Kiruba Munuswamy: progenitor of shockwaves in a casteist-pratriarchal society

Abstract

In such a dismal state, Kiruba Munusamy is ensuring outrage. An advocate practising in the Supreme Court of India and a researcher and Dalit rights activist, Munusamy introduces herself as a lawyer first and then an Ambedkarite (Dastidar 2022). After passing the bar exam in 2008 at an early age of 22, she steadily made a name for herself by taking sensitive cases like rape, murder, and torture against people from the Dalit community, and openly advocated for the rights of transgender people. According to the 2019 report by IndiaSpend (IndiaSpend 2020) which analysed crime in India, there were 3,486 cases of rape against Scheduled Caste women including girls, and 3,375 cases of assault, each constituting around 7–8 per cent of total crimes against Scheduled Castes (Srivastava 2020). Cases of rape and assault against Scheduled Caste women have increased by 37 and 20 per cent, respectively, since 2015 (ibid.). According to the findings of the National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) 2019, ten Dalit women were raped every day in 2019 and these are only the reported cases (Biswas 2020). One such horrendous incident occurred in 2020, in Hathras, Uttar Pradesh, where a 19year-old Dalit woman was gang raped, brutalised, and murdered by upper-caste Thakur men of the village (ibid.). Several reports suggested that the victim’s family was mistreated by the police who later forced the family to cremate the victim’s body in haste (Khan 2022; Kumar 2020). Though the accused were arrested and put to trial, the oppressive caste people were outraged by the arrest. Amid such a clash, Kiruba Munusamy came forward to not only highlight the case which was either reported without the caste angle or sidelined altogether, but also provided her unconditional support to fight the systematic caste-laden patriarchy which uses rape and other forms of physical violence against women, particularly Dalit woman, to degrade and dehumanise the oppressed communities and to maintain the caste hierarchy. As argued by Uma Chakravarti, ‘upper caste men have sexual access to lower caste women, an aspect of the material power they have over the lower castes’ (Chakravarti 2018, 81). In a similar line of thought,