India Dishonoured: Behind a Nation's War on Women Read Online Free PDF Page B

importantly, need. “Nobody comes to our help in these parts. The officials and the police are corrupt and anti-poor. So sometimes we have to take the law in our hands. At other times, we prefer to shame the wrongdoers,” she told the BBC in 2007.
    The incident that propelled them to nationwide fame took place in April 2006 when they were tipped off that local government officials were pilfering food meant for villagers and giving it to corrupt officials instead. They intercepted the truck, thrashed the people involved and provided evidence of corruption to the government. There have been numerous other such incidents.
    Last year, when a lower-caste Dalit woman was allegedly raped by an upper-caste man, the police not only refused to register the case but arrested villagers who protested against the injustice. The Gulabi Gang stormed the police station and demanded the case be registered. When police refused to comply, the women beat them with sticks. That sparked a state-wide inquiry into police misconduct. On another occasion, Devi reportedly dragged a government official out of his car to illustrate the dire state of local roads. They have also intervened in sham marriages, dowry disputes and even tried to combat female illiteracy.
    This hasn’t made her universally popular of course. She told an Indian newspaper last year that she had lost count of the court cases pending against her, but never bothered about them. “In fact, I have beaten the cops and a magistrate as well, when they doled out injustice to the ladies of our village. For the past 30 years, I’m fighting against the social injustice meted out to us at home, and I’m not scared of anything or anyone,” she claimed, with a measure of satisfaction.
    The story of Sampat Devi is now being made into a Bollywood film with top Indian actresses, to be released in 2013. In the face of overwhelming corruption, misogyny and lawlessness, the rise of such a group is inevitable. Coincidentally, Uttar Pradesh is also the home of Phoolan Devi (a rape victim who started a gang of dacoits to exact revenge) whose story was made into the film Bandit Queen.
    It is also the state where a 15-strong group of young women gained fame after they set up a self-defence group called Red Brigades in late 2011. Its 25-year-old leader, Usha Vishwakarma, told The Times of India recently that 1 'Red Brigade takes guard against women tormentors on Lucknow streets' Times of India, March 2013 she formed the group after one of her colleagues tried to rape her. “I fought back and managed to escape. It took a year to recover from the incident but I realised that every girl has the strength to protect herself.”
    She joined with other girls in her locality, in the city of Lucknow, because she felt they had to take things in their own hands. “It is the woman who bears the brunt in every case of sexual harassment. No one comes to her rescue and she gets hardly any help from administration or police,” she said.
    The incidents were also hurting their chances of getting an education. “Parents were telling girls to stay in their homes so there would be no incidents. They said, ‘if you go to school, boys will be troubling you, so stay home and there will be no sexual violence’,” Vishwakarma told The Guardian newspaper in a subsequent interview. 2 ‘Women hit back at India's rape culture’ – Guardian newspaper, April 2013 The gang of girls have been involved in several incidents of protecting women from harassment and abuse, and say their numbers have swelled to over a 100. “We chose red because it means danger and black for protest,” she adds.
    Despite the deeply ingrained cultural attitudes, these examples illustrate that Indian women aren’t exactly shrinking violets absent from public life as they are in some countries. There has always been a vibrant feminist protest culture in India over injustices.
    Meera Subramanian says there is a lot of anger at how women are asked to