Criminalising Grief: Gendered Mourning and the Silencing of Dissent in India

Public mourning after sexual violence, caste-based violence, and communal riots has repeatedly been met with surveillance, police brutality, and criminal charges, revealing how grief, particularly when articulated by women and marginalised communities, is criminalised and how the act of mourning is deeply gendered in itself.

- KANISHKA CHATURVEDI

The examples of the Hathras case, the Unnao rape case, and that of Bilkis Bano speak to how the criminalisation of grief enforces a lived reality for women in India, particularly for those coming from lower caste and minority groups, and how this reality relentlessly exposes whose lives are protected and whose are abandoned.

The recent events in India over the last month speak about something far deeper in terms of the criminalisation of grief in India and how profoundly gendered this process is. This criminalisation moves from domestic spaces to national politics and into the judiciary. The domestic nature of criminalising grief within households, particularly through the silencing of the survivor, extends itself into the larger political institutions of the country, despite its claim of being the largest democracy in the world.

The gendered silencing of the Unnao rape case survivor stands as a testimony to the larger pattern of gendered silencing of dissent in India, and it reveals a state-enforced hierarchy that decides whose lives matter more than others and whose bodies can be violated, silenced, and abandoned. This structural condition can be understood through what Achille Mbembe refers to as the creation of death worlds within the framework of necropolitics. This is no less than structural violence, or what can be described as slow death, where the survivor is subjected to daily forms of humiliation and systematically forced into silence while confronting entrenched patriarchal dogmas.

Judiciary as an Extension of Patriarchal Power