The recent protest against sexual violence in Delhi University triggered by a series of rapes and murder in the national capital region, became the site for the creation of some creative and hard-hitting slogans which are trending all across social media. A few slogans, like “Ek Sutta, Do Chai, Mard Jaat Haye, Haye!”, “Ek Kachori Do Samosa, Mard Jaat Ka Kya Bharosa”, and “Mere Sir Me Dard Hai, Uska Karan Mard Hain”, have become instant hits. The popularity of these slogans can be attributed to their rhythmic appeal, as evident from the emergence of similar rhythmic slogans coined by different groups of protesters. These slogans, a combination of everyday words with a strong critical tone have invited a lot of positive as well as negative reactions from the public. Some of the men have come up with usual arguments like ‘not all men’, ‘what about your father and brother’, ‘don’t generalise ’, ‘Aren’t Indian soldiers also men?’, ‘What about those women who have killed their husband?’ etc., to critique the protesting women and their slogans.

There is another interesting and troubling dimension to these hard-hitting slogans. Their rhythmic nature has made them highly shareable content on social media. But instead of provoking self-reflection, these slogans have been transformed into “vibe-able” content, with boys and men dancing and grooving to them. Additionally, these slogans have also been critiqued by showing women raising these slogans, and then finding men in different contexts who use the same slogans to shame them. This phenomenon has diluted the seriousness and urgency of women’s safety in public places by turning a protest against sexual violence into a moment of entertainment. This particular type of content has further emptied out the social critique and experience which produced these slogans.

The vibing and grooving part of these slogans is understandable given the cultural power of slogans. Slogans are catchy by design and serve a strong pedagogic function. They are communicators of ideas and critique. A good slogan is able to capture public imagination, lodge itself in the public consciousness, and become an instantly recognisable fragment of popular culture. A good slogan does not merely communicate a message. It is not simply a collection of words compressing a complex idea. Its real potential lies in creating a mood, a rhythm, a ‘vibe’! Its power not only lies in what it makes people think, but more importantly in what it makes them feel. From the perspective of the sociologist Emile Durkheim, a slogan is a tool for generating and sustaining collective effervescence. By being easy to remember and repeat given its rhythmic design, slogans become a generator and transmitter of shared mood and emotions, creating and sustaining solidarities in the process. A good slogan, like a good song, can be so infectious that people can dance and groove on it.

And this is precisely where the problem lies. The very qualities that make a slogan powerful as a form of protest, that is, its rhythmic ability to generate a shared emotional response – can also detach it from the critique that produced it. The ‘vibe’ can survive while the politics disappears. People can dance to a slogan without confronting what the slogan is actually saying. What was meant to produce discomfort, reflection and solidarity has been reduced to entertaining content, to reel material. In these reels, the slogan is present but with its political and pedagogic content emptied.

Before critiquing or raising objecting to these slogans, or merely treating them as vibe-able content and dancing on them, it is important to take a step back and try to understand what these slogans are trying to convey and what experiences led to their formulation.  Since everyone can’t understand the urgency of the problem of sexual violence because the victims are distant and unrelated figures, let us begin with familiar situations, with which everyone can relate. Let’s take the most hard-hitting and ‘rooving’ slogan “Ek Kachori, Do Samosa, In Mardo Ka Kya Bharosa”, and try to unpack the basic idea behind it. Let us do a men-centric analysis to understand why these slogans are not anti-men, but the sentiments they express and the social reality which gave rise to these slogans are shared by men too!

Suppose your sister is late, and she is not picking up her phone; what will be the most powerful and probably the first thought that will come to your mind? Will the thought that she might have been subjected to the worst form of sexual violence by “some man” not occur in your mind?  In that scenario, how is that “some man” not different from the mard jaat or ‘all men’? Because you will suspect just any random man she may have encountered!

Take another scenario. Suppose your daughter is walking home alone and it’s getting late. Imagine her noticing a stranger following her. What do you think will be her reaction? What kind of thoughts, you think, will keep crossing her head at the speed of light? The stranger might just be walking home like her, or might just be taking a stroll. But what will your daughter feel? And what might you, as her father, experience when she narrates to you that she was followed by a man? Will you not get angry at that “random faceless man”? And advise your daughter to either call you for pickup if she gets late the next time?  But by getting angry at that “random man”, are you also not suspecting the mard jaat in totality?

These responses are understandable as they emerge from concern for the safety of one’s own female relatives. But most importantly, they also reveal something about our social environment, i.e. the possibility of danger from “unknown men” is a familiar experience which shapes our everyday concerns and thoughts. The possibility of violence from men shapes the everyday conduct of women as it shapes their routes and routines, transport decisions, and clothing choices.

Take another scenario: you are travelling with your wife in the metro or bus. A man close to her might ‘touch’ her. It might not be intentional at all! But what will you feel when your wife tells you that this particular man touched her? Will you not immediately suspect that the intention of that man was wrong? Will you not get angry at him? Again, the point is not to determine whether that particular man was actually acting with harmful intent, but the suspicion of the intent itself! Similarly, if you are walking, sitting or travelling with your sister, or daughter, or wife, your ‘protective’ side becomes activated! You are always on your guard! Whom are you protecting them from?

In all the above situations, what are you, as a father, brother, husband are getting angry at? Are you also not reacting and behaving in accordance with the second part of the slogan “in mardo ka kya Bharosa”? They are all expressions of general distrust towards men. Read in this light, the slogan is not simply an attack on the character of every individual man, but more importantly, it is an expression and critique of a social environment and condition in which women cannot simply assume that an unfamiliar man is harmless. In fact, even men express the essence of this slogan when they ask their daughters, sisters or wives to return home early, to not engage with stranger men or when they suggest their female family members not to go to this place or that place, or to not go alone. This represents a contradiction in men’s consciousness, because, as men, they too are not ready to trust other men in relation to the female members of their family, but they are also critiquing and objecting to these slogans for targeting all men.

The purpose of pointing out this contradiction is not to assign individual blame but to encourage reflection on how deeply such assumptions have become embedded in everyday social life. The question, therefore, is that, if men routinely worry about the safety of the women close to them in relation to other men, what does that tell us about the broader social relations between men and women in our society? This contradiction is embedded in the everyday masculinity and the attendant patriarchal structure which primarily frames women as sexual objects. Every woman, other than one’s own family, is treated as a sexual object who, unless bounded in the confines of the four walls become legitimate target for sexual violence. But, even in this case, the sexualisation of female bodies does not find its limits.   

There is another more serious and deeply troubling side to this slogan. Sexual violence, particularly against minors, is not only perpetrated by strangers. In a significant number of cases, the perpetrator is someone known to the victim, including blood relatives and members of the extended family. A 2023 study conducted for the Delhi Commission for Women, based on 218 ‘reported’ cases of incestuous sexual assault involving minors, found that in 35% of the cases, the alleged perpetrator was the victim’s father, while in another 22% he was an uncle. So, even when it comes to intimate family relations, certain men have proved that even these relations, which are spaces of comfort and security, cannot be trusted!

These everyday concerns and instances point to a societal condition in which men have lost trust (bharosa), not only in the eyes of women, but also in the eyes of men. We have almost reached an inflexion point where fifty per cent of human beings are not trusted by one hundred per cent of the human beings. The slogan “mard jaat ka kya bharosa” and “mere sir me dard hai, iska karan mard hain” can therefore be understood as an expression of this problem, rather than simply as an accusation against individual men. Moreover, the reality of this problem is acknowledged by many men when it concerns the safety of their female relatives. Rather than objecting to these slogans, therefore, they can be treated as an opportunity for self-reflection for men and, more importantly, as an invitation to collectively work towards creating a safer social environment for every woman.

This also helps shift the conversation away from the familiar response of “not all men”. Of course, not every man commits sexual violence, and some men themselves are victims of sexual violence. But the broader social issue raised by these slogans is not simply the statistical question of how many men are perpetrators and aggressors. It is the social question of why women, as well as their male relatives, have to negotiate their everyday life with the possibility of male violence in the background. Why do they have to be always on guard and tense? Why do they have to carry pepper spray? Therefore, the point, particularly for men, is not to take these slogans personally, but to take seriously the social experience from which the slogan emerges, and rebuild the trust that not only women, but men too have lost in themselves as a class.  

Note: This write-up evokes those identities through which women are generally understood in Indian society. The only purpose of doing so in this particular case is to evoke generalised empathy because, as evident from the negative reactions to these slogans and their trivialization, it often becomes difficult to fully grasp the seriousness and urgency of sexual violence when its victim remains an abstract “woman,” rather than someone whose experience can be located within the social relationships and identities familiar and personally close to us. However, this particular way of thinking itself deserves a critical examination, as the safety of women should not become socially meaningful only when women are understood through their relationships with men.

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Harshvardhan Tripathy is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University School of Liberal Arts, Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, New Delhi.