BackIs Kerala really safe for women?
The recent rape and murder of a Dalit woman in Kerala comes as a shock to the citizens of a state that takes pride in its status as the only Indian state where the sex ratio is favourable to women
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Bengaluru: The recent rape and murder of a Dalit woman in Kerala has cast a cloud over the safety of women in a state that never fails to parade its favourable sex ratio.
Twenty eight-year-old Jisha, a law student at the Government Law College, Ernakulam was found murdered on 28 April at her home in Perumbavoor, where she lived with her mother. The town is only an hour-and-half by road from the state’s commercial capital Ernakulam.
A post-mortem revealed rape and assault. The nature of injuries drew comparison with a similar assault on a physiotherapy student in Delhi in 2012. Kerala police on Tuesday said it has held a suspect.
Social media erupted in anger. Multiple Facebook groups titled Justice for Jisha sprang up overnight and #JusticeForJisha trended on Twitter. On Wednesday, students from four law colleges in state capital Thiruvananthapuram plan to come together at the state secretariat at 3pm for a protest. A message being passed on Facebook says, “We the law students of all 4 law colleges in Trivandrum are organizing the Justice for Jisha campaign as the people responsible (government, police, media and public) are not doing anything." A similar event is planned at the Town Hall in Bengaluru. A campaign that exhorts citizens not to cast their votes is also on in the state that goes to polls on 16 May.
Political leaders have also joined in, albeit late. “This is horrible. A murder as brutal as Nirbhaya’s. Urgent action needed," tweeted Congress MP Shashi Tharoor on 2 May, while chief minister Oommen Chandy visited the victim’s grieving mother Rajeshwari and promised that justice would be delivered at the earliest.
Even before the dust had settled on the horrific rape and murder, local media reported a Dalit nursing student was gangraped by her boyfriend and others on 4 April at Varkala in southern Kerala.
The incidents have come as a shock to the citizens of a state that takes pride in high literacy, low infant mortality and its status as the only Indian state where the sex ratio is favourable to women.
“A lot of these so-called progressive social developments addressed only issues of class; gender, caste, sexuality and morality have still not been addressed," said C.S. Chandrika, a writer and social scientist based in Wayanad in northern Kerala. “I think there has been an increase in issues related to women’s rights, mobility and sexual violence against women in Kerala. The state is still very feudal when it comes to women’s space, right and dignity. It is—like everywhere in India—a highly casteist, patriarchal society," she said.
Kavita Krishnan, secretary of the All India Progressive Women’s Association agreed. “When it comes to violence against women, Kerala is just as bad as the other states. Dalit women have always been victimized under various regimes. This is not a recent phenomenon."
According to a 2014 report released by the National Crime Records Bureau, the crime rate against women in Kerala was 63%, much higher than the national average rate of 56.3%. And if the data on the Kerala Police website is to be believed, this appears to be increasing—there were 1,263 rapes recorded in 2015 from 1132 cases in 2011.
Krishnan is wary of these numbers, however. “Look—rape statistics are always a little misleading. It is often underreported and sometimes, the parents of couples who elope foist rape cases as well," she says. However, she does agree that women in Kerala are subjected to a lot of hostility, heckling and violence and Jisha is not an isolated instance.
Take for instance the case of Naseera who was stopped from boarding a state transport bus in 2014 because the bus had pilgrims headed for Sabarimala, a hill temple where women of menstruating age are barred. Or the tragic case of 23-year-old Soumya who was attacked by a beggar on an Ernakulam-Shoranur passenger train in 2011: she was thrown out of the train, raped and left to die in the woods near the rail track.
“It is not a recent phenomenon. Take for instance the 1996 rape of that 16-year-old school girl in Idukki district," Chandrika said, referring to an incident where a minor was raped by 42 men over months.
“People say that because the woman goes out, she invites it. What can we say about Jisha then? She was at home," Chandrika said.
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