Not a day goes by when one doesn’t read of crimes against women in the country, but it is only the more bizarre ones (of those reported in the first place) that initiate public debate that lingers on for some time.
The sad case of the woman in Lahore who was beaten and stripped because she refused to dance for her husband’s friends is one such case. That the lady was brave enough to go to the police station, and also agreed to be photographed, added some visuals to the story, immediately resulting in even more virality on social media.
One found it curious how some television channels, while reporting the story, were mentioning how it was a love marriage and not an arranged affair. No big deal, I thought; that it is just some colour and detail that the reporters and the newsroom hands were adding to the story to make the story pop. However, certain apprehensions about the mention of this fact were confirmed when online outfits like Parhlo, in their coverage of the incident, bizarrely seemed to peg the issue down, in part, to love marriages. The pasand ki shadi ka nateeja argument even got some traction, with online commenters agreeing with it. The implication here is that if a woman were to exercise her agency in deciding whom to marry, it would end up in situations like these.
These regressive views were revealed even more in the reaction to later developments in the story. We both had a crystal meth habit, claimed her subsequently arrested husband, leading the online legions to immediately distrust her account of the incident.
The subsequent release of an earlier recorded video of the lady dancing with some men then went viral, with the likes of ZemTV gleefully reporting the news item with a sense of (ta da!) resolution. Asli kahani toh ab saamne aai! The implication, widely prevalent in the men of the country, being that if a woman can interact in a particular manner with one individual, she is expected to extent the exact same liberties to all the males she meets for the rest of her life. A binary has been created for women.
Bollywood has long since popularised the ‘good and truthful’ victim of sexual assault, a retiring and shy, mostly mute woman clad in white. While the outspoken and confident victim is usually revealed to be a fraudster making false accusations against a rich and successful man, either because she wants his money or is a spurned lover.
The man and his servants subjected the poor woman to physical abuse. They need to face the consequences of their actions.
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Though women get the worst deal, such expectations exist for most victims. Like some of the activists of the PTM, who had shared their harrowing accounts from the stage of some of the movement’s rallies. Subsequent photos of theirs smiling or laughing at some joke at these rallies started being shared online as some sort of smoking gun proof that they weren’t actually victims. Laughing photos of PTM leader and MNA Ali Wazir, who has lost 17 of his family members to both the Taliban and the security agencies, have also been shared in a similar light.
A year after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the then nascent social media was also rife with photos of Asif Ali Zardari smiling his signature Cheshire grin at one meeting or the other. They were being shared with an air of quod erat demonstrandum, proving that not only was the man not unhappy about his wife’s demise, but was also somehow complicit in the same.