Guru Randhawa thinks schoolgirls are like bottles of premium tequila — the kind that are available for purchase in India for anywhere between Rs 28,000 and Rs 5.5 lakh, according to a liquor website.
In his latest music video, ‘Azul’, the rapper likens their moves to a bottle of Hennessy, “rare and classy”, and says their fiery spirit is like raw moonshine. Other alcohol to which he compares the girls, who are first clad in school uniforms and then in cheerleader outfits? Unnamed blended scotch, 8PM whiskey, Ciroc vodka, Bombay Sapphire gin, Bacardi, Jägermeister, champagne, white wine, and two or three other brands of tequila.
There’s alcohol drinking, alcohol as pretty props, and alcohol as lyrics in this video that is a Punjabi jhappi to one of pornography’s eternal themes: the schoolgirl.
The Predatory Teacher Aesthetic
For this video, which he warns is “addictive”, he dresses his dancers (who I’m guessing are adult women, otherwise it would be even more sordid) in thigh-length pleated schoolgirl skirts, the kind you only see in old, man-targeted pornography and that Britney Spears video that launched her career at 16.
In ‘Azul’, Randhawa, a rapper who usually flaunts his jewellery and sunglasses collections in his music videos, pares down his look to a simple black sweater with geeky black glasses and a stubble.
Is he depicting himself as a teacher? Maybe he’s meant to be a responsible looking adult whom children trust? And one who violates their trust by sexualising them and getting off on them? That’s not farfetched in a country where a government study found that 53 percent of children have been abused (an underestimate, if you ask me).
Many of our children are abused by their adult caretakers such as parents, relatives, religious gurus, and teachers.
India's Grim Reality of Child Sexual Abuse
Randhawa’s video will have many takers. Like the man who kissed a child and stuck his finger in her mouth in full view of the public outside a sweet shop in West Bengal.
Or the three government school teachers who assaulted a 13-year-old on the school’s campus in Tamil Nadu.
Or the little girls who were abused in Maharashtra when they went to use the toilet in their nursery school.
Or the 34 schoolgirls who were beaten up in Bihar because they resisted harassment.
Or the Delhi teacher who assaulted a 15-year-old and then shared the video with his friends.
School girls are routinely attacked on the way to school, and in school, and this often reduces their chances of getting an education. The rape of underage boys is fairly common in this country too. Child pornography and trafficking is a huge problem in India. And as is well known, the home is an even more dangerous place for Indian children than their school.
Randhawa’s video has got 708,000 thumbs-ups and 39,649,534 million views from those who can’t figure out why some of us find it objectionable.
“I don’t know what’s more cringe. grown women in school uniform, jumping like mad giraffes being called ‘amazing dancers’ or sexualization of girls in school uniform,” one Reddit user asked. I wonder why they don’t know.
It’s one thing for a consensual adult partner to dress in whatever she wishes while doing whatever she wants, but Randhawa’s music video normalises the power dynamic of men who want to have sex with children. It also perpetuates the stereotype of the sexually assertive schoolgirl.
The Arpan Campaign Controversy
In a country that has no value or respect for the safety of its children, even an NGO that supposedly safeguards their rights can inadvertently seem like an advocate for potential perpetrators. The language in the recent video campaign by Arpan, a well known NGO that works on child sexual abuse, is one such example.
“I haven’t hurt any child. But I’m scared I might.” This was the caption the NGO posted on its LinkedIn page a few months ago alongside a video that zooms into the tense face of a man riding an elevator. When the door opens, a young boy bouncing a ball exits the elevator. A voice asks: “Do you like children in ways you shouldn’t? There is help.” It’s the video launch of Don’t Offend India, “an initiative to provide treatment to people with a sexual attraction towards children and/or early adolescents.”
Don’t offend? Really?
Critics such as Pallavi Prateek, founder and CEO of UNGENDER that works on issues of organisational compliance and culture, pointed out that though support should be available to potential pedophiles, “…in a public facing campaign, it ends up doing something far more troubling: it positions the potential perpetrator at the centre of our empathy.”
Child rights activist and co-founder of child rights centre HAQ, Enakshi Ganguly, was “gobsmacked” by the campaign, and asked: “Are we now being told wanting to have sex with a child is simply a #sexual #urge, #sexualaberration or a mental health issue that can be cured?”
You can watch the video on Arpan’s LinkedIn page here.
Real Uniforms vs Fetish Fantasy
As for the schoolgirl uniform in Randhawa’s fantasy video, you’ll certainly not see it in India. Here, most school uniforms include skirts that are below the knees or salwar kameez. My teenager wears trousers to school and isn’t allowed to board the bus back home even when she’s clad in her long PE shorts. As usual, women must be policed for society’s perversities.
Sexualising school girls has a long and sordid history. Japan’s Joshi Kosei (high-school girl) crisis is legendary—and legal. There are hundreds of JK cafes where old men pay to spend time with underage girls and the country’s JK business refers to a range of activities where schoolgirls are commodified.
I don’t know if Randhawa thought that using schoolgirls in his latest video would be a “cool” idea, or if he even has any idea about the scope of the Indian problem. During the Covid-19 lockdown, the India Child Protection Fund said the demand for child pornography had gone up by 100 percent, with searches for ‘child porn’, ‘sexy child’ and ‘teen sex videos’ surging.
The sexual exploitation of children is a real problem in India. Randhawa’s jig with ‘schoolgirls' just made it worse.
(The author is the founder of India Love Project and on the editorial board of Article 14. This is an opinion piece. All views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)