How women's rights must become part of a wider struggle for a more equal India

So it arrives, feminist realism piercing this season of euphoric dissent. No matter how long and for what reason women take to the streets, patriarchy will refuse to give up even its evening stroll in the park. Men seeking to hold power to account say that we mustn't confuse issues by bringing the matter of women's safety to protests of national importance. We get it: violence against women isn't India's highest priority today.

But it is a fundamental faultline in every battle over every high priority. Men and women seeking India's social transformation must both know this and act accordingly. We see each other most clearly in moments of struggle. The young people bonding over mutual aid and memes in the student protests this July represent the possibility of powerful alliances across gender and sexuality. It is time to mobilise and speak up for each other's causes.

We mobilise because, first of all, there are real people, women, who are victims of morbidly familiar crimes, who must be feeling the greatest loneliness of their young lives right now, and who deserve to feel less alone. Second, it is because the rest of us are not victims. Indian women have experienced decades of upward socio-economic mobility, growing individual freedoms, and -- most affectingly -- improved access to each other. Almost all of us, as the meme goes, are the first in our bloodlines to live these vast, expansive lives.

It is time to put these gifts to use.

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Bridging the gap

The most profound change that protest affects is within protesters, so it is vital for us to find our friends in these spaces, and to make new ones. This is generational work, and extends beyond the scope of seeking accountability for any single crime. Women live online now, and are vulnerable to the influence of our echo chambers in the way our grandmothers were to their caste and kinship networks. We are responsive to what hurts us viscerally, and socially sanctioned, publicly excused male violence is certainly a primary cause. But this isn't an isolated structural issue affecting women. It is linked to our economic security and livelihoods, which allow dignity and freedom to both men and women, and are fundamental to supporting more women in accessing public spaces and public life.

Student activists stage a protest in New Delhi demanding the resignation of the Chief Election Commissioner. | Photo Credit: ANI

It is linked to climate, which represents both the most abstract and the most immediate crisis of our lives. Direct research linking heat stress to rising domestic violence is empiricising something that already feels true to many of us. We know that resource scarcity will dispossess women of opportunity at every level of society.

India's feminist history has historically anticipated and fought for justice in matters linked to these alarming changes, including housing and rising prices. It is time to bridge the gap between our anger at sexual violence and our strategies to confront the structures that enable it. No single solidarity march can protect women from becoming part of the growing underclass created by the climate crisis and global inequality.

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Hard-won rights

Men also live online. Women must recognise that we are losing ground on the Internet, a key battlefield. The strangers in our parks may not have the privileges that the men reading this newspaper do. But neither are they taking to the streets to find friends and ringleaders. They are finding them in their messaging apps and on social media, in the comments section of the manosphere, which thrives on bullying the vulnerable. This in-groupism substitutes friendship and love with assimilation into shame culture, the biggest and dankest locker room in history.

That is a male problem, but it is an opportunity for feminists to think about our own unfinished work. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the anarchic energy of the #MeToo movement tore through the hypocrisies of liberal upper-class life in creative industries, workplaces, and in India's proto-egalitarian dating culture. But the fragile pressure groups and support structures that began emerging for women have had no room to grow.

Feminists have institutional work to do in these spaces, especially in response to violent crimes like doxxing and deepfakes. As of this writing, men in the U.S., angered by the outcry over an alleged gang rape at Cornell University, are arguing in favour of revealing the complainant's identity -- a cultural shift that, if it enters the mainstream, could roll back a hard-won judicial principle in ways that no rearguard action can undo.

The time is ripe

Men who like women and queer people but are removed from their problems must see this moment of dissent as a chance to join us in acting for a progressive, stable future -- one not yet out of reach. Right-wing violence is increasingly inseparable from resentful machismo. It has tremendous force. It is time to accept what misogynists and traditionalists have long understood. Women's rights are a wedge issue, and giving them grace, and space, open up movements for everyone.

The odds seem stacked against us. But above all, and for the first time since the pandemic, the time is right. In India, this stormy monsoon of student protests has brought a coalition of unlikely forces into contact. Leftists and Ambedkarites, sceptics and pluralists, disenfranchised queer youth and religious elders are shaking hands across lines. It is a time to experience the struggles of others as our own.

The alliances between young men and women on the streets right now are imperfect, vulnerable to pressure. But we can protest in poetry and negotiate in prose. We owe ourselves that, and we owe it to the future to build relationships, both personal and institutional, that break with our past mistakes. It hurts not to be from the last generation to protest for our rights as sovereign individuals. It must have hurt those who went before us, too. But they were not afraid, and did not find themselves alone. Neither will we be.

The author is a Mumbai-based writer and editor.