insufficient number of buses at night being one sign of poor investment in the most commonly used means of mobility in the city. We must also remember that the idea of being “unsafe” takes different forms across our different identities and bodies. The increase in the spatially enclosed, gated communities that pervade the NCR cannot be separated from the non-spaces they create just outside their closed barricades, which leave the public space as residual space unclaimed by any and unsafe for all. The ease with which the elite and the state dispossess the poor and brush aside their claims to the city must not be separated from the absence of hawkers and vendors in mixed-used neighbourhoods, where the eyes of the street can act as both surveillance and support, police as well as community. The problem of non-registration of FIRs on harassment, abuse, stalking and rape must be pursued alongside the equally long list of FIRs of Muslims, Dalits, basti residents, migrants and women, which remain just as elusive. The non-recognised rapes committed within marriages, within families, and by armed forces, police forces and representatives of the state cannot be separated from other forms of violence that these same actors commit with the same sense of entitlement and impunity.

There are rightly many specific and directed responses addressing the particularity of sexual violence following the events of last December in Delhi. Yet overemphasising this particularity, and separating sexual violence from other idioms of violence, is a mistake we should not allow ourselves to make. Resistance against violence must respond in a different register—one that realises that the fight back will be a long, slow, painful and complex effort targeted at institutions and institutionalised inequality. Responding in this way will make our campaigns against violence broader and more powerful. To take just the set of examples cited above, a campaign to increase the registrations of FIRs no matter what the nature of the complaint will be stronger and more sustainable than one that just focuses on complaints of sexual violence. Similarly, a broader campaign to give dignity and efficiency to public transport takes an agenda beyond violence that will nevertheless have a significant impact on safety and dignity for all. Viewing sexual violence in a broader context of institutional failure allows us a different framework from an equally necessary but inevitably limited set of debates centered on culture, appropriate punishment, or sensitising a police force. It also allows us to both say something to those young men about sexual violence and masculinity, and hear what they have to say about the cities that we all share.