THE YOUNG AND THE RESTLESS. GENDER, ‘YOUTH’, AND THE DELHI GANG RAPE CASE OF 2012

Abstract

Following the Delhi gang rape and murder of Jyoti Singh Pandhey in New Delhi and the unprecedented levels of protest that followed, high numbers of young people in the subcontinent and specifically urban India were blamed for sexual violence, while also heralded as a progressive vanguard.¹ In this piece, I discuss the paradoxical discourses that surround the Delhi gang rape and the unprecedented levels of protest that followed in relation to global austerity and anxieties concerning youth. While ‘idle young men’ are blamed for sexual violence and ‘young’ women are subject to paternalistic protectionism, I suggest that gendered violence in urban India must be thought of in relation to a wider moment of global recession and austerity. I use the Delhi gang rape case and discursive constructions of ‘youth’ as both deviant and politically progressive to discuss the gendered effects that increased forms of global precarity supports.

Notes

1 The Justice Verma Commission report that followed the Delhi gang rape described a ‘… mass of young, prospectless men’ who were blamed for violent assaults of women in urban India. The report further concluded that ‘ … large scale disempowerment of urban man is lending intensity to a pre-existing culture of sexual violence’. Paradoxically, Justice Verma also praised the young for their political activism following the Delhi gang rape and murder case. Justice Verma specifically praised the Youth Movement, stating that:

Much to Learn from the youth, not possible to name everyone who contributed. Even when there was provocation, they did not react and continued to maintain calm. It was the young men who were conscious that this gender inequality has to be done away with.

One can see how discourses concerning young urban Indians are fraught with contradictions that gesture to how political leaders want to cease on the energies of young people to support national interests, while also blaming them for their insecurity within a neoliberal economy.

2 See Fanon (1963). This quote is one that makes reference to the generation of anti-colonial struggles that Fanon wrote of and was a part of. However, in gesturing to his work I am suggesting that contemporary.

3 ‘Time pass’ is a term often used in urban India to refer to ‘hanging out’. Since the Delhi gang rape, it has been largely referred to in a negative way to refer to young men who are precarious and unemployed within cities and are being blamed for rising levels of sexual violence.

4 The length of this work does not warrant a detailed discussion regarding the relationship between Occidentalist superiority and the production of the ‘Orient’ or modernism, colonialism and ideas of teleological progress. See Said (1979), Bhabha (1994) and Chakrabarty (2000).

Additional information

Tara Atluri. Address: Research Associate, Oecumene: Citizenship after Orientalism/Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Project Team, 596 Brooks Howard Court, Newmarket, ON L3Y 6V1, Canada. Email address: [email protected]