The Verma Committee report, 2013: notes on nation, gender and crime

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe introduction to the Report of the Committee on Amendments to Criminal Law 23 January 2013, set up in the wake of the country-wide protest against the gang-rape of a young woman inside a Delhi bus in December 2012, recalls the pledge of the Constitution India adopted in 1949. The Report seized its moment to gesture at the point that the making of the state or the nation is inseparable from questions of gender. It is futile to try and seal off a political sphere from the civil society or from cultural practices. The notion of a nation always already in the making is reliant on the fugitive character of culture. The ideas of jati (nation), and rashtra (state) are, in the long run, dependent on what the desh (country) and samaja (society/community) make of the concept of lokatantra (republic/democracy). If the legal structure of the state enjoins a certain idea of nationhood there are bound to be contesting claims from intersecting fields, including those that involve seeing the nation as ‘gendered’. The current situation is more about the majoritarian understanding of what makes for the ‘modern feminine in India’ than idolatrous iconography or of the new patriarchy that had since the late nineteenth century sought a fragile truce with the project of ‘improving’ the lot of women along Western lines. Conversely, if the state – as sought to be reinvented by the current leaders of India – wishes to visibly display its secular credentials, the ruling majority will less than subtly alter the concept of Hindutva (or ‘Hindu-ness’) to identify with the nation and with ‘Indianness’. The Report of the Verma Committee attempts to recover the foundational tenets of the Indian Union which offered equal rights to citizens irrespective of gender. In the wake of popular protests against the ghastly incident that occasioned its appointment, it alluded to the fact that questions of gender justice and safety were inseparable from those of women’s equity, empowerment and capability. In the current situation it might be useful to recall Rabindranath Tagore’s suspicions about the imagined ‘nation’ held together more by chains of servitude than bonds of belonging. Tagore guessed – as his mature fiction clearly demonstrates – that there was no way of skirting issues of gender when speaking of the ‘modern’ idea of the nation. Tagore promises more than Reports of government Committees.