Focus on Allahbadia instead of marital rape acquittal is telling
The news is obsessed with one and refuses to give any airtime to the other. What does this say about our priorities?
While India’s media has been outraging over the obnoxious obscenity of a social media influencer, a woman’s rapist — and possibly her killer — has been acquitted by the Chhattisgarh high court, because evidently, husbands are allowed to do as they please with their wives. The news is obsessed with one and refuses to give any airtime to the other. What does this say about our priorities?
I am certainly no fan of Ranveer Allahbadia aka Beer Biceps, whose ugly comments on watching one’s parents have sex have pretty much revealed who he has always been. I have always thought his cultivated wide-eyed wonder camouflaged a certain vileness. To those who have argued that he is a “kid” who lost his way, I say, firstly, a person with a crafty business instinct and massive access to the echelons of power cannot be looked at like we would at a college kid just starting out. Next, I would point them in the direction of his earliest content. A cursory search would show you its basic sexism. It was about “seven secrets of a woman’s mind” or “women’s dating psychology”— quite visibly, content directed at men to be used to manipulate women into courtship and possibly more. More recently, in an interview, he urged the interviewee to “name three Indians who should be asked to leave the country”. That was an incitement to violence, not an innocuous absence of smarts.
But should the State machinery be deployed against him? Is police action appropriate? While I do not think this is a free-speech debate at all, I am no fan of any government having overarching powers. Today, it is Allahbadia; tomorrow, it will be someone else — maybe even one of us — who will have to crawl out from under a mountain of FIRs. Today, we agree on the unseemliness of what he said; tomorrow, opinion on a statement could be divided. Today, it is a routine investigation; tomorrow, it could become the ground to curb genuine, robust journalism.
Allowing the State machinery to have sweeping powers is never a good idea in the medium- or long-term. A much more effective response is people- and platform-led. If people are genuinely disgusted, then brands should come under pressure to withdraw sponsorships to Allahbadia’s content, and guests should think a million times before agreeing to talk to him. YouTube, otherwise so firm on removing content it argues violates community standards, should arguably consider curtailing monetisation for a fixed period as a penalty to those who violated common decency.
And then we should move on.
Amazingly, TV networks remain glued to this. And what happened in Chhattisgarh remains a footnote of the news cycle, dismissed as an ordinary crime story.
So, let me nudge you to read more about it. And perhaps you will feel the same rage I do. The honourable justice Narendra Kumar Vyas of Chhattisgarh high court overturned a trial court conviction in a rape and culpable homicide case of a man whose wife, before dying, told an executive magistrate that her husband had anally raped her. She was admitted to the hospital soon after her husband forced his hand up her rectum. She died from peritonitis and rectal perforations. A trial court in Bastar found the man guilty of culpable homicide and rape and sent the perpetrator to prison. The high court has cited the “marital rape exception” — that India has no recognised law on marital rape — as one of the reasons why forced anal penetration by the husband could not be deemed a crime. The court argued that as long as the woman was above 15 years of age, non-consensual sex — a stupid euphemism for rape — could not apply.
And while the lower court had sentenced the man to 10 years in jail for being responsible for the death of his wife, justice Vyas said that irrespective of what the woman had told the magistrate about what led to her death and the forced nature of the anal penetration, there was no corroborative evidence of the woman’s statement.
What does this judgment say to every abuser in a marriage? And more importantly, what does it say to every woman who is a victim or survivor of domestic and sexual abuse?
The court has legitimised the idea that a wife is the private property of a husband, to do with as he pleases. The court has overturned the basic principle of content. And even if a legal void — the absence of a recognised law on marital rape — prevented the judge from applying those sections, he could have at least considered the testimony of the magistrate and the findings of the post-mortem.
It is, quite frankly, a travesty.
So, if we are done wasting time on the toxic bro culture spawned by the likes of Beer Biceps (the name says it all), how about turning our attention — and our anger to things that really matter?
Barkha Dutt is an award-winning journalist and author. The views expressed are personal