Opinion Shraddha Walkar: Victim-blaming rearing its ugly head again

In yet another all-too-familiar instance of victim blaming and stereotyping, Union Minister of State, Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, Kaushal Kishore, laid the blame of domestic violence on the shoulders of “educated women” who choose non-traditional relationships such as “live-in” over marriages. The minister was speaking in the context of the murder of a 27-year-old by her live-in partner in south Delhi’s Mehrauli that recently came to light. Aaftab Poonawala allegedly strangled his partner Shraddha Walkar in May this year before dismembering her body and disposing of it across the city after that.

Unseemly as it is, and ironic in light of the Centre’s push for women’s emancipation through its many schemes such as Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao and Stree Manoraksha — the latter especially with the purpose of providing psycho-social and mental-health support to women in distress or facing violence — the minister’s comment, unfortunately, is hardly an aberration. Despite pushbacks and movements such as MeToo, incidents of gender-based crime act as triggers for raising questions about a woman’s choices, her morality, and, in this case, the bogey of a familiar ghost — “love jihad” and its attendant manifestations of Islamophobia. In the overarching patriarchal flex, systemically attuned to play judge and jury over the lives of women, what gets lost is the fact that crime against women by intimate partners remains a grim reality in India. According to a report released by the National Crime Records Bureau in August this year, of the 4,28,278 instances of crimes against women in 2021, a 15 percent increase from the year before, the most cases, at 31.8 per cent, were recorded under “cruelty by husband or his relatives.”

Advertisement

For those caught in abusive relationships, it is often difficult to make sense of the coercive control that holds them hostage. But the irrefutability of statistics indicates what the incessant debates over who is to blame cannot — that for women to feel safe in their homes, in their choices and with their partners, it is necessary to extend to them the solidarity of support without the jagged edges of judgement. Support that is not dispensed by a parent or society as an act of benediction, but solidarity that recognises them as more than the sum total of their mistakes, as individuals with agency, deserving of institutional and societal mechanisms of redressal, should they be in need of them.