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As news of the Delhi gang-rape of a 23 year old physiotherapy student spread like wildfire across Delhi and the nation, the streets of the capital were soon filled with protesters - women, men, young, old, rich and poor who came out and demanded justice and reform - their suggestions ranging from death penalty to fast track courts to better policing to broader based reforms in the civil culture including women’s libertarian rights.

About time too that the issue be brought to light as a national agenda. It might have been the gory details of the brutality that the media covered in this case or the speed of propagation through social networks which simultaneously brewed and re-inforced people’s anger and gave it a momentum that was sufficient to drive them to the streets to start a dedicated conversation. The fact is that sexual violence occurs with horrendous regularity in India : Radha Kumar, an expert on ethnic conflicts peace processes has stated that rape is one of the most common crimes against women in India.l1] Often it tends to get glossed over, appearing in the potpourri of other crimes like murder, theft, corruption scandals  which NDTV and its ilk report  with crude regularity and gaudy montage-and-dramatic-background-music-filled footage, where, like the omnipresent garish background music, it is delegated to the background of our brains as we consume the overwhelming daily dosage of crime and ridiculousness in Delhi. Often while reporting, details are left out, or summarized in one liners, relegated to the bottoms of inside pages of newspapers. The regularization of such reporting and the incidence of such crimes has become so commonplace that any incident below the level of death-like violence and guttural stomach-twisting stunts ceases to make it to news-worthy consideration. And as far as less heinous acts of misogyny, domestic abuse, sexual harassment go - and let us not forget them because that is where it all starts - have been long accepted as a running norm in our news digests.

For any girl who has lived in Delhi, the unfriendly roadside smut scene is all too familiar. There are throngs of men on the streets who will hiss, mutter sexual innuendos and whistle to women walking by and behave with brazen impunity with them in broad daylight. There is nothing novel about being endlessly stared at, groped, rubbed up against or pinched around in a crowded DTC bus, unless one either fights back or abandons such public transportation altogether to skip the humiliation.

Since we are talking about rape, in order to counter it, it is also essential to understand where rape comes from. Research on convicted rapists has found several motivational factors - such as having anger at women and the need to control or dominate them[2]. Factors that increase the risk of men committing rape have been known to be - "being impulsive and having antisocial tendencies, having an exaggerated sense of masculinity, having a low opinion on women, being a member of a criminal gang, having sexually aggressive friends, having been abused as a child and having been raised in a strongly patriarchal family"[3]. It is thought that young men raised in strong patriarchal traditions are left feeling unnerved by the newfound visibility and upward mobility of women in Indian society today. "This visibility is seen as a threat and a challenge," says Ranjana Kumari, of the Center for Social Research in New Delhi.[4] Also, given the rapid modernization of our urban areas, gang rapes, often committed by groups of younger men, are viewed by the perpetrators and sometimes others as ‘justifiable’ means of punishing 'immoral' behavior in women, such as 'wearing short skirts or frequenting bars'.[5] To this, it does not help that there are widely perceived notions in society such as these among men and women alike that the victim “invited” the rape. This social acceptance of rape, is in fact, not too far from the social acceptance which legitimizes the rapes conducted with regularity by armed forces in Kashmir and Manipur, as these are seen as necessary tactics for coercion to ‘fight  and win’ for national cause. And if history is a reminder, this is turn blends smoothly into the long bloody practice in the Indian subcontinent where rapes were used as legitimate weapons for settling scores in battles - during the India-Pakistan partition, the liberation war in Bangladesh, to this day among the more remote village communities as a means to dishonor families and avenge feudal rivalries, and as a means of oppressing Dalit communities.

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Many have started the conversation - and rightly so- around that a solution that might well lie in changing the culture of devaluing women - starting from the home where parents commit female infanticide, the traditional acceptance of child brides and later their husbands and their families who routinely debase and abuse them, give preferential treatment to their sons as opposed to their daughters and bring up their sons in an environment where these acts of violence are committed in the household. This is an argument which has repeatedly been hashed , but in a deeply conservative society which has roots firmly planted in age-old feudal patriarchy, change cannot be made overnight, let alone by any means other than a liberal education and grassroots reform. And since these changes go hand in hand with socio-economic progress, emancipation of the poor, better social-security measures and the encouragement of role-models, a realization needs to be made that all of these issues that contribute to the problem need to be touched. In addition, better judicial services, efficient policing, public grievance and redressal systems, uprooting corruption in the police and political institutions are strong pre-requisites for swift delivery of justice and the rigorous maintenance of law and order. Already, the web of reforms is even more intricately interlinked than we would like to admit.

In more recent times, the decline of agriculture and shift towards patronage politics in the rural areas has created a mass of migrant workers who have shifted to urban centers but are essentially rootless and without a social security net, without an approachable family network or fall-back mechanisms. And besides the decline of agriculture in rural areas which had traditionally provided women with an economic role, emergent sex-determination technologies used to illegally eliminate female fetuses, while eliminating the “burden” of families by ridding themselves of the responsibility of a female child, has distorted the social demographic in a sinister corollary. According to Narendar Pani , professor of National Institute of Advanced Studies : “A twenty-year-old young man born after liberalization in these regions has very little scope for meaningful association with women.
The chances of relating to them at agricultural work are now much less. And with a demographic pattern of just seven or eight women for every ten men, the competition for meaningful interaction with single young women gets that much more intense. With the old agriculture based value system — with all its inequities — no longer available, this competition takes on a Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest form. If in the old system a young woman accompanied by her husband was seen as being out of bounds, in the social Darwinism that has emerged they are targets of jealous rage. And any relationship between a man and a woman that is outside the control of the local power structure, whether it is marriage within the same gothra or a couple at a pub, is seen as justification for violence.“

While we introspect and analyze, however, about what is wrong with India, and forgetting perhaps that it happens elsewhere as well, it is worthwhile reminding ourselves that rape in itself is not particularly just an “Indian” problem. According to the American Medical Association (1995), sexual violence, and rape in particular, is considered the most under-reported violent crime in the US as well[6]. Rape statistics,( if they are anything to go by, since they vary from country to country in how they are scoped), show extremely high incident rates in South Africa and Sweden. In 1998, one in three of the 4,000 women questioned in Johannesburg was raped, according to Community Information, Empowerment and Transparency (CIET) Africa[7]. Owen Jones of The Independent says that “It is a pandemic of violence against women that – given its scale – is not discussed nearly enough.”

Emer O’Toole at The Guardian writes about the statistics: “For example, this BBC article states, as if shocking, the statistic that a woman is raped in Delhi every 14 hours. That equates to 625 a year. Yet in England and Wales, which has a population about 3.5 times that of Delhi, we find a figure for recorded rapes of women that is proportionately four times larger: 9,509. Similarly, the Wall Street Journal decries the fact that in India just over a quarter of alleged rapists are convicted; in the US only 24% of alleged rapes even result in an arrest, never mind a conviction.”

Owen Jones explains in The Independent - “Rape and sexual violence against women are endemic everywhere. Shocked by what happened in India? Take a look at France, that prosperous bastion of European civilization. In 1999, two then-teenagers – named only as Nina and Stephanie – were raped almost every day for six months. Young men would queue up to rape them, patiently waiting for their friends to finish in secluded basements. After a three-week trial this year, 10 of the 14 accused left the courtroom as free men; the other four were granted lenient sentences of one year at most.”

Even the blaming the victim instead of the perpetrator is not just an “Indian” phenomenon. According to Jones,“The Amnesty poll found that a third of Britons believed a woman acting flirtatiously was partly or completely to blame for being raped, while over a quarter found women who were wearing revealing clothes or were drunk shared responsibility. “

 

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Nevertheless, as universal as rape may be, these voices are nothing to gain solace in, because the tragedy that occurred on the night of Dec 16th 2012 on the streets of the nation’s capital, where for Nirbhaya, death came as the end, is, like it or not, going to remain an Indian tragedy. The fact that our justice and policing systems are so lax , incompetent and corrupt is a uniquely Indian tragedy. The fact that unspeakable violence is perpetrated to women of the lower castes routinely and regularly, as is the routine play of sexual harassment on the streets of Delhi to any woman who dares to tread alone there, is a uniquely Indian tragedy. The fact that India lags so far behind on women’s emancipation issues - clear and strong determinants for a civilized society - is a uniquely Indian tragedy.

Lest we forget, among the list of countless Indian rape tragedies, the BBC lists a few that came to light in their time, where public anger was roused, but which soon faded away from the public consciousness:

The Mumbai nurse Aurna Shambaug case -“Sodomised by a cleaner in the hospital where she worked, the 25-year-old was strangled with metal chains and left to die by her attacker, Sohanlal Bharta Walmiki, on 27 November 1973. She was saved and survives, but barely so. For the past 39 years she has been lying in a hospital bed in a vegetative state, brain dead, unable to recognise anyone, unable to speak, unable to perform even the most basic of tasks.
"He was not even charged for raping her," says journalist and author Pinki Virani, who wrote Aruna's Story, a book on the nurse's plight”[8]

In 1972, Mathura, a sixteen-year-old tribal girl, was raped by two policemen on the compound of Desai Ganj Police Station in Chandrapur district of Maharashtra. Her relatives, who had come to register a complaint, were patiently waiting outside even as the act was allegedly being committed in the police station.[9]

The Kunan Poshpora incident occurred on February 23, 1991, when units of the Indian army launched a search and interrogation operation in the village of Kunan Poshpora, located in Kashmir's remote Kupwara District. At least 53 women were allegedly gang raped by soldiers that night.[10]

In the Suryanelli rape case, a 16-year-old girl who was sexually harassed and assaulted continuously for 40 days by 42 men in 1996. The girl from Suryanelli in Idukki district of Kerala in India was transported from place to place across Kerala. The accused included some well-known and well-placed individuals.[11]

“During the 2002 riots in Gujarat, a number of Muslim women were gang-raped, and campaign groups routinely accuse the security forces in Indian-administered Kashmir and the troubled north-east of using rape as a weapon to punish the entire community.

In 2003, the country was shamed when a 28-year-old Swiss diplomat was forced into her own car by two men in south Delhi's posh Siri Fort area and raped by one of them. The rapist, whom she described as being fluent in English, spoke to her about Switzerland and is believed to have even lectured her on Indian culture.

In 2004 in Manipur, 32-year-old Manorama was taken away from home by the soldiers of Assam Rifles who accused her of helping insurgents. A few hours later, her mutilated body was found by the roadside, her pelvis riddled with dozens of bullets.

In Chhattisgarh, Soni Sori has been in police custody since October 2011 when she was arrested on charges of being a courier for the Maoists. She has alleged in the Supreme Court that while in custody, she has been raped and stones have been shoved inside her vagina.“[12]

It remains to be seen if the recent gang-rape case will make any difference at all or just join the long laundry list of faded, half-resolved episodes that sparked the public anger but failed to fuel the accompanying corrective actions we as a society need to take to mend our attitudes and reform our culture surrounding the treatment of women. Or if it will indeed make a difference - to India - as it ushers into an era of perceived modernity, international power play and progressiveness, but truly so only if it is able to mete out half of its population with the basic regard for human equality, and bequeath a legacy of justice to coming generations, riding shakily and nervously on a crooked vision of democracy.