From Jamui to Gurugram, Why Does Violence Need To 'Trend' Before the State Acts?
To be moved by the viewers instead of the violence itself is what is emerging as a new-age strategy.
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It’s an utterly familiar scene by now, repeating itself outside gated colonies, metro stations, in markets, even at malls one would reckon across Indian towns and cities—a bunch of men huddled over a phone, watching a video of a woman being assaulted, not with shock or horror but with something resembling amusement and smugness. The unmistakable smirk and an arrogance that comes when someone agrees with the content they are viewing. And when they are caught looking, this smirk doesn’t leave their faces, even after an uncomfortable glance is exchanged.
The video in question, this time, was from Jamui, Bihar. Two class 10 students, a boy and a girl, were walking home from tuition on 19 September when a group of men stopped them, slapped the boy, and went after the girl while they both begged them to stop. Someone in their group filmed the whole thing.
Once it did, an SIT was formed within hours and three men were arrested. The main accused, Nandan Yadav, was later injured in a police encounter. All of that could have happened on 19 September, instead it happened on 21 September, once enough number of views were generated and an audience primed to see police take “swift” steps.
Virality has become a substitute for policing. It teaches boys, and everyone watching, that consequences could easily be dealt with until a clip trends. Even then the emboldening is frightening with support of the state and authority.
When Virality Becomes The Trigger
Harassment in public has always been just another weather update, something one dresses for, conducts oneself according to, in cities and villages alike. This primal instinct is always searching for the moment the woman should have stopped herself from being harassed.
We talk about these crimes mostly in terms of catching the men who commit them. It's a fair conversation to have, except that framing has a deep hole in it. The men, mostly, do get caught eventually, once a video forces the authorities to act urgently. Arrests are common and natural occurrences in these circumstances, not a rarity, as Jamui shows.
There's a ruling from Uttar Pradesh from last year that keeps coming up. An 11-year-old girl was groped, almost dragged into a drainage, and the High Court judge reviewing it decided that the men hadn't gone far enough for it to count as "attempt to rape." It was "only preparation," he remarked. The Supreme Court stayed the order within the week, called it inhuman. It also pointed out something worse, that the the High Court judge had sat on this decision for four months before writing it. The judge deliberated before passing his judgment way more than 12 jurors collectively would, in a western country.
The instinct behind that ruling isn't an anomaly. The National Crime Records Bureau's own compiled data put the conviction rate for insult to a woman's modesty at around 13 percent, and for assault with intent to outrage modesty at under a third. So a judge deciding certain acts don't quite clear the bar is, in a sense, just putting a name to what the numbers already show happens by default.
The Same Pattern Beyond The Courts
That same instinct is hardly in need of a courtroom to show up. In Hyderabad this month, a home guard was filmed dragging a woman by her hair outside a railway station. He was arrested and removed from service while the state's DGP called it abominable, all within a day of the footage circulating.
A serving policeman needed a viral clip before the system moved against him for assaulting a woman. that tells you what it takes for the system to move on behalf of anyone else. And when money and power are involved, the delay simply changes shape rather than closing. When a Rajya Sabha MP's son allegedly ran his Aston Martin into a young saleswoman in Hyderabad last month and killed her, the case was registered as death by negligence, a bailable offence, while his father publicly defended him on record. Privilege negotiates the size and seriousness of the consequence.
In Jamui, police said no complaint was acted on until a video of the assault went viral. They were able to catch one of the culprits because a video's footage displayed the vehicle number. In Nalanda, three men groped a married woman on a village road on March 26, and there too nothing moved until the video spread five days later. Days after Jamui, on a road leading to Odisha’s Kapilash temple, a young couple was stopped by a group of men, and the matter was quickly settled on the spot once residents stepped in.
No case, no record. Down the same road, the same men stopped the couple again, this time filming what they did to the woman while she pleaded to be let go. The second version of this event on same day, the one with camera pointed at it, is the one that went viral the next day. This virality got three men arrested. The first assault, according to the authorities, never happened at all.
When The Camera Becomes The Evidence
On 13 September, in Gurugram, a woman biker named Sia was harassed and chased the occupants of a white Maruti Suzuki Ciaz. They were repeatedly asking her to stop the bike. After aggressively pursuing Sia’s bike, the man in the driver seat swerved and hit her bike, throwing her onto the road. It left her exposed to oncoming traffic while the car fled the scene.
The entire ordeal was captured by a camera mounted on her bike handle. This viral road rage video gained millions of views sparking the relentless debate about woman’s safety and road entitlement. Sia's father said on record that the attempt-to-murder charges should have come immediately, not after the story gained traction online. It won't be untrue to state that police can trace numberplates in hours when it suits them, but they wait for their will to erupt when there is an audience waiting to applaud. To be moved by the viewers instead of the violence itself is what is emerging as a new-age strategy. The evidence in the shape of a viral clip is the legitimacy one is waiting for. The accused, Kalyan Bainsla, was arrested from Dausa, Rajasthan on 15 September.
In one of Delhi's popular parks in Kalkaji, three men allegedly posed as police officers to corner a 17-year-old and her friend. Threats to the couple were followed by assault to the girl. It seemed that "moral policing" was notched up when these men decided to teach the couple a lesson. The impunity here is glaring. They were able to take matters into their own hands because of the smug awareness that even the state wouldn't mind them doing so.
Arrests Are Not The End Of The Story
While addressing the public assault of the two minors in Jamui, Bihar's Sports Minister and local MLA Shreyasi Singh stated, in a TV interview that has itself since gone viral, that "moral policing can be done in a more decent and elegant fashion." By suggesting there is a right way to police others' behaviour rather than condemning the harassment outright, she gave a thumbs-up to vigilante entitlement and signalled to perpetrators that their intrusion is acceptable.
His frontal cortex is signalling to him that this time the odds were not in his favour, and that next time he will be more calculative. He is just eliminating the ways he can get caught. The system is preparing him to do better and be smarter. A judge sitting on a decision for four months is preparing the next courtroom, and the man reading about the ruling, exactly where the line is, and how close he can stand to it.
Faster arrests can prevent nothing if the gap between what the law calls a violation and what a girl standing in that moment already knows is not going to close. Until then, we will keep watching viral reels of assault and catching men after the incidents and call it justice, while the thing that led them to their craft keeps doing its work, in the space before anyone watches.
(Meenakshi Jha is an educator and freelance aspirational writer. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author's own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)