India: After a savage rape, a nation looks inward

The brutal gang rape and murder of a young woman has “stirred the conscience of the nation,” said Arun Nehru in The Asian Age. The woman, whom the press has symbolically named Nirbhaya, or Fearless, was on her way home from a movie last month when she and a male companion boarded a private bus. The driver and five other men beat up her friend and brutally raped her for hours as they cruised through the streets of Delhi, using an iron rod in the attack. Then they dumped the two in the road. Despite the prayers of India, Nirbhaya died of her injuries two weeks later. But her loss has “generated a revolution of sorts.” Thousands of women and men protested in the streets, calling for an end to violence against women.

Let’s start with policing, said The Times of India in an editorial. “Police ineptitude and callousness” are partly to blame for Nirbhaya’s death. Her battered body lay in the street for two hours before officers showed up, and then they delayed treating her while they bickered about jurisdiction. Police all over India show shocking indifference to rape victims. In one recent case in Punjab, a rape victim committed suicide after the officers badgered her with “degrading questions” about her rape, asking her where the rapist touched her first and how often and for how long. Part of the problem is that the police force is 96 percent male. And part of it is that we just don’t have enough officers to serve the population, so rapes go uninvestigated. “Sexual crimes don’t just reveal men brutalizing women—they also show a public service failing its people.”

Changing police culture will require a sea change in Indian culture in general, said Shoma Chaudhury in Tehelka.com. The harsh truth is that “rape is not deviant in India—it is rampant, almost culturally sanctioned.” In the last five years, at least 20 men accused of rape have been chosen by their parties to run in local or state elections. Nearly half of all Indian women have been groped or molested in their own homes. If a girl dares to speak of her treatment, she is told to keep quiet, since outing her uncle as a molester would shame her more than him.

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That’s why it took a rape of exceptional brutality to wake the nation, said Meena Kandasamy in Outlook India. Rape is so common here that we just don’t notice it. There’s marital rape, which is not a crime, even when wives end up in the hospital with internal bleeding. There is “patriotic rape,” when the army has ransacked villages in Kashmir or Sri Lanka. There is “minority rape” of Muslim women during ethnic riots in Gujarat, and then of course there’s the “commonplace, everyday caste-Hindu rape of Dalit women,” or untouchables. Those rapes are never prosecuted. In the rare case that a woman does report a rape, the judge often orders her to marry her rapist. With this medieval mind-set so entrenched in Indian culture, can protests and new laws really make a difference?