Emerging from my corner to say... thank you for writing. I've been slightly overwhelmed recently. I use this blog not so much to communicate as to record personal details and make random observations, so this kind of response was completely unexpected. Unfortunately I didn't intend anything quite so heroic as publicising my story to give other women courage - I was troubled, and so I recorded what troubled me. The rest is an incidental fallout. Thank you for writing though. I have read every response several times over.
I'm still trying to figure out due processes of law and procedures. A friend at the Alternative Law Forum here in Bangalore tells me that both sections 354 and 509 are cognizable and bailable, so why did the cops say Sanjeev Kumar would be in a remand facility for fifteen days even before he was presented before the magistrate? I'm still figuring those bits out. That and what will happen if I don't show for the trial, because I feel I don't want to take this further, by appearing for a hearing and so on.
I mentioned a stray thought that crossed my mind - seeing the perpetrator as from a lower caste. I was troubled that it would have arisen in my mind at all, and I was confused later, about whether I was feeling violated because he touched me, or who he was who touched me. Thinking about it now, I think the instinct is to see the offender as Other. Any Other. If he was fair, rich, i-Pod-wielding I might have seen him as a 'North Indian' Other. If he was Tamil-speaking, I might have chosen to see myself as Bengali (which I am, half) and him as Other. Whoever he was, to justify what happened in my head, he had to be an Other.
On the surface this looks like a girl-was-touched-she-screamed-got-justice story but it's so inextricably tangled in identities of caste, class and gender. Just like anything else in India. Even just being at a police station reinforces that observation. You're supposed to be able to go in, write out an FIR and leave, but how much stress you're put through seems to depend on how you handle them.
The first time I went in to file an FIR, some months ago, I was curt and business-like. I had a complaint, they were supposed to provide me with the means to file it. But it's never as simple as that. It's sort of understood that the personal equation you build with the cop determines all the variables they control: how long do you wait (the first time I waited seemingly endlessly while the cop watched a Tamil soap at 7:30), how many times do they make you write out a complaint, how do they treat you (do they all huddle around you, making you uncomfortable - do they ask you personal questions about your marital status, do they comment on your body). All this is apparently determined by how you play them. Of course, of course, of course there are many exceptions; these are just my personal experiences.
It seems to me that there is an undertone of caste equation through this. Walking in, wearing Western clothes and speaking English, do they see you as an upper class 'aggressor' and then does a history of (their) subjugation come into play as they make you wait endlessly, or exert control in their territory by commenting intrusively on the way you look? At Chennai Central I found myself appealing to them, albeit subtly, to protect me, standing our histories on their head as traditional positions determined by caste were consciously reversed.
Language surely played an important role. Would Sanjeev Kumar have been treated the way he was if he appealed to the police in Tamil, as one of Them, in a state so acutely aware not just of language but also Dravidian-Brahmin variation within the same language? Would I have been treated differently if I spoke no Tamil, had no link to their (cops) state as I did through The Hindu?
Also, all the people silently watching on the train. If I had screamed like this in Second Class, or on an airplane would the reaction have been different? Or just, would there have been a reaction at all? Are there different threshholds for what people consider a serious violation in different cultural contexts, social strata? There must be, of course. So is that what silenced people... that they thought what happened was just me over-reacting to a mundane instance? Would screaming on an airplane have been different? Or was it what I explained (elsewhere) as the Bystander Effect - When there is an emergency, the more bystanders there are, the less likely it is that any of them will actually help.
So many questions, so many variables.
