UP Elections: Women, the Silent Victims of Pandemic, may Change the Game

Banda: Quresha, an Anganwadi worker in her late 30’s,is looking forward to getting divorced and wants to see her husband behind the bars.

With three children, Quresha has been married to a daily wager, who works at a sweet shop in Mumbai, for the last 18 years. However, she now wants to end the marriage owing to the physical and mental abuse she has been facing from her spouse everyday since the lockdown was imposed to contain the spread of COVID-19.

Quresha has managed to file a police complaint at Banda in Uttar Pradesh against her husband in the second week of December but the are yet to take any action on the complaint.

She says, “I cannot tolerate the beatings of my husband anymore. If he wants to live with other women it is okay for me but I cannot live with a man who abuses me and beats me regularly.”

“He came back from Mumbai when the lockdown was imposed. There was no work and he stayed at home all the time. He did nothing but beat me. He remains frustrated and the reasons are known best to him only. A few days ago he brought a woman into our house and is living with her and he even tried to kill me by spiking my tea. My daughter saw it and helped me get out of the situation. Post pandemic, the situation has become really bad for me,” the Anganwadi worker claims.

On being asked more about the problem, Quresha says that her husband could be doing this also because of the frustration of losing his job or it could be anything, but the pandemic has definitely made a negative impact on their life.

“We initially fought over the needs of our children, for ration in the house, and then he started everything. In the first few days,I thought that it is just a phase and this too shall pass but it continued and now I think it is the time for me to take help of police and authorities,” she said.

Quresha took the help of a non-profit to get her police complaint registered in Banda. She was able to meet the district police chief who assured of her action and also convinced her to think again on the divorce aspect.

Rizwana (name changed), a teenage girl coming from the marginalised section of the society, is a survivor of a rape attempt. Her predator has landed in jail but the trauma she has suffered has shattered her confidence.

After the lockdown was imposed in the second wave of COVID-19, an elderly male neighbour tried to force himself on her. The teenage girl was saved when she raised the alarm and her elder sister came to her rescue.

She says, “It was not the first time that he had tried to take advantage of finding me alone in the house. The other members of my family were out selling envelopes. He had made several attempts in the past but that day he entered my house and forced himself on me.”

Ever since this incident,Rizwana has lost her confidence; she remains inside her house and fears stepping outside. She has stopped playing, speaks less, and is unable to come out of the trauma, says Mubeena Khatoon, a social worker who helped Rizwana register her police complaint.

Khatoon, a women’s rights activist based in Bundelkhand, says that crime against women have increased after the pandemic.This rise may impact the outcome of the upcoming assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh as women voters constitute a large part of the vote bloc and their vote share was 59.5% in 2019. It is this that has motivated the Congress, led in the state by Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, to release a 'pink manifesto' aimed at attracting women voters.

Meanwhile, in the absence of data, the rise in gender based violence in the state cannot be concretely asserted. However, global studies and trend have revealed the increased violence faced by women during the pandemic and lockdowns, which the UN Women has dubbed the “shadow pandemic”.

“We have not done any study on the increasing violence but the pattern suggests that women in the Bundelkhand region have faced a lot. Women are facing it all from being abused inside the home by husbands, relatives and other male members to being sexually assaulted outside their home. The reason that I see is that a lot of men have returned to their villages after the lockdown and now they are staying here without work. Our organisation has seen a lot of cases where women have been assaulted by their husbands and outside they have been seen as a sex object by men. Women here do not go complain fearing the consequence of the society but few of them came out and it gave strength to other women also who had suffered the similar crime,” she said.

According to data from the National Commission of Women, India recorded a 2.5 times increase in domestic violence between February and May 2020. Some women’s organisations reported that in the first four phases of the lockdown, they received more reports of domestic violence than they had in the last ten years for a similar period of time. Others indicated that many women were unable to report the violence as they had less privacy and means to access help.

Madhu Garg, an office bearer of the Lucknow chapter of theAll India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA), says, “Women have been the silent victims of the pandemic and it is very disturbing to see how they are still seen only as sex objects and unpaid labour by this developing society.”

“It is also very disturbing to see that not much has been done in this direction to stop these crimes against women,” she adds.

Abhinandan, the Banda Superintendent of Police (SP),in an interview with Newsclick claims that crime against women has not increased and more cases are coming to notice because more of them are being acknowledged.

“Earlier, the cases were not coming to our notice, and now the cases come and we acknowledge them. We do not have any study to say that it is due to pandemic or whatever the reason is,” he says.