To be very frank, I didn’t have any intention of forming any opinion on this issue. Like many others, I believed that the use of phrase “Slutwalk” is some kind of promotion of prostitutes and prostitution, projecting them as an important and integral part of society not to be relegated to an inferior position.

However, a little research tells me that the concept of “Slutwalk” got introduced as a result of some Torronto police officers’s comment that if girls don’t want to be raped, they shouldn’t dress like sluts. Here, the problem with the police officer’s comment is not wrt women’s restricted right of making public appearances in a society, but wrt his comment that a woman can be raped just because she dresses up like a “Slut” or behave anti the so-called norms of a society. A rape, more than a sexual crime, is a crime against the privacy of the woman raped, which is a right guaranteed under article 21 of the Indian Constitution; more powerful persons, physically or otherwise, can’t be allowed to take away the fundamental rights of a woman just because she dresses up like a slut. That’s obnoxious!

In India, the “Slutwalk” is being organised by a 19-year-old girl-student Umang Sabharwal, whom I just heard in a TV debate. I think, irrespective of whether she gave a deep thought before organising this event, her intuitive understanding of the issue is fine. She convincingly answered the so-called intellectuals by putting the things as simply as this, “the women of Delhi want to make a declaration that, yes, we are besharams [Sluts].” With this declaration, also goes the message that all the besharams of the Delhi City have now united; rape them if you have guts. So, the “Slutwalk” is basically a warning to the powerful men (and women) of the society. If the message is just this and nothing else, I think the “Slutwalk” in Delhi is fine.

©2011 Ankur Mutreja