When researching my forthcoming book, Why Men Rape: An Indian Undercover Investigation, I went undercover for up to a week each with nine men who had raped across the country, two of whom were involved in gang rapes. Here’s what I learnt about the phenomenon.

Dipu Raja Yadav knew he was a Very Important Person from the moment he was born. Being the only boy of six children, the much-awaited son after several ‘unwanted daughters’ to boot, he was truly divine, the raja beta* everyone had been praying for. Literally praying—in the stolen moments I got with his ghoonghatted** mother, she spoke of her intensifying despair and the desperate fasts she had kept for a son. So when Dipu was born, “bhagwan ki kirpa se, by the grace of god”, the midwife beat a brass thaali*** in ecstatic announcement. Savitri was finally the mother of a son. And the village pandit**** had been summoned for as lavish a pooja***** ceremony and feast as the family could afford.

Eighteen-or-so years after the momentous occasion of his birth, I had gone to meet this man-child in his village on the border of MP and UP, out on bail for participating in a gang rape.

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Let me give you some Rape 101: The dominant discourse about the cause of sexual and other forms of violence is that their perpetrators fail to acknowledge the humanity of others. This ‘other’ can be conceived of simply as another individual or group. Or as the philosophical concept of ‘the Other’ in relation to and different from ‘Self’, which Simone de Beauvoir and others after have applied to the man-woman binary construct and sexual inequality.

Either way, the core idea behind this belief is that one can perpetrate crimes on others only because we do not see them as human, but as different from and less than human or equal. In the masterly article ‘Beastly’ in The New Yorker, Paul Bloom discusses this notion with respect to literature about slave owning and the Holocaust, quoting the psychologist Herbert C Kelman, “‘The inhibitions against murdering fellow human beings are generally so strong that the victims must be deprived of their human status if systematic killing is to proceed in a smooth and orderly fashion.’” We therefore talk about the ‘dehumanisation’ and ‘objectification’ of women—the denial of women’s autonomy, agency and humanity—as the cause of sexual violence.

“The thesis that viewing others as objects or animals enables our very worst conduct would seem to explain a great deal,” says Bloom while introducing a new wave in critical theory about violence. “Yet there’s reason to think that it’s almost the opposite of the truth.”

This school of thought—that much violence is because of, not in spite of, the recognition of the humanness of the victims—is worse. “The sadism of treating human beings like vermin lies precisely in the recognition that they are not.”

The feminist philosopher Kate Manne applies this theory—that “people may know full well that those they treat in brutally degrading and inhuman ways are fellow human beings”—to sexual violence in her ground-breaking book, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. Where feminist theorist Catherine A Mackinnon asks “Are women human yet?” while listing the atrocities committed against our sex, Manne proposes: “often, it’s not a sense of women’s humanity that is lacking. Her humanity is precisely the problem.”

Here I offer a humble contribution to the discourse on violence: both ways of looking at victims, dehumanised or all-too-human, are causes of violence. It depends on the individual perpetrator’s agenda with that individual victim in that particular instance.

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In what is arguably the most important book on the psychology of rapists, the psychologist Dr Nicholas Groth says that in all rape, three components are present: power, anger and sexuality, their hierarchy and interrelationships vary. I find myself correlating the power-anger versus sex theories to the contradictory theories on whether perpetrators dehumanise their victims or see them as all-too-human. Here too, I propose that all motives, for sex, power and anger, are causes of rape; and that it depends on the individual perpetrator’s agenda with that individual victim in that particular instance. For instance, in marital and relationship rape of the garden variety (ie, sans violence or anger), they objectify and dehumanise their victims for sexual fulfilment. When in doubt, he asserts his personal interests over hers. He is the entitled, superior human; she is denied the right to make an autonomous decision about participating in sex, and human rights in general.

But the reverse is true in the cases of public gang rape….

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It was a regular “fun” evening for the boys, like many others, that started with Dipu Yadav hanging out and getting drunk with his older, history-sheeter cousin Arjun. However, this evening a year before was to not end like their other habitual outings, but with a gang rape and subsequent police complaint that would alter the lives of the cousins and their two friends (and, obviously and primarily, the survivor and her family). The boys moved on to a gambling game in the village, where they got drunker. Some friends called and invited them to a gathering at a local den—where they went to eat some rough, rustic food and drink even more. It was now ten-11, late by village standards. Some friends had left, some had stayed. Someone suggested they call it a night. Arjun said he needed to collect some money he was owed from a man called Pintu, who had been avoiding him. “We told him that if we go at this time, we would cause a fight. But he insisted.” So a carful of them went to this Pintu’s house.

Pintu snuck out the back as soon as they arrived. His wife, who used to be a dancer, opened the door and said her husband wasn’t in. This enraged Arjun and, under his leadership, the four of them had raped her at her doorstep. When the husband reappeared, they beat him up too. No one dared stop them.

Both factors that Dipu identified as causes of this gang rape are well documented across the world. Dipu told me it was “a consequence of company.” He had been unable to withstand the pressure from his older cousin and the others as he risked being ostracised—as tends to happen with young people within the dynamics of a group. And because they were all drunk.

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The idea had been to punish Pintu through the gang rape of his wife, the premise being that the honour of the family lies in the vaginas of its women. That ‘honour’ is seen as inseparable from the chastity of women holds true even when she exercises sexual agency. From a patriarchal perspective, rape is a crime against the ‘owner’ of the woman—with her ‘honour’ sullied, her ‘virginity’ robbed, the goods spoilt. It is a familial and societal shame. This is a lingering legacy from times as old as the hills, of religion, of Gandhi. (The Mahatma believed that Indian women who were raped lost their value as human beings; and argued that fathers were justified in killing daughters who had been sexually assaulted for the sake of family and community honour.) In What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape, Sohaila Abdulali, a survivor of gang rape in Mumbai who wrote about it unabashedly in the eighties and then again over 30 years later, says of rapists who hurt the woman while the man watches helplessly (as had been the case with her): “The whole scenario is a toxic blend of machismo and cruelty, a neat way of pressing every button related to what it means to be male and female…. If you want power and control, and all the research says that is what much of rape is about, then, if you manage to rape a woman and bring a man to his knees at the same time, it must be a double victory.” Pintu’s punishment for delaying the return of four-five thousand rupees to Arjun was the public gang rape of his wife. (I’ll allow you a moment to take that in.)

Here, it is apparent that the survivor was seen as fully human, and power assertion and anger were the perpetrators’ primary motivations. It is the same when, beyond the personal dynamics, rape is used as a tool of politics, war and civil conflict, deployed against countries and communities—as it was during Partition and the Gujarat Riots. Called ‘genocidal rape’, it can also be seen in the Kathua Gang Rape Case—apparently, the perpetrators wanted to distress and displace the eight-year-old girl’s nomadic community through her prolonged disappearance and the ultimate discovery of her brutalised body. But, through all these instances, there is no denying the sexual pleasure derived by the perpetrators. The police chargesheet of the Kathua incident reveals the nauseating detail that one of the accused, policeman Deepak Khajuria told another to wait “as he wanted to rape the girl before she is killed.”

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Stranger rapes are no more than five or six percent of the total number of rapes; stranger gang rapes are even less frequent; and stranger gang rapes and murders are rarer still. Although stranger gang rapes and murders are not the norm—quotidian marital, relationship and acquaintance rapes are—this is the type of rape that gets our attention, from the Delhi Gang Rape to the recent Telangana and Unnao cases. This is problematic, because episodic news coverage and selective outrage is part of the problem. It muddies the water when it comes to the idea of rape and consent. It takes a law and order approach to solving the rape crisis in India. It has a caste-religion/class angle to stranger rape—the Shakti Kapoor idea of rapists, ‘the Other’ loutish men lurking in bushes, waiting for ‘good’ Savarna women to come along. But I digress.

Stranger gang rape happens, of course. An incisive report titled Women’s Safety in the National Capital Territory of India published in 2018 proposed ‘migrant anxiety’ as one of several reasons for increasing incidents of gang rapes and groups engaging in violence against women in public spheres of Delhi. Migrants feel “othered” by insiders; further, “[u]nemployment in the city creates a sense of isolation and powerlessness… exacerbated by constant exposure to an unattainable lifestyle.”

“The nature of public rape is changing,” observes Dr Abhijit Das of the global NGO MenEngage. India has been deeply hierarchical for millennia and, for all that time, most rape tended to follow class lines, top-down—men targeting women of their class or lower—except when the power dynamic was occasionally subverted. Explains why, when a friend was molested in public by a man not of our milieu, her friends caught him and demanded: “Teri aukaad kaise hui? How dare you touch a woman above your class?”

Top-down gender violence continues as it always has, in public as well as private spheres. These are some leads I did not pursue, shared by a cop I spoke to over a couple of years: the son of a taxi driver became a doctor in Mumbai, and also married a doctor. When the couple visited his village in UP, the local Thakur and his sons tied the wife to a tree and raped her in front of her husband because they “couldn’t handle a poor taxi driver’s son being an MBBS.” Although apparently reassured by her husband, she jumped from the train near Igatpuri and died. Another: in order to usurp a poor farmer’s land, a powerful landowner got five-six men to gang rape the farmer’s wife and two daughters. The family left the village….

But public rape now includes another dimension—lower-class men targeting upper-class women. “The poor uprooted rural man, exponentially disempowered in the city, is lashing out at those he thinks are the reason for the problem,” says Dr Das. This type of rape carries elements of genocidal rape—asserting power, instilling fear, expressing anger and, of course, sex. These perpetrators also fit the ‘Anger Rapist’ category of the Groth Typology. For them, the rape experience is one of  “conscious anger and rage, and he expresses his fury both physically and verbally. His aim is to hurt and debase his victim, and he expresses his contempt for her through abusive and profane language…. Sex becomes his weapon, and rape constitutes the ultimate expression of his anger”. And we seem to be breeding mobs of them.

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Aside from the rage resulting from migration and money issues, the report on women’s safety in Delhi also lists the clash of cultures as a major reason for the city’s problem of stranger gang rapes. Migrants are unable to distinguish the public roles of city women from that of rural women. “A decent girl won’t roam around at nine o’clock at night…. Housework and housekeeping is for girls, not roaming in discos and bars at night,” says Mukesh Singh, one of the Delhi Gang Rapists in India’s Daughter. Physically and metaphorically, these migrants bring ideas and norms of what is accepted and acceptable in the hinterland to the urbanised modern world—where patriarchy and misogyny in thought, word and deed collide with women’s empowerment; as do social order and civic order; old and new; rural and urban….

Ankur Vikal, the sole male actor in Yael Farber’s Nirbhaya, the extraordinary play about sexual violence, describes the piteous lives of these migrant men as such: “They come from the village without their women, and live ten-to-a-house somewhere on the outskirts. They get jobs where they are in extreme close proximity to women, as tailors, guards, drivers….” He goes on to describe the clash of cultures and clothes that they experience, not to mention the porn they are watching, and the accompanying urges: “They probably all resent staying together and are missing their wives, and they are measuring women’s busts or they are guarding them or driving them in autorickshaws on extremely secluded streets….” My cop resource too ascribes some rapes to the poverty and “majboori”****** of migrants.

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There are no quick or easy answers to the rape crisis unfurling in India today. The solutions are hard work. They include but are not limited to introducing comprehensive sexuality education; reducing economic inequality; changing the police and legal systems; revolutionising social structures; etc. But whatever the masses may think about it, the solutions do not, by any stretch of imagination, include the police murdering rape accused in their custody.

* Raja beta: King son
** Ghoonghat: A veil worn by some Hindu women to cover their heads and faces
*** Thaali: Plate
**** Pandit: Hindu priest
***** Pooja: Prayer
****** Majboori: Need

An edited version of this article was the cover story of The Week on 14.12.19.