India’s “disturbed areas” have always had a contentious relationship with the state.

Women’s bodies
often become the surface on which violent practices of nation-making are inscribed in these regions.
There is no graver proof of this than the January abduction, gangrape and murder of an eight-year-
old girl from the nomadic Muslim Bakarwal community in Jammu. The crimes involved eight
perpetrators including local SPOs Deepak Khajuria and Surinder Kumar, a teen, Parvesh Kumar, and
Vishal Jangotra, the son of the mastermind Sanji Ram, a retired revenue official and custodian of the
Devisthan temple in Rasana village of Kathua district where the girl was raped and held captive over
days. A sub-inspector and head constable were complicit in failing to collect important evidence and
colluding to destroy evidence.

The crimes were part of a series of strategies to drive the Bakarwals, a marginalised and landless
community that was granted Scheduled Tribe status in 1991, out of the region by the Hindu
community of Jammu as assertion of the State’s hegemonic nationalism. The rape propagates the
imagination of a majoritarian nation-state where Muslim bodies become sites of violence and
mutilation. This case becomes imbricated within the militarisation of Kashmir and the use of rape as
a weapon of social control and political violence on Kashmiri bodies. State impunity in trivialising the
incident continued when the newly assigned J&K Deputy Chief Minister and BJP leader, Kavinder
Gupta, referred to the rape as “ek chhotisi baat”. The girl’s rape in a temple and the February protest
march led by the Hindu Ekta Manch—a newly formed Hindutva group that supported the accused
SPOs and marched the streets brandishing the Indian tricolour—becomes part of the symbolic
arsenal of a virulent Hindu politics. Attempts by the Kathua Bar Association to prevent the
chargesheet from being filed by the Crime Branch reveal the depths of lawlessness that gripped the
State. Moreover, these indicate the brazen violation of the nation’s secular ideals and loss of
constitutional morality. The role of the state as an aggressor stands out in its recent dealings of rape
cases.1 This becomes prominent in the Kathua case where rape becomesa a masculinist performance
of state sovereignty, especially in silencing the margina-lised minority populations.

Cries of justice for the victim spread across the nation in the weeks after the chargesheet against the
accused was filed. Protest marches have, however, failed to emphasise this crime against Kashmir’s
tortuous relationship with the Indian state.2 In thinking about constitu-tional morality and state
impunity, literature provides one of the best critiques of rape as a violent state practice. Mahasweta
Devi’s short story Draupadi is a scathing indictment of the rape of its protagonist, Dopdi, a tribal
insurgent, by agents of the state. In the story, counter-insurgency forces chase Dopdi and Dulna
Majhi who are instrumental in masterminding the Naxal peasant uprising in West Bengal,
culminating in her rape and the dramatic confrontation with encounter specialist Senanayak. The
terse narrative reveals the human cost of maintaining the sovereignty of the nation-state, critically
examining questions of justice in relation to marginalised populations of India. It also exposes the
disjunction between the lived experiences of minorities and narratives of social justice enshrined in
the Indian Constitution.

I highlight how Draupadi becomes an allegory for constitutional injustice by exploring contestations
of power in the use of law, voice and deployment of the body. Written at the intersection of state
power and sexual violence, the story inverts the narrative order of violence by rewriting the script of
the violated female body. It presents a radical feminism that challenges patriarchal complicity in state
power and scripts narratives of resistance that come together to form a feminist theatre of justice. I
use Devi’s story to read how dominant narrativity within the framework of the Indian Constitution
suppresses its democratic, egalitarian imagination. This reading examines the rot beneath discourses
of national security and unjustified state action perpetrated on women’s bodies.

The Naxalbari movement aimed to reinstate peasants’ rights from exploitation by landowners whose
nexus with government officials ensured a cyclical system of oppression. The inability of the state to
counter the political violence stemming from dispossession and resentment becomes justification for
the use of force, leading to the suspension of democratic practices and human rights provisions for
those acting against the mandate of state security. This becomes an unconstitutional move that
violates human rights and reproduces the conditions for this imbalance, thwarting “alternative
constitutional visions of a radical democratic India that is not Bharat”.3 There is no recognition by the
state of the exploitation of agricultural workers by landlords, money-lenders, state officials and
middlemen which perpetuates cycles of poverty, landlessness and servitude.

At the start of the story we are told: “By the Indian Constitution, all human beings, regardless of
caste or creed, are sacred. Still, accidents like this do happen.”4 Instantly, we are alerted to the
hierarchy of bodies that matters within the Constitution. The text highlights constitutional betrayal in
many ways. A Left-centric criticism of the Constitution is the prevalence of class dominance within its
provisions, representing how “the making and the working of the Indian Constitution celebrate the
rights of the propertied classes over the proletariat”.5 The constitutional challenge represented by
the Naxalite revolutionaries to bourgeois state power is the best example of how the state
misrecognises armed insurrection in pursuit of distributive justice as a threat to the stability of the
Indian state and the production of docile bodies. “Any form of popular (mass) action/movement that
exposes legality and illegitimacy of the ruling ‘development’ paradigms invite legal, even
constitutionally justified repression.”6 The upturning of dominant legalities to achieve an egalitarian
society promised by the Constitution is harnessed by the disciplinary power of the state.

The failure of state operations to catch the couple results in Senanayak’s arrival. There is a metered
dissonance between his militaristic ambitions and Draupadi’s ways that are rooted to the land. Devi
structures these oppositions of civilised and uncivilised, law and anarchy, state violence and tribal
anger towards a specific end. An expert in combat politics and faithful to The Army Handbook,
Senanayak’s knowledge performs a regulatory function: the military tactics and textbooks used to
apprehend the duo become ways of classifying subjects to make them knowable in the eyes of the
state. The use of militaristic methods of warfare locates him within a major idiom of law: that of
rationality and order. The story shows the pitfalls of privileging military warfare as a mode of
knowledge, power and control which reinforces the status quo of dominant legalities and ignores the
question of equality. The law adhered to is “the law of confrontation” according to which “they are
shot at the taxpayer’s expense”.7

There are two distinct discourses in the story: one the militaristic state discourse, of rank and file,
apprehend, search and destroy, eliminate, surrender, camp, police convoys,crunch-crunch-crunch of
marching boots,cordons, and machine guns. The other is rooted in the language of nature and its use
as an ally—a language of signs, ululations, the sounds of birds and animals’ sounds, the gurgle of
water, the tip of the wooden arrowhead, the use of kerosene, hatchets, scythes, bows and arrows,
the forest as cover. These discourses show two different modes of experiencing the state. One is the
protocol-based adherence of the major idiom which yields a harsh, regimented, violent state order
while the other is the raging, subversive, fluid living of the minor idiom, much like the tactics of
guerrilla warfare.

On the run, Draupadi meets sympathetic tribal villagers who advise her to run away. She states the
futility of such action: “No. Tell me, how many times can I run away? What will they do if they catch
me? They will counter me. Let them.”8 Counter, the indigenised term for “encounter”, defines both
her rape and the infamous encounters that led to the killing of rebels by the police. The rebel woman
is doubly vulnerable to such speech because it gains new meaning through its audience. “When they
counter you, your hands are tied behind you. All your bones are crushed, your sex is a terrible
wound.”9 The gendered dimension of torture involves inflicting complete dominance over the
woman’s body. While a man is tortured, a woman is tortured and raped. In response, to counter also
becomes a performative act whose fugitive workings in political discourse are appropriated by Dopdi
through its recognition. Countering challenges the very idea of the encounter, performing a mimicry
that displaces meaning and disrupts the modalities of power that order the native subject. By
appropriating it, the word becomes inappropriate through an inversion of the gaze, in its legibility.

Dopdi’s statement also demonstrates how there is no running away from the state. The parameters
of citizenship which inscribe the welfare of its citizens and define the terms of their engagement with
the state can be read in how one lives with the state, as Sunder Rajan (2003) says.10 The exploited
and marginalised are in a permanently antagonistic relationship with the state. Living with the state
means being a participant in its social, economic and civic life, with rights and responsibilities. But
the deprivation of marginalised communities in the narrative of progress and development prevents
a meaningful exchange of economic, natural and cultural resources between citizen and state which
impinges on their loyalty to the idea of the nation.

The pursuit of Dopdi by Senanayak results in her capture near the Naxals’ forest hideout by
Senanayak’s officers. She is gangraped by the officers through the night, then handed a piece of cloth
to cover herself and ordered to go to Senanayak’s tent, upon which she frenziedly tears the cloth
with her teeth. The guard runs to Senanayak who is rendered speechless at the sight of Dopdi.
“Draupadi stands before him, naked. Thigh and pubic hair matted with dry blood. Two breasts, two
wounds.”11 Hands on her hips, she laughs an ‘indomitable laughter’ and spits blood on Senanayak’s
shirt, asking: “You can strip me, but how can you clothe me again? Are you a man?”12 The story ends
with her demand that he counter her as he cowers in fear.

Senanayak is stricken by the narrative’s reversal of power through Dopdi’s utterances after her rape.
Dopdi’s speech is a reversal of legitimation through which it resists state power. The extraordinary
sexual violence performed on her body with the impunity of the state is reversed through her
narrative assertion of his emasculation, of denying his manliness. The patriarchal expectation of tacit
submission is radically undone by the corporea-lity of Dopdi’s battered body brandished as a
feminine marker of resistance. In this act, she not only reclaims her body from the legal imagination
of the raped woman but also inserts the pain of the subaltern into history through the symbolism of
the body. Her refusal to be clothed and demand to be countered marks her confrontation of the
gendered body as a site of violence, performing a politics of resistance that challenges the authority
of the state over her body. In her rejection of the patriarchal imposition of brute force as structuring
her experience of state power, she reclaims both narrative and agentive power. Her defiance
becomes the final frontier of unknowability for the state, breaking with previous representations of
women in Indian writing.

The Naxal insurrection against the state gave men and women equal footing to lay siege to the state’s
authority, exhibited in the comrade-like marriage of Dulna and Dopdi. The display of female agency
through active participation in the movement postulates women as equal and threatens the
patriarchal assumptions upon which state power rests. The power relations premised on the
subordination of women which informs the political economy of the state is undone by Dopdi’s
corporeal challenge to masculinist state power. This contempt also unmasks the fear of the other
that presents itself as a challenge to the developmental discourse of the state, what Upendra Baxi
calls the “matam” of constitutional discourse.13

Draupadi is a battle-cry mocking the failure of governance and the abnegation of constitutional
duties. It contests the state’s recalcitrance to address the rights of its disenfranchised subjects
without violent suppression, depicting the struggle of the marginalised to gain socio-economic
benefits and social justice by narrating the political and sexual violence that emerges from a skewed
narrative of development. It also showcases the pride of the indigenous subject and the fierce,
violent resistance to being excluded from participatory development. There is a constant awareness
of the differences between marginalised tribal communities, their rights and the rational,
bureaucratic, law-oriented state apparatus.

Mahasweta Devi scripts a gendered response to not just the disciplinary politics of the state but also
constitutional injustice represented in this fictive encounter. The story provides a framework for
articulating women’s grievances against the state’s violent politico-sexual dominance by its
patriarchal representatives. This undermining of the revolutionary potential of women’s participation
not just in movements but active public life is challenged by new forms of engagement generated by
women. As Misri (2011) notes, the social life of the text extends beyond its immediate political
context into future frameworks of protest by women addressing questions of gender, violence and
state power.14 It also gives birth to forms of activism that challenge the hegemony of the state over
narratives defining women’s bodies.

The story fuels future political frameworks of protest in the 2000s in Manipur. Draupadi was adapted
into political theatre by renowned Manipuri theatre actor Heisnam Kanhailal to embody the
resistance of Manipuri insurgents to state-sponsored terrorism and human rights violations after the
imposition of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) to quell Manipur’s stalemate with
lawlessness, sovereignty, and competing internal power struggles. The illegibility of the emergency
law amidst the narrative of secession and self-determination in various North-Eastern States in India
creates a crisis that emerges out of a state of exception.15 The character of Draupadi, played by
theatre doyenne Sabitri Heisnam, becomes the first instance of representing the naked woman on
stage as a political idiom and inaugurates a new critical vocabulary of Indian feminism.

Attracting attention to the state’s excesses through the cultural medium of theatre not only inscribes
the story and its symbolism within regional memory but also produces its own social effects. The
story famously generates the performance of politics by a group of Manipuri women in response to
the draconian forms of state suppression through the imposition of AFSPA to maintain law and order
in the country’s North-East. In July 2004 a group of twelve Meitei mothers or Imas stood naked
outside the Assam Rifles headquarters protesting the torture, rape and extra-judicial killing of
Manipuri activist Thangjam Manorama Devi, taken from her home by the Assam Rifles paramilitary
unit under suspicion of being an underground militant and informant of the banned People’s
Liberation Army of Manipur. In a chorus they shouted “Indian Army, rape us! Kill us!”16 before they
were arrested by the police.

Unknowability and illegibility forms a large part of extra-judicial encounters emerging from AFSPA,
the emergency law that provides impunity to security forces for search without warrants, summary
arrests, and orders to shoot and kill. The act of rape challenges the legitimacy of women as equal
social agents and seeks to quell their insubordination. But in demanding their own rape, the women
display similar political agency to Dopdi in transforming the discourse surrounding the female body
from its mystical, unknowable state to a corporeal, political tool that gains a new critical vocabulary
in the public sphere. The feminist rebuttal to Manorama’s encounter death not only takes the
primacy of the female body as its instrument of resistance but also contributes to challenging the
discourse around rape through an inversion of the trope. Regional memory develops this fiction into
a feminist political theatre of resistance that confronts institutional patriarchy represented in the
state apparatus and the discourses sanctioned by state institutions. Fiction becomes a way to
visualise the implicit nature of constitutional violence and highlight the disjunction between
expectations of social justice and the reality of social violence.

I conclude with certain reflections for the present context. The hyper visibilisation of the Kathua rape
victim in the media and the protests, by repeatedly invoking her name on TV, in banners, and social
media posts, exposes the belief of lesser respect for the anonymity and privacy of victims belonging
to the minority and marginalised populations. This becomes a tacit symptom of practices of othering
by well-meaning civil society interventions. Despite outrage over her rape and murder, the violation
of her legal entitlement to anonymity, and the lack of acknowledgement of her vulnerable political
context puts a question-mark on these protests themselves as the preserve of upper-class morality. I
conclude by thinking about the hierarchy of lives that are deemed deserving of state protection.
What would be more relevant is if protests percolated spheres of action that challenged the very
premises of abrasive masculinist nationalism and women’s subjection to axes of violence on which
the discourse of rape as a violative state practice is constructed.

Notes and References

1. The Unnao rape case, where an 18-year-old girl was allegedly raped by BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh
Sengar in June 2017, came to light around the same time as the Kathua case when the victim tried to
immolate herself outside Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s residence in April to draw
attention to her case one day before her father, imprisoned on petty grounds, died in police custody,
allegedly succumbing to wounds inflicted in jail under political pressure by Singh who used his
influence to tamper evidence, obstructing the registering of the crime, the medical examinations of
the victim, and moulding the law and order machinery to his advantage. He was arrested after the
Allahabad High Court’s scathing indictment of the lack of police action and ordered to be taken into
custody.

2. The conflation of the Kathua rape with the Nirbhaya outrage of 2012 during protests and marches
across the nation erases the historical complexity of India’s history of military violence in Kashmir.
Condemning the rape without acknowledging its political location presupposes the tacit complicity of
mainstream public opinion on questions relating to the Indian occupation of Kashmir and the
presence of Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) which gives immunity to security forces and
removes the compulsion of appearing before a civilian court. Added to this is the element of
majoritarian nationalism which precipitates violent processes of state-making.