Keywords: Gender bias, Gender data gap, Urban planning, Public policy

In human society the exposure to vulnerability to violence depends on the rank one holds based on the parameters of one’s societal status. Caste and gender stand as two different set ups of hierarchy dividing population, and to add more to it they even combine at some places leading a majority of human existence towards vulnerability. Both of them merge together giving birth to a system of tinted beliefs and ideologies that shapes the hegemonic idea of masculinity and femininity and superiority and inferiority regarding human work and identity. The use of violence to claim superiority and power specially, against women in India is very common and is deeply rooted in the system of patriarchy system intersecting with other axes of inequality such as caste, class and religion. The upper-caste men try to redefine their masculinity by their capacity to possess or control the other, and therefore they in their process of reasserting their own masculinity violate Dalit woman’s body. Lower caste maleness, on the other hand is targeted by the inability to protect their women, and thus to avert this idea and to assert their masculinity and power they try to sexually violate the upper caste woman. So, in both the cases it is woman who becomes the victim of violence in the struggle of power that fluctuates among the hierarchy of caste and other social spheres.

Keywords: Body, Caste, Gender, Violence