The verdict in the actor-assault case of 2017, delivered a few day back in the Ernakulam Principal Sessions Court, did not surprise anyone, except the extremely naive. Not just because of the difficulties in proving conspiracies, but also because the trial court seemed so unbelievably biased against the survivor all through and actually in favour of the accused. The man accused of conspiring against the female actor and hiring a gang of thugs to abduct and rape her in a moving vehicle, Dileep aka Gopalakrishnan, is an actor in the Malayalam industry. But he is also accused of being a notorious fixer in the Malayalam movie industry, the go-to person for people who want to get things done — someone who bends things to their will, cuts through all institutional procedure and safeguards using invisible chains of influence and violence. The verdict convicted the six men who actually committed the crime – and declared that the prosecution had not proven Dileep’s involvement in the crime. In other words, the man escaped for entirely technical reasons — or the blind spots of the law.

The silver lining is that public opinion in Kerala is overwhelmingly against Dileep. The many lapses of the judiciary as the trial progressed unfolded in full public view. It was easy for anyone to see that the twenty-eight witnesses who turned hostile had something to do with proving that Dileep had a strong motive for conspiring against the assaulted female actor. While the court could pretend not to see that witnesses do not change their minds for nothing, the Malayali people, who know well of how a fixer can tip the balance of power in his favour, saw through the game. The in-camera trial in which the defendant’s legal team of thirty lawyers was allowed to verbally assault the survivor might be justified in technical terms (indeed, lawyers keen to defend the integrity of the judiciary have been saying that the law is not namby-pamby — it is tough. In other words, the law is the all-seeing super-patriarch, the final word and we’d all better fall in line), but people who witnessed the survivors distress, being subject to all sorts of arms of the super-patriarchal state, tended to identify with the survivor. The atrocious break in the chain of judicial custody of the rape visuals, the failure of the trial court to record this as evidence, its failure to share this crucial piece of evidence with the prosecution, the setting aside of crucial testimonies — while the judicial establishment remains tight-lipped on these, people see it as gross violation, and again, they would identify with the powerless. If any one player has suffered immense loss of legitimacy and even dignity in the whole sordid drama, it is the judiciary.

Dileep is thus never going to be perceived as innocent . But the worrying fact is that he is also deeply admired — hero-worshipped — by a section of Malayalis, overwhelmingly male.

Mainstream feminist response to the verdict has condemned it and hailed the Kerala government’s decision to stand with the survivor and appeal to higher courts. But it appears to me that we need to look closely and critically with an intersectional feminist lens at the social, cultural, and politics roots of the malice. There is something that binds the elite patriarchal man and the non-elite criminal man across the divides in civil society, something that seems ever-more foundational to our ‘criminal economies’, and perhaps in politics too. I have encountered this myself in fieldwork at the sites of natural resource plunder by predatory capitalism — around granite quarries and illegal river sand mining. Rich, usually historically-privileged and/or dominant caste men who own enterprises engaged in natural resource plunder typically use men of the historically-underprivileged castes and/or working-class men to commit acts of violence against anyone who may stand in their way. When these impediments possess female bodies, the violence is almost always sexualised — for example, female protestors against rapacious resource extraction inevitably face sexually-denigrating abuse and physical assault. The police inevitably file cases on the actual instruments, while the conspirators, the elite men, equally criminal, get away readily.

Pulsar Suni and his gang are of the same ilk as these instruments of predatory capital. They are the products of the grievous depoliticisation of Malayali society and the decline of socialism. Working class men, it seems, are no longer organised collectively as the bearers of egalitarian values and the ethics that go along with such values; they are unorganized individual rational agents, in informal sector, low-skill work who double up as criminals when that choice seems to maximise their utility.

Pulsar Suni’s psychology ought to be studied seriously: the kind of masculinity the man has tried to project through the media interviews he has granted seems inextricably bound up with a certain self-curated criminality. He seems to claim that there are two men in him: one, who supports his wife and sister in their dilapidated old house with honest labour of a few days; the other, the unrepentant criminal who spent his ill-gotten wealth on a life of ease and indulgence. What really strikes one is the way in which he poses in ways that claim a certain saleable uniqueness of his life as a criminal (a claim that is easily disputed). That is, he ‘curates’ his criminal deeds to achieve that effect. As is well-known in the discussions about the neoliberal self, criminality is not at all abhorrent to it. Rather, the figure of the criminal may segue smoothly into that of the gutsy risk-taker, the entrepreneur of their own self — and indeed, the lack of reluctance to break the law would count as a ‘skill’ or ‘ability’ even worth bragging about. Indeed, Pulsar Suni’s statements seem to point to exactly this sort of a self. He claims to be just doing a job for the cash and the favours that the hirer then owes him (permanently perhaps), and disinterested in the type of violence he is asked to commit. Sex with minors does not interest him, apparently, but he has supplied minors to men interested in such sex. No wonder that so many men seem to be fascinated not just by Dileep but also by Pulsar Sun. The duo seem to share a common frame of amorality.

There are two aspects to the Dileep-Suni sort of self : the first is the amoral neoliberal utility-maximising strategic agent, and the second one, the conservative male provider and protector of the women in his family. Dileep, being a celebrity, has a third side — his public espousal of misogyny, which sends the so-called neoconservative men’s rights campaigners in Kerala to raptures. Not surprisingly then, he is supported by the men’s rights lobby, openly. In Kerala, ‘men’s rights’ discourse is the only cultural space in which the rank-and-file Hindutva men are heard by an audience other than Hindutva supporters. Not surprisingly, because it ‘secularises’ their deeply communal and casteist attitudes; for in that space they may hold hands with Christian, Muslim, and atheist misogynists. This space has been celebrating Dileep’s victory and unleashing cyber attacks on the survivor’s lawyer and generally claiming their hero’s ‘innocence’.

Feminist activism in Kerala needs to reflect on this Janus-faced self in our present that is both amoral and deeply patriarchal at the root of violence and espousal of violence against women who challenge patriarchy. We need to work harder on the cultural front against the discourse of men’s rights and against the demonisation of people of all genders who question the Malayali reformer-built modern patriarchy of the past century and seek to build lives outside its terms (including the complainant in the infamous Mamkoottathil case) . We cannot limit ourselves to appealing to or congratulating the ruling government and the Left. Rahul Easwar is not the joker he seems to be, he is the brand ambassador for deeply casteist misogyny against assertive women who defy and challenge patriarchy — and all his tomfoolery cannot conceal its menacing claws. We have to create our own cultural resistance and not just hang on the state’s arm and its pretend-protectiveness, or the promises emanating from the Left’s moral community here. The point is not that such support is unwelcome — definitely, it is, and it must be openly and fairly acknowledged as such. But we cannot limit ourselves to such dependence.

Why? Because the trial of the actor assault case has, once again, shown the sheer hollowness of the moral community of the Left in Kerala. The Left in Kerala of the twentieth century did not work enough to consciously create a moral community of its supporters — their position on the value of such political work was ambiguous to say the least. However, shared public space, public education, and public healthcare did create such a community in which a certain egalitarian moral ethos bound the richer and poorer sections of people, in whatever flawed ways. Clearly, it was not strong enough to survive the neoliberal cultural tide. Again and again, we have seen it collapse into the logics of conservative caste/community-based civil society, or indeed, of the new Hindutva (un)civil society. As political society, the Left has been generally reluctant to shed its sexual conservatism and soft Hindu bias. In the Hadiya case of 2017 which was about a young Ezhava woman who willingly converted to Islam and married a Muslim man of her own choice, the most shocking things was that her court-sanctioned family confinement remained totally unchallenged despite the fact that the ward, the panchayat, and the assembly constituency in which she was subjected to everyday violence by Hindutva agents were represented by the CPI. And the shining stars of Left cyberspaces — their news-fixer-journalists — did their utmost to misrepresent and endanger the couple. The collapse of the Left’s moral community was even more starkly and shockingly exposed by the Anupama Chandran case of 2021, a case of baby-snatching in which gender, class, and caste violence converged. In the present case, it is even more conspicuous, sadly enough, through the person of the judge herself — Honey M Varghese’s origins are precisely in the moral community of the CPM. One remembers that the CPM as Opposition had indeed created massive campaigns creating a highly effective public against the ruling UDF government at the eve of the 2016 state assembly elections around the murder and rape of a young dalit woman, Jisha. The new LDF government moved fast and Ameer-Ul-Islam, a young migrant worker, was quickly arrested, convicted, and awarded the death penalty. Why such efficiency was missing in the Dileep case is a question that the Left’s tattered moral community is not likely to raise.

In short, we cannot simply rely on either the super-patriarch of the state or political parties which may swear by women’s rights. Feminist cultural activism needs to chart its own course and develop its own arguments. Insisting on Dileep’s role is not merely an emotional response — it is an intersectional feminist political response. Given that the sexual violence law in India tends to convict and incarcerate non-elite men and let elite criminals escape. When Suni and the others alone are punished and Dileep escapes that logic is perfectly reiterated. In this case, conspiracy by elite men is undeniable, given the available evidence. The call to pursue the conspirators, elite men, most probably Dileep is therefore not overreaction or just emotional response. It is a political demand. It seeks to bring elite men to justice, make them face the wrath of the law. Elite men are able to pose as the protectors of elite women only because their central role in punishing elite women who challenge or transgress elite patriarchy is thus concealed, and the law is a significant part of the concealment apparatus.

We have to keep going. Let us not give in to despair if only because we have one of the bravest women of our generation on our side, the survivor. The light that she shed has transformed us all. Not all the darkness in the world can extinguish the light of a single candle . Let us make sure that the brute force of the wind does not.