I sent a letter to my love

Illustration/Uday Mohite

On January 19, hundreds of women wrote letters to a group of nuns from Kerala, letters of anger, pain, solidarity - and love. They had one reason, and many reasons.

In 2018, a nun filed an FIR against Bishop Franco Mulakkal, accusing him of raping her 13 times between 2014 and 2016. The FIR came when the Church offered no redress, but rather, threats and persecution. She was supported by her friends and colleagues, Sisters Alphy, Anupama, Josephine, Nina Rose and Ancett. As one of them said, "We aren't fighting against the Bishop as a person, [but his] ways and the silence of the church."

Last week a Kottayam court acquitted the Bishop - which led to the river of letters that flowed towards the Sisters. The judgement's all too familiar language cast doubt on the complainant's character, demeanour and motives.

When the man in question is powerful, answers to ‘why would a woman accuse someone of rape' rarely seem to include ‘perhaps because she was raped'. Everyone knows a powerful man has enemies, na (concrete evidence of this is never needed). His case comes to stand for all elite men's potential destruction, and all women become witches. Quite different from the baying of blood to protect ‘our women' when the accused is a poor man.

Much discussion hinges on whether the woman behaved like a true rape victim. The truest rape victim is one who is dead of course. Alive, she becomes dubious and these discussions constantly encourage us to pretend that we don't know how power can make coercion or compulsion look like consent. Has a woman had consensual sex with someone else? Then obviously all sex she has must be consensual. Just like, if she has got married, and therefore had sex, the question of consent simply does not arise. Women's sexual consent is inextricably linked to the idea of masculine privilege and our refusal to discuss it is a refusal to question that privilege.

The resistance to recognising marital rape as a crime again harps on the imagined apocalypse of false accusations that signal the end of family. If questioning a man's absolute right to sex and violence, threatens the Indian family, what does it say about that institution? Some men declared they would go on #MarriageStrike if such a law comes to be. No despairing women were recorded.

Don't worry boys. Check out a recent cover of Vanitha magazine, featuring actor Dileep as an ideal Family Man with suitable accessories: maroon kurta, wife and kids. Being a rape-accused, hiring men to assault a woman colleague he felt had crossed him, has not come in the way.

The protection of powerful men, is about the protection of the institutions that vest them with power - priesthoods or family. It is to maintain this power that patriarchy trains us to cast a loving eye on men, thrilling to their humanity and power, weeping for their troubles and to cast a hyper-critical eye on women's pains and achievements, as if they are permanent daughters-in-law in a soap opera. To change the world, a million love letters must be written for women's fights and rights, love letters to their lives and light. As the writer J Devika wrote in hers, "Sceptics who say that fireflies cannot beat the night... Please tell them... If millions of fireflies get together, they may beat this unending night."

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com