Death by rape. This expression is parallel to ‘death by suicide’, the phrase used instead of the subject ‘committing’ suicide to indicate the agency of others in self-destruction. This change was wrought by the death of Rohith Vemula, and Indira Jaising, lawyer and activist, referred to this in a recent speech as the example from which she formulated the phrase, ‘death by rape’. Rapists need to kill the women they rape most of the time; in any case, the issue of justice in the case of rape is a troubled one. Should rapists be incarcerated for life or should they be executed? The latter penalty adds to the rapist’s reason to kill. The greater paradox, however, lies in the peculiar conditions of life and death of a woman, which prompts Ms Jaising, who had represented the junior doctors in the R.G. Kar rape-and-murder case, to mention life, rape and death in one breath. In the paradox, when a woman speaks for herself, she is not heard. Her dead body speaks for itself too and, surprisingly, it is this voiceless voice that is heard.
By focusing on this, Ms Jaising drew attention not just to the law’s perception of women — the dead woman being more important than the live one — but also to the whole justice system’s treatment of them. Women become inconvenient to the smug order of society when they complain about violence. They are often disbelieved, as in the case of a child’s sexual abuse by a relative; they can be ignored or dismissed, sometimes with insults, as when they are driven out of police stations without being able to register a complaint. They may be too intimidated by weighty social decorum to complain against spousal violence or abuse in the natal home. So, women protesting against violence are apparently silent for all practical purposes. What they say is not accepted in its full gravity; it is hedged around with suspicion, derision and scepticism. It is no wonder that marital rape is not recognised by law: one of the reasons for this is the notion that this shall destabilise the marriage institution. After all, women are destabilising forces and must be kept silent.
When the woman dies, however, the scene changes abruptly. The justice system gets down to business. What was it doing when the woman was alive? But the body speaks in unmistakable tones, allowing the forensic scientist to show exactly what kind of violence caused death. The body will show earlier marks of violence too, telling the world the kind of life she had been subjected to. The law gets to work on the perpetrators, who need not have had the chance had the law been activated earlier on the basis of the woman’s accusations. This is the cruel paradox by which, like the heroine of Tagore’s story, “Jibito o Mrito”, a woman must die to prove that she had been alive.
