Dehra Dun has had an uncharacteristic buzz since Saturday. While people go about their daily chores in the biting cold, school and college students have been gatheringed in numbers to protest.

While driving past the march one day, I noticed a guy I had seen a few days ago in front of a popular hangout. He was in trendy winter wear, with his car stereo blasting Honey Singh.

The same rapper Honey Singh who treats women as vermin, as objects of conquest and proclaims himself a “balaatkari (rapist)” while advocating sexual violence. He has attained cult status amongst a sizeable chunk of the youth, men and women alike, has 2.6 million Facebook followers, and featured in India’s most-viewed Youtube video in 2012.

His popularity is an uncomfortable commentary on the youth who have pledged, in the last week, to ensure a society free of violence against women. “You don’t get his hip-hop. It’s all fun, dude. Just a fantasy,” explains a Honey Singh fan. The women in the songs have either “abandoned” loving men or “cheated” on them. Hence the desire to sexually subjugate them is rationalised.

The rap builds on a crude macho idea of masculinity that thrives upon subjugation of women; this is echoed in popular culture time and again with rape jokes, sexist images that portray women as incapable of science, rational logic or driving.

This is symptomatic of a larger culture that treats violence with reverence, reflected in the thousands of petitions that want the perpetrators castrated, flogged to death in public, or mutilated slowly.

We are more interested in satiating our visceral instincts than arresting rape. The youth treats the due process of law with scorn, choosing to impart vigilante justice instead. We don’t wonder if we’re outraged only because “this could happen to us”, as mentioned in the most popular petition.

Instead of wondering what makes marital rape legal in India or why we routinely laugh at sexist jokes or share “fifty ways to understand a woman” mails, over 1500 of 1700 odd comments on the online petition list out methods of castration.

Honey Singh is simply the ambassador of this “hipster” sexism generation, where we “let our women go to schools” but make sure they “don’t get too full of themselves”.

It is ironic that the guy who finds urban rape funny should wear white and demand the death penalty for perpetrators of an urban rape.

(Dhruba is a student of the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai.)

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