On 8 March last year, the UPA-II had passed the Women’s Reservation Bill in the Rajya Sabha with much fanfare. As the International Women’s Day Centenary culminating on 8 March 2011 nears, it is apparent that the Bill has been shelved. It may periodically be taken off the shelf and dusted off, but there is no sign that it will in fact be passed without significant dilutions. Other key legislations like the one on sexual harassment are still pending.

Meanwhile, a series of rape cases involving elected leaders of ruling parties has brought the issue of violence against women to centre-stage, and highlighting the tolerant attitude of the ruling political establishment towards such violence. In the Rupam Pathak case in Bihar, the Deputy CM himself led a campaign to vilify a woman who, faced with the impossibility of securing justice in her complaint of sexual exploitation by a BJP MLA, had resorted to the desperate measure of stabbing the MLA.

The situation in Uttar Pradesh is especially shocking. The BSP Government led by Mayawati had come to power on the promise of social justice and a leash on crime. In particular, women from oppressed castes had expected that the Government led by a ‘dalit ki beti’ (as Mayawati styles herself) would ensure some freedom from the feudal violence of which they bear the worst brunt. Instead, NCRB data shows an increase in crimes against women, especially dalit women, in UP. But that is not all. Since Mayawati came to power, no less than seven MLAs from her own party have been implicated in crimes against women. In Mayawati’s previous tenure, she could try and shrug off the case of BSP Minister Amarmani Tripathi (later SP MLA) convicted of murder of his lover Madhumita Shukla, as a one-off case. But seven such cases in her current tenure suggest that the rot runs deep. It seems there is something about Mayawati’s sarvajan regime that allows these MLAs to entertain the feudal belief that rape (especially of women from oppressed castes) is part of the perks of power.

First, in 2007, there was the Uttar Pradesh minister of state for Food Processing Anand Sen Yadav, allegedly involved in the kidnapping of a 24-year old dalit college student of Faizabad. Then, in 2008, there was another BSP MLA Guddu Pandit who was accused of raping a schoolteacher. Then came the case of kidnapping and rape against Bilsi MLA Yogendra Sagar. The police avoided arresting Sagar and he was declared to be “absconding”, forcing the victim to move court. Another BSP MLA, Haji Alim, was charged with the abduction and rape of Nepali girls who were forced to work in his circus. In January 2009, Ram Mohan Garg, former Chairman of the Uttar Pradesh Fisheries Development Corporation, a post which enjoyed ministerial rank, was arrested on charges of raping a woman and making an obscene video of her. More recently, the Banda MLA Purushottam Naresh Dwivedi stands charged with raping a oppressed caste girl and then getting her arrested in a fabricated theft case. Since then, another BSP MLA Shiv Pratap Yadav has been charged by a court in Etawah of conspiring to protect a school principal accused of raping a teacher in his school and driving the victim’s husband to commit suicide.

When MLAs from the ruling BSP behave as though they have a license to rape, it is a symptom of a more widespread disease, whereby police and authorities routinely protect socially and politically powerful perpetrators of crimes against women. A rash of horrific cases of violence against women is being witnessed in UP, especially against dalit women. Near Kanpur, one dalit girl had her body parts chopped off for resisting rape. Some months ago, a dalit teenage girl immolated herself after police refused to register her rape complaint. Recently, another dalit girl in Azamgarh hanged herself when her father got threats after she complained of gang rape. A schoolteacher at Jaunpur immolated herself recently, despairing of being able to get justice in her rape charge against the director of the school board. At Chinhat, not far from the state capital, the police tried its best to suppress and destroy evidence of rape and murder of a dalit girl.

Previous governments and rival parties in UP have been no better. In 2006, three ministers of the Mulayam Singh Yadav government were accused of being involved in the murder of a woman lecturer in Meerut University. Last year, a Samajwadi Party MLA was charged with rape by a woman in Sultanpur. But this is no excuse for the Mayawati Government, because after all the sole USP of this Government is supposedly its commitment to justice for those who have long suffered feudal and patriarchal oppression. For MLAs in this Government as well as police in the state to be involved in and encouraging such oppression exposes the BSP’s social justice facade as hollow and deceptive.

The Congress has been quick to embarrass the Mayawati Government over the series of incidents of violence on women in UP. But who will answer for the relentless increase in incidents of rape and violence in Congress-ruled Andhra Pradesh, Assam and even Delhi? According to NCRB data, Hyderabad and Delhi are among the worst cities as far as women’s safety is concerned. Likewise, Haryana has the worst record as far as ‘honour’ killings are concerned, and the Congress government there continues to offer excuses for this barbaric phenomenon.

The recent case in Barasat where a young boy was killed by goons when he resisted them for harassing his sister, at a place quite close to the DM’s bungalow, reminds us that even West Bengal is showing a dismal record these days when it comes to violence against women.

In regions where the Indian state is at war with people, women have been a deliberate target. In the rape and murder of two young women at Shopian, Kashmir, the country’s highest investigative agency colluded to bury the truth and claim that they drowned in a shallow stream. If the systematic state repression were not enough, women also become targets for militant groups: recently, two sisters in the Valley were picked up from their homes by unidentified gunmen and brutally killed.

In Odisha, within a period of weeks beginning in the last week of December 2010, 10 women, many of them adivasis, have been killed in what the police claims were ‘encounters’ with Maoists. These include four women and one 12-year-old girl near the site of people’s resistance to the proposed Tata steel plant at Kalinganagar, and five women adivasis, all around 20 years old, killed in a single night in Rayagada district.

If women and even children in these areas of resistance to corporate land grab and mining loot are being massacred in fake encounters, the case of a young tribal woman of Odisha, Kandri Lohar, illustrates how the situation of ‘surrendered Maoist’ women is no less vulnerable. Kandri, who is said to have run away from home to join the Maoists, was arrested in 2005. Press stories said she was arrested with her fiancé Shankar, and the police, holding Kandri to be “innocent,” got her to surrender and arranger her marriage to a local youth. However, reports are that she was tortured by her husband and in-laws, and therefore returned to her parents’ house with her small son. Meanwhile the police had promised her the job of homeguard at the time of her surrender, but the job was offered to her only in 2009 when media highlighted her case. On the night of 11 February 2011, she and her son were found brutally murdered. Police claimed that Maoists killed her because she was suspected of helping the police, but Maoist leaders have accused the police of the killing. Human rights groups, pointing out that police had killed three alleged Maoists in an encounter in the afternoon of 11 February, have suspected that perhaps Kandri was in touch with suspected Maoists and being used by police to track their movements. Whatever the truth about who killed her, Kandri’s story does raise serious questions about the conduct of the police. If the media stories are true, it seems the police separated Kandri from the partner of her choice and, doing nothing for years to provide her with employment and independence, instead satisfied themselves with “arranging” another marriage for her, in which she was subjected to violence. Official explanations of how she was killed leave many questions unanswered.

The Ruchika case had underlined how difficult it is to pursue a case of sexual harassment against a police official. The same is being repeated in a notorious case of 2005 in which P S Natarajan, an IG of police in Jharkhand, was accused of sexually exploiting an adivasi woman. This month, the Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT) has squashed the suspension order of Natarajan, and the Jharkhand police is busy putting out stories accusing the woman of being a leader of a Maoist outfit.

With this grim situation all over the country, the IWD Centenary will not be only an occasion to celebrate a 100 years of hard-won gains. Rather, on IWD in India this year, women all over the country will cut through the bland and hollow assurances of governments and will demand why these same governments are protecting perpetrators of crimes against women.