– Samia Vasa

In this short article, I want to analyse two fairly established but covertly functional  components of the discourse on sexual harassment on university campuses: the victimised-villainised figure of the upper-caste woman and the secretly homosexual harasser of men. This analysis is offered as one way of interrogating our assumptions about sexuality and caste, and apprehending the limits of the discourses on sexual violence in circulation today. I begin with analysing a few cases of sexual violence on the Hyderabad campus of the EFL University to show how certain kinds of masculinist Dalit politics cast the upper-caste woman as the perpetrator of all sorts of violence, whether it is sexual violence meted out to a Dalit woman by an upper-caste man, or a Dalit woman is harassed by Dalit men, or an upper-caste woman is harassed by a Dalit man. It is these heterosexual transactions between the figure of the upper caste woman and the challenges posed to it by Dalit male leaders that further reinforce the position of upper caste men and Dalit women within caste hierarchies. I end this article with a few comments on the ways in which the campus responded to the life and death of Mudassir Kamran. I argue that heterosexuality’s invisible relation to our understanding of sexual harassment structures our responses to caste violence as well as male-male harassment.

Violent Figurations

The Dalit-Bahujan and the other left-oriented student organizations in the EFLU campus have offered trenchant critiques of the feminist movements in India that have consistently deferred the question of violence against Dalit women. These critiques and other interventions against caste violence have created a rich history of protest and reflection on the campus. While the mainstream media and political discourses focus mostly on violence against upper-caste women, student organizations of the campus have made it a point to highlight violence against Dalit, OBC, tribal and minority women. However, this engagement has often fed into misogyny and sexism; almost, as if caste violence can be addressed by Dalit masculinity only if it involves reparative violence against the figure of the upper caste woman, thereby consolidating the patriarchal orders within and through which caste and heterosexuality function and flourish.
In 2011, an upper caste guest faculty member molested his research student, an OBC woman, in his room in the university guest house. The faculty member was arrested that evening. Next day, a number of student organizations rallied across the campus. Posters were put up that accused the then Vice-Chancellor (a woman) of having taught the faculty member to rape. Instead of focusing on the violence of the faculty member, it was the upper-caste woman that was cast as not only complicit, but crucially instrumental to the violence that a marginalised woman had undergone. It was essential for this protest to be excessive and virulent in its invocation of caste violence as the intention, pedagogy and nature of the upper-caste woman in order to be effective.
In 2012, a Dalit Telangana PhD student was harassed by five student leaders of her community when she refused to join their organization on the campus. She was repeatedly threatened and asked not to start SFI politics on campus. This political enmity was played out on the body of this woman who was claimed as one of their own, and therefore subject to their judgements. Allegedly, she was sexually harassed by one of the leaders who claimed that he was in ‘love’ with her and demanded that she must have sex with him. Another leader called her a ‘prostitute’, spied on her and informed her parents that she was having a love affair. Her parents stopped talking to her, and she still faces a social boycott in her village. A number of questions of power and ownership converged in this one classic case of multiple kinds of violence perpetrated by different people, all at the same time. She went through several months of all this and more before asking for help from faculty members and students. A small panchayat of faculty members, Telangana community leaders, Dalit feminist leaders, and student organizations was called, in which some of us, by then organised as a gender forum, were dismissed as upper-caste women who were only too happy to villainise Dalit men. The upper caste woman was thus, once again, the reason there was a rift between “brothers and sisters” in the first place. The Dalit female student spoke eloquently at the panchayat. Not only did she outline the sequence of events, she even pointed out that though she might get a formal apology at the end of the panchayat, a piece of paper could not ever undo the violence that she had gone through. She also severely criticised the members of the panchayat that dismissed the gender forum as simply an upper-caste forum. She upheld this dismissal as antifeminist and violent.
Earlier this year, a student (an upper caste girl) lodged a complaint with GSCASH that a Dalit professor was harassing her and the professor lodged a complaint with the proctorial board that the girl had slapped him in front of the class room. Even this brief description raises a number of questions about relations of power that are structured by caste as well as class. A few Dalit students and professors, however, had no desire to engage with even the possibility of sexual harassment. For them, this was an instance of casteist behaviour: how else could a female student have mustered enough authority to slap her own professor? Though institutional procedures were followed, and a written apology from the girl was tendered, the girl was rusticated, putatively for slapping a faculty member in public, an administrative justification which should be taken with a bag of salt! What kind of anti-caste politics was this that collapsed into consolidating the stereotype of the woman who always lies about sexual harassment?
A history of caste oppression reveals the ways in which upper caste women are complicit in systematic violence against Dalit men and women; often, complaints of harassment against Dalit men by upper-caste women have been the beginning of violent conflicts against Dalit communities. Upper caste women are also notorious for feeling harassed by the mere presence of Dalit men. Stereotypes of the rowdy, lecherous Dalit man have always been powerfully entrenched in cultural representations. However, this is also a country that has consistently and powerfully silenced questions and experiences of sexual violence. Can we then dismiss complaints of sexual harassment from upper caste women without any specific engagement? This is not to say that the experience of sexual harassment is a sacred entity and is outside of relations of caste and class. But is it desirable to dismiss claims of harassment by claiming full knowledge of the meanings of an experience and explain it away without taking into account questions of gendered power? The history of caste violence cannot delegitimise the history of sexual violence that produces and reaffirms the performances of masculinities and femininities. By consistently refusing to engage with gender as anything but a secondary or a less pervasive form of relations of power, a rich history of anti-caste movements is being reduced to a very unproductive confrontation between questions of caste and gender, as if they are neatly extricable from each other. Worse, this figure of the upper caste woman that comes to acquire meanings in all instances of sexual violence against Dalit women ensures that Dalit male leaders and their transactions with this figure obscure the meanings of sexual violence that Dalit women experience.
If anti-caste movements have not thought about gender, if feminist movements have been casteist, how may we engage with these histories of exclusion productively? Do we repeat them in our politics, or do we take the critique seriously and think of caste and gender at a much more foundational level? This is not to say that the student who slapped the professor was casteist and the professor who harassed the student was patriarchal. Such intersectional analyses tend to isolate different components of one’s subjectivity, as if these are fixed components in a machine, working in the same way, producing the same effects, creating the same predicaments at all times and in all places. If acts of violence have to be analysed, they will have to be analysed with all the complexity and the contingency of our subjecthood. But even before we undertake this difficult analytical task, we have to first build a basic sequence of events, we have to be able to record testimonies of both the sides, and we have to be able to create a space where analysis can take place. Institutionally and organizationally, there are no practices of fact-finding that can establish some narrative in such cases. Indeed, this work is even thwarted by the frenzy around taking a position on either casteism or patriarchy.

Politics of gayness: On the waiting list of student politics

If these are some of the limits and some of the complexities of the discourse around sexual harassment of women, there is a complete lack of language to understand other kinds of harassed subjects. To now talk about sexual harassment of men by men would seem to invoke the prevalent debate about gender-neutral laws: that we need to have gender-neutral languages within law as well as outside of it. I suggest no such thing; indeed, gender-neutrality cannot be an adequate institutional response to gendered realities and bodies. What happens, then, when we are confronted with accounts of violence that structurally blur the possibility of distinguishing between harassment and homophobia?
Mudassir Kamran hung himself in March 2013. The immediate cause of his suicide seemed to be an emotional disturbance over having been handed over to the police by the university administration, in response to a serious complaint by Mudassir’s ‘close friend’ and former roommate. By this time, Mudassir had several complaints against him by this friend, alleging stalking, emotional and verbal harassment, and physical assault, among other things. In my own conversation with this friend, I noticed that Mudassir’s advances were also being rejected on the grounds of disgust at the possibility of homosexuality.  While I would be the first to argue that harassment of the friend had to stop, I would also assert that an engagement with one’s own heterosexism is required in really understanding this avoidable tragedy.  My point, frequently misinterpreted as a declaration of a truth about Mudassir Kamran, is not that he was gay.    Gayness is not an essence that can be embodied by the dead or the living. My point is that Mudassir was an instance of how institutions and cultural communities deal with subjects that are assumed to be gay.
Much of the following account came to light only after his death. Hours before that, an informal police complaint was lodged against him, apparently because Mudassir and the complainant had gotten into a physical fight, reportedly ending in Mudassir attempting to strangle his friend. It appears in hindsight that the complaints that were filed against Mudassir did not take the institutional course (GSCASH referral, formal meetings with the accused, and so forth), except in a series of show-cause notices, after which he was handed over to the police and held in the police station.   Students and faculty members, who had been involved at the behest of the complainant, had pointed out beforehand to the administration the significant risks of handing Mudassir over to the police. He was a Kashmiri Muslim, after all. Afzal Guru had just been hung, and Muslim youth had just been falsely implicated in the Dilsukhnagar blasts. It was observed by these students involved that the Proctor, who normally thus far had been reluctant to take a stand against the ‘offender’ seemed quick to hand the matter over to the police.  He rejected repeated requests for arranging formal counselling for Mudassir. Indeed it seemed as if the complainant claimed that all he wanted was an end to this ordeal. What the ordeal was for Mudassir is now irretrievable. All we have is a newspaper report that cites three letters that Mudassir had written to the administration in response to the complaints filed against him (TOI report, March 14, 2013). It is true that student organizations managed to get Mudassir released from police custody in barely an hour, but the damage was done. Or so we can conclude, because Mudassir hung himself the next day.
That the administration recognised none of this complexity was not surprising. What  was really the stunning moment of reckoning with Mudassir’s death, was that the student protests did not mention Mudassir’s ‘crimes’ or the possibility of homosexuality being an issue for at least a week of intense protests. In fact, the administration’s claim that this was a “homosexual issue” was interpreted by the students as an attempt to “malign the dead”. The document that was written immediately after his death called this a scuffle between two friends. Other documents used the word “conflict”. One student went so far as to call this ‘problem’ an instance of “brotherly love”. Some students even claimed that an allegation of homosexuality fed into the stereotype of Muslim men being homosexual, thereby confirming that being called homosexual was an insult one could never hope to recover from. It was only on the fourth day that the protest documents mentioned homosexuality as an issue that “now” needs to be addressed, in spite of members of the protest insisting that homosexuality was not an issue at all.1
That the protest documents were more politically (and poetically) correct did not signify any major political breakthrough. Thus, throughout the student agitation for “justice” for Mudassir, he was compulsively framed as the Kashmiri Muslim man who was treated unfairly by a nationalist, casteist university administration. The denial of any possibility of homosexuality became the grounds on which the “struggle” was mounted. Language failed the protest documents when they mentioned the “friend” who was stalked by Mudassir. For both the administration as well as the student protests, Mudassir could either be understood as a harassed Kashmiri man, or a violent homosexual.
It is important to understand the many ways in which the failure of language marks this event.  The term homosexual became a polyvalent term, which gave rise to completely paradoxical dispositions among those who surrounded Mudassir’s death.  His complainant felt distress, annoyance, irritation and fear; the proctor felt enough discomfort to hand him to the police rather than think about less violent possibilities like counselling; the police used the term as a license to incarcerate him, (a killing incarceration, even though in objective terms it was hardly for an hour); like the police, administration sought to excuse its conduct under the seemingly omnibus crime/sin of Mudassir’s homosexuality; the stunned and guilt ridden community sought to blame and escape it by evading the possibility of its existence altogether.
While a discourse, that claims to describe, understand and explain violence committed by men against women cannot be expected to illuminate the murky terrain of Mudassir’s life and death, one at least hopes to glean some insights about violence, institutions and cultures from it. Sadly, even that is not available. My argument, then, is not to develop discourses that can describe and include even these ‘special’ cases. What is clear, instead, is that an attempt to explain away sexual violence by simply pointing to caste or class or nationalism or desire, will necessarily privilege certain kinds of narratives and meanings over others. At the very least, we need the political desire to engage with sexual violence in a way that interrogates our own locations and limits in understanding it and responding to it. At the very least, we need to read acts of harassment, homophobia and institutional procedures as barring our access to any neat narrative. At the very least, we need to ask questions about heterosexuality and its foundational relationship with the way we articulate sexual violence and structures of caste.
Samia Vasa was a student at English and Foreign Languages University
Notes:
1. On 6th March, the protest document said, among other things: ”The administration, along with the police has been hinting at the sexuality of the student and what could be its expression as the cause behind the conflict between him and his friend. We believe that Mudassir’s friend with whom he got in to a fight is being forced by the administration and the police to give statements that frame Mudassir in a particular manner and to give his character an “unnatural” colour. We strongly believe that these rumours spread by the administration uphold its homophobic attitude and its use of homosexuality as a pretext for abuse and discrimination. Even in attempting to engage with the aspect of sexuality that this situation now brings forth, one finds a severe want of nuance in their language” (emphases mine).
On 7th March, a cartoon poster was published which had “Homophobia” written across the poster with the following words: “Just think we stumbled upon an important clue regarding Mudassir’s death” (emphasis mine).  The protest document that was published on Facebook on 11th March says: “We have decided to shed our organizational affiliations and come together under the united front of the Struggle Committee for Justice for Mudassir Kamran. This committee will not stand for any kind of discrimination based on caste, class, gender, region or sexual orientation. For a long time, this campus has been consciously blind to the voices of marginalized students. We clarify today: So what if Mudassir was homosexual? So what if he was a Kashmiri Muslim?  This campus, members of the administration, the faculty, student body have failed to nurture a space that allows for a language other than the ‘normal’”.  (emphasis mine).
References
Nikhila Henry, “Was Kamran denied justice at EFLU?”, Published in the Times of India, 14th March, 2013. Accessed from: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/hyderabad/Was-Kamran-denied-justice-at-Eflu/articleshow/18962864.cms
“Insult, Injury, Death”. Accesed from: https://www.facebook.com/notes/ria-holika-de/insult-injury-death/10200826188362428
“The Polemics of Truth”. Accessed from: https://www.facebook.com/notes/ria-holika-de/the-polemics-of-truth/10200851691759997
“Emergency Exit”. Accessed from: https://www.facebook.com/notes/the-struggle-committee-for-justice-for-mudasir-kamran/emergency-exit/263777503756803