Even a female of easy virtue has a right to life. This statement is not an extract from a crumbling, ancient text, but the reported sum of what the Supreme Court of India has said recently, in perfect seriousness, while rejecting the appeal of a convicted rapist who appealed on the ground that the woman he had raped was promiscuous and habituated to sexual activities. In 2013, even in India, this reads like something from a mischievous book of nonsense that aims to expose the tattered straw filling of India’s modernity. “Even if the victim had lost her virginity earlier…” the court is reported to have said, this cannot give a “licence” to any person to rape her. It is not merely the fact that expressions such as ‘promiscuity’, ‘virginity’ or ‘easy virtue’ simply do not work in today’s context, but also that the court is compelled to make a point as patently obvious as this one that is absurd. It is a little puzzling that ‘virginity’ chimes in with the premise of the rapist’s appeal. How the appeal could have been framed in these terms is bewildering too. The rapist evidently has not yet understood the meaning of rape. Should not the establishment drive home to him what that means instead of opening up a route to argue over a woman’s promiscuity?

Such an interchange exposes the intractably oppressive attitudes that underlie the Indian sensibility. How can promiscuity in a ‘female’ be acceptable as a ground of argument? Whenever is a ‘promiscuous’ male an object of official scrutiny and dissection? Equally revealing, in this context, was another of the Supreme Court’s rulings recently, during which the court remarked that a daughter-in-law should be treated as a member of the family and not as a maid, and that she cannot be “thrown out of her matrimonial home at any time”. That the court should have to pronounce this in this day and age is a shameful index of India’s cruelty towards women. India ranks among the top countries in domestic abuse of women as in violence against women that includes rape and molestation. By stating the obvious, the court underlined the frightening absence of change in social attitudes, because it pronounces on actual, everyday cases.

The attitudes not only run deep, they are also many-layered. By saying that a daughter-in-law is not a housemaid, the court is also pointing towards society’s attitude towards women domestic workers. These women are “thrown out... at any time”, accorded no respect as workers or human beings, they are perceived as being without dignity and without value. In their case, class and economic status, together with the work they do — cleaning up the waste of respectable people’s lives —are added to gender to multiply their indignity. The comparison of daughters-in-law to housemaids is a rather painful commentary on Indian married life.