The Other Side of Silence by Urvashi Butalia

Author:Urvashi Butalia [Butalia, Urvashi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Published: 2017-08-29T00:00:00+00:00

The Assembly was not the only place where the fate of women was discussed. A similar, and different, discussion on the fate of abducted women took place in the pages of newspapers and journals at the time. The Organiser, the mouthpiece of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) took on the issue with gusto. On December 29, 1949 the front page of the Organiser carried a story entitled ‘Pakistan the Sinner: 25,000 Abducted, Thousands Sold.’ The story ran as follows: ‘For the honour of Sita, Sri Rama warred against and destroyed Ravana, when filthy Khilji beseiged Chitoor its thousands of women headed by Rani Padmini all clad in gerua [saffron] saris, mounted the funeral pyre smiling, ere the mleccha [impure] could pollute a drop of the noble Hindu blood. Today, when tens of hundreds of Hindu women are spending sorrowful days and unthinkable nights in Pakistan, the first free government of the Union of Indian Sovereign Democratic Republic has nothing but a whimper for them.’

This article and its subsequent accusation that Pakistan actually deserved the epithet ‘Napakistan’ (impure) was typical of the kind of thing the Organiser voiced regularly in the years following on Partition. The rape and abduction of Hindu and Sikh women by Muslim men formed the backdrop against which accusations were levelled at Pakistan for being barbaric, uncivilized, lustful. The very formation of the nation of Pakistan out of the territory of Bharat (or, the body of Bharatmata) became a metaphor for the violation of the body of the pure Hindu woman. The Indian State was regularly assailed for its failure to protect its women and to respond to Pakistan, the aggressor State, in the language that it deserved. More than ever, the need of the hour for Hindus was to build up ‘a strong and virile state backed by a powerful army’, because, as one Chaman Lal, author of a book entitled Hindu America put it, ‘we have become such extreme pacificsts that despite receiving kicks ... we continue to appeal to the invaders in the name of truth and justice.’ If the invader was to be responded to in kind, what was required for the removal of this grave ‘national’ weakness was the ‘Kshatriyaisation’3 of the Hindu race.

For many writers in the Organiser the rape and abduction of women was a shameful, but predictable, event for what else could be expected of Pakistan, a nation ‘built on the predatory desire for Hindu property and Hindu women [which] took practically no steps to checkmate the lust and avarice of its champions.’4 There was, however, another reality. Muslim women had also been abducted by Hindu and Sikh men. How could this be explained? In the debates in the Constituent Assembly this was seen as an ‘aberration’, these men had clearly fallen victim to ‘evil passions’. The Organiser wasn’t quite prepared to admit that Hindu and Sikh men had been guilty of abductions. Rather, they had ‘sheltered’ Muslim women. In an article entitled ‘During the War of 1947’ the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.