India Dishonoured: Behind a Nation's War on Women (4 page)

 

1
'Red Brigade takes guard against women tormentors on Lucknow streets' Times of India, March 2013

2
‘Women hit back at India's rape culture’ – Guardian newspaper, April 2013

Conclusion

It was the suicide note that finally forced the police to act. Four of the accused were arrested immediately and two police officers were dismissed for failing in their duty. On 26th December 2012, a 17-year-old girl swallowed poison and was found in agony by her family. She died at the hospital later, with her last breath lamenting (in Punjabi) that, “there is nobody to listen to us, mother.”

A few weeks earlier, on November 13th, two men had drugged and kidnapped her from a village in the state of Punjab. Four days after her rape ordeal she gathered the courage to go to the police with her family. That should have been the end of her suffering, but the nightmare continued. The police did not register her case for two weeks while the alleged attackers, who hadn’t even been questioned yet, roamed free. Officials also pressured the victim to marry one of her attackers and drop the case, and did not bother mentioning it in their daily crime briefing when it was eventually registered. The suicide note said: “I am fed up with my life so I am taking this step. Those who have raped me are responsible for my death.”

Around the same time, as thousands of Indians were holding vigils for the student who was gang raped on a Delhi bus, her friend told an Indian broadcaster about the police incompetence that meant they lay on the streets for 45 minutes. Rather than apologise, Delhi Police filed a case against the broadcaster for revealing the identity of the rape victim by airing the interview.

Four months later, Delhi was again rocked by protests in April 2013 when it emerged that a five-year-old girl had been found severely abused and raped by her neighbour. Her father told reporters that the police dismissed him when he came to report her absence, and later tried to pay him off to keep quiet when her body was found. Three policemen were later suspended.

Such examples of police indifference and malpractice are not the exception but hair-raisingly common in India. In another case that is currently being heard in court, a victim recounted how her rapist was only arrested after she had asked a well-connected friend to intervene; the police had been uninterested and were seen laughing with her attacker.

Vrinda Grover, a human rights lawyer based in New Delhi told The New York Times
1
‘For Rape Victims in India, Police Are Often Part of the Problem’ New York Times, Jan 2013
that the commonly held view across the country is that, “If you’re a woman in distress, the last thing you want to do is go to the police.”

Even Kiran Bedi, the first Indian Police Service (IPS) senior woman officer, admitted serious failings: “There is a problem in policing here. Police do not register crime freely and there is rarely adequate investigation done in cases of molestation,” in an interview with broadcaster CNN-IBN.
2
‘Rise in rape incidents due to low conviction, poor policing: Experts’ CNN-IBN, Dec 2010
“People do not become rapists all of a sudden. Rapists have a history in molestation and other petty crimes. But since complaints against them are not registered by police early on, they go on to become bigger criminals and rapists,” she said.

Let’s step back and ask a wider question in the context of this mini-book: why single out India? After all, reports of police incompetence and indifference towards violence against women are common across the world. Even in London, the Metropolitan Police admitted in February 2013 to pressuring a rape victim to drop her claim against a man (who later went on to murder his children). The Met’s anti-sex-crime unit ‘Sapphire’ is also the subject of several internal investigations for failing victims.

Is violence against women any worse in India than in South Africa, Congo (once dubbed ‘most dangerous place on earth to be a woman’) or parts of Latin America? Moreover, is India any worse than China, where sex-selection is also practiced on a genocidal scale, or Pakistan and Afghanistan, where women also have very little rights? Isn’t violence against women in India part of a global pattern of patriarchy? Why single it out?

Any comparative survey is difficult since statistics are collected differently, and in some places women are more under pressure to keep silent than others. But there are good reasons why India’s problem is unique and deserves more attention.

For starters, the number of women being
eliminated
is on a genocidal scale, with only China coming close. India currently has 37 million more males than females,
3
According to the 2011 Census: 586.47 million females and 623.72 million males.
and it is estimated that the total ‘missing’ is around 50 million over the last three generations, thanks to abortions, infanticide, dowry deaths and other kinds of murders. By 2020, the country will have around an extra 28 million men of marriageable age. For context, that is more than the
entire
male population of England. Given that India and China together represent around 36% of the entire world’s population, the sex-ratio imbalance is unprecedented in human history and likely to have global implications.

Added to that is a perfect storm of inter-related factors in India: from mass migration of men to cities looking for work, to the liberalisation of attitudes and lifestyle in cities, growing consumerism after the economic reforms of the early 90s, and the coming of age of men who were born during the sex-selection boom. NGOs such as Action Aid say these factors together make the situation worse. “The child sex ratio has declined in areas where we thought it was not going to happen; in groups that were earlier outside this discrimination,” says case-worker Sehjo Singh. Companies providing ultra-sound equipment were bribing doctors, paramedical workers and government officials to push sex-selection even in remote areas.

Writing in The Hindu newspaper recently,
4
‘The rapist in the mirror’ The Hindu, January 2013
Praveen Swami said India’s transforming economy was producing “a mass of young, prospect-less men,” for some of whom “the sexually independent woman is thus [the] enemy to be annihilated,” as they became frustrated with an increasingly liberalised popular culture that they could not participate in. The report commissioned in response to the Delhi gang rape linked to the article approvingly, and warned that rape and other forms of sexual assault were, “consistently deployed as an expression of power and must not necessarily be seen as ‘crime of passion’ only.”

But while China has a strong military and police force better able to maintain law and order, India’s police force in contrast is woefully under-resourced and badly trained. It employs around one policeman for every 1,030 people, compared to one policeman per 390 people in the US and one per 236 people in a city like New York.

The problem is not just the police, justice system, politicians, corruption or economic de-regulation: it is also India’s unique brand of religiosity and ingrained ideas about the ‘honour’ of women that makes it so hard to change attitudes. It is worth emphasising that a large proportion of sexual violence is carried out by people known to the victim, rather than strangers.

This makes the scale of India’s war against women several magnitudes bigger than other countries. This is why it deserves to be singled out and woken up from inaction.

Dr Monica Das Gupta, a senior demographer at the World Bank, thinks what Indian women need is greater flexibility to live independently and offer financial support to their parents. In a report for the World Bank
5
‘Why is son preference so persistent in East and South Asia?’ World Bank, 2002
she wrote that measures are needed to “make it socially acceptable for daughters to help their parents”. “What is required is to reduce the incentive to discriminate against girls by making daughters and sons more equally valuable to their parents.”

In other words, make it socially acceptable for women to look after their own parents after they get married, and parents will start to value them more. Alternatively, a stronger safety net to support older people, such as a well-funded national pension system, would also make parents less fearful of old age.

Vandana Shiva, an environmental feminist, says that religious conventions need to be tackled too:
6
‘Sita, Draupadi and Kali: Women in Hinduism’ BBC World Service, February 2013
“We’ve got to reform religion in its ancient exclusions, with all the shlokas (poems) and mantras (prayers) saying the woman is secondary, the woman is to serve the husband… plus those forces that are new and not part of religion in its ancient form, but part of a new religion of the market, religion of greed, the religion of commodification.”

The government has also long tried to change attitudes through advertising campaigns. In one recent ad on TV, a pregnant woman at a hospital is told by her mother-in-law: “Daughter-in-law, I only want a son.” The woman, visibly distraught, says nothing, and neither does her husband. Then a soft voice from the womb rings out, asking why she is being written out of history before she is born, and promising that she will be a good daughter who will look after her mother and work hard. The entire family is reduced to tears and the mother-in-law says: “Daughter, let’s go home and prepare for the birth of your daughter.”

But given the scale of the crisis, and the signs that say it will only get worse, these piecemeal efforts barely make a dent. The problems lie at the heart of Indian identity and culture, and won’t be eradicated unless major taboos and conventions are challenged to their core. Or else, the scars will affect every aspect of its development.

 

1
‘For Rape Victims in India, Police Are Often Part of the Problem’ New York Times, Jan 2013

2
‘Rise in rape incidents due to low conviction, poor policing: Experts’ CNN-IBN, Dec 2010

3
According to the 2011 Census: 586.47 million females and 623.72 million males.

4
‘The rapist in the mirror’ The Hindu, January 2013

5
‘Why is son preference so persistent in East and South Asia?’ World Bank, 2002

6
‘Sita, Draupadi and Kali: Women in Hinduism’ BBC World Service, February 2013

India Dishonoured: Behind a nation’s war on women

Published by Guardian Books 2013

Epub ISBN: 978-1-78356-009-7

Mobi ISBN: 978-1-78356-010-3

Version 1.0

Copyright © Sunny Hundal

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