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Sexual Subjectivity in Rape Narratives: Consent, Credibility, and Coercion in Rural Haryana

Since the brutal rape and death of a young physiotherapy student in 2012, the national uprising that followed it, and subsequent amendments to strengthen the criminal law, the National Crime Records Bureau in India has recorded an increase in the number of rape cases filed. This essay is an empirical study based in rural Haryana that seeks to understand this increase. On asking police officers, attorneys, and senior bureaucrats about the increase, the most common refrain I heard was that 90 percent of rape cases are false. Against documented evidence of police collusion and the challenges that women and minorities face when attempting to file rape charges, I am interested in what the amplification of false cases allows. There are two arguments I make. First, I suggest that the false case narrative is a hostile response to the structural and discursive credibility, albeit limited and contingent, that women’s claims of violation are beginning to receive. Second, I argue that consent in the false rape narrative simultaneously nullifies the rape charge while discrediting the woman as corrupt and immoral. It is a disciplining maneuver that seeks to bring the straying women back into the libidinal boundaries of the patriarchal home and state. Sexual subjectivity, in the title of my essay, signals deep anxiety on the part of the patriarchal state machinery, which motivates efforts to wrest autonomy from women back to its “rightful” place with men.