Voices from the Indian Feminist Movement
Shoma Chaudhury
One night in December 2012, a 23-year-old medical student was brutally gang-raped and killed by six men in a wealthy Delhi neighborhood. Since then, India has been reckoning with its chronic problem of sexual violence. Six years later, the #MeToo movement has taken India by storm. Allegations of rape and sexual harassment have brought down Bollywood stars, politicians, and media moguls alike. In an ironic twist, the Indian news media played a key role in bringing down its own titans. “What the media has done is to help take away the sense of shame from a victim and to relocate the shame on the perpetrator and create the space to speak up,” says Shoma Chaudhury, senior journalist and former managing editor of the investigative magazine, Tehelka. In a deeply patriarchal society, this is a remarkable feat.
Ms. Chaudhury has written about gender and politics throughout her career. She investigated and exposed the historic case of Soni Sori, a tribal school teacher falsely accused of being a violent Marxist in 2011. She was thrown in a Chattisgarh prison, where she was brutally raped and abused by the State police throughout her imprisonment. When she was finally acquitted of six of her eight charges in 2013, she “went through a cycle of rage and desiring revenge.” Considering the savagery she went through during her time in prison -- coupled with being separated from her three children -- it would have been understandable. She even considered joining the Marxists and taking up arms against the Indian State. But she finally realized: "Why would I want to go out and kill a whole lot of people who did not do this
to me? The better way of living out my rage would be to get out of jail and stand up for other women who are languishing in jail falsely. Each time I help free a woman or I help them fight a case, some anger in me recedes and I feel healed." Ms. Sori has become a formidable activist for tribal women’s rights, thanks to Ms. Chaudhury’s efforts to bring her story into the limelight.
Though she has reported on various landmark cases of the feminist movement, Ms. Chaudhury has been a controversial figure within the movement. In 2013, her boss, Tarun Tejpal, sexually assaulted a young journalist at a literary festival. Under the Indian Penal Code, which was amended after the 2013 Nirbhaya case, penetration of a woman’s vagina of any kind is considered rape. Tejpal had “fingered” his victim, earning himself a national scandal of a rape trial. Ms. Chaudhury defended her boss on national television, stating that there was a difference between what he did and actual rape. And was seen to have betrayed the feminist cause for it. Considering that she was the victim’s superior, and protected the magazine’s interests over hers, this may have been a justified remark.
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Soni Sori, the tribal schoolteacher who was wrongfully thrown and abused in jail, is pictured here. Chaudhury exposed her case.
She remarks on the current #MeToo wave India is riding. “I think what's problematic about the whole MeToo movement is that it's become a biological movement, rather than a sociological moment. Just by virtue of being a woman
in a biological sense, you are claiming that you are the location of truth. I'm a woman. I tell the truth. Whatever I say is right. It's devoid of any sociological context. While hers is a valid point, men have been claiming that they are the highest authority on truth and justice for millenia. A few months of women being believed like men, does not mean that the movement has gone too far. I ask her to clarify her position on her statement. “In a social situation, the moment a woman says something has happened to her, there should be empathy. There should be acknowledgement. There should be a desire to believe. But in the criminal justice process, there has to be the principal of fair, natural justice, which is that you're presumed innocent until proven guilty.” Fair enough.