Current Events

Don't Hold Your Breath For An 'Arab Spring' in India

KRISTA MAHR

As more details of the rape in New Delhi on the night of December 16, 2012 emerge, a feeling of unease has settled over the Indian capital like the damp fog that demonstrators outside the court huddled in on Monday afternoon. School was out, so students were there in full force, soaking up scraps of sunshine on the unusually chilly winter day.

“People’s malaise is deep-seated,” said Sarita Rai, a 23-year-old student. “The victim and her friend’s experience on that dreadful night has exposed Delhi-ites’ uncaring mind-sets. We put our self-interest above everything else.”

The upheaval of the past three weeks has exposed other deep fractures, raising difficult questions not only about the status of women in India but also about increasing violence, widening class divides and the delivery of justice in the world’s largest democracy.

The fatal assault has been discussed by the public and treated by authorities as a sexual assault, which it was. But the ferocity of what happened behind the drawn curtains of a private bus that night -- and the outrage that has ensued --  makes the incident no longer just a case of sexual violence.

The unhinged brutality of the culprits necessitates more than greater policing of night buses and GPS tracking systems. It requires a frank look at the social conditions that led six young men to lose their grip on humanity and reflection on why the reaction to the horrific crime has included lawyers’ refusal to give the accused their constitutional right of public defense.

“It’s symptomatic of the fact that as a country, we do not have a culture of abiding by rule of law and respecting the law,” says Vrinda Grover, a human-rights lawyer based in New Delhi. “The link has to be made that if we did believe in rule of law, we wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place.”

Indeed, a disturbing firsthand account the incident given over the weekend by the victim’s friend underscores the broader problems that came into play that night.

In an interview with Zee News, the only witness to the crime said that after being stripped and thrown out of the moving bus, he and the woman lay exposed and bleeding by the side of the road for nearly half an hour as multiple vehicles passed before somebody called the police to help them.

“The victim’s friend echoed the insensitivity of India’s capital, where passersby simply look the other way when they find somebody in distress,” said Rajesh Garg, a 22-year-old student who was also outside the courtroom. “Nobody wants a brush with law.”

The witness went on to say that once the call was made, police took more than half an hour to arrive on the scene, argued over who was responsible for the pair and eventually took them to a government hospital farther away than private hospitals in the vicinity. The police have rebutted that version of events, saying their vans reached the scene within a few minutes of receiving the call and that police refer all medico-legal cases, of which sexual assault is one, to government hospitals that are equipped to handle them.

Since December 16, the Indian media’s coverage of rapes across the country has measurably increased, not due to a rise in incidence as much as a renewed focus on a crime that is widely under-reported and has not typically garnered much attention when it is. Indian dailies are now giving the stream of incidents wider and more prominent coverage, emphasizing the fact that the December 16 attack, though particularly heinous, was far from an isolated event.

As the five accused were driven to court on Monday, for instance, a 16-year-old girl in the northern city of Allahabad was in critical condition after being set on fire by a boy who allegedly attempted to rape her on Saturday. That same day in Delhi, the body of a 21-year-old woman was found; her father says she was gang-raped and murdered on her way home from work the previous evening.

This steady stream of distressing cases has not prevented an equally steady flow of tone-deaf commentary from some of India’s most prominent politicians and religious and social leaders.

Indian media reported that Asaram Bapu, a Hindu religious leader, said the victim was to blame for not reaching out to her attackers as “brothers” and “begged before them to stop.”

In its recommendations to a government commission set up to better protect women in India, Jamaat-e-Islami Hind, an Islamist group, suggested “sober and dignified” dress for girls and the abolishment of co-education.

The real fix for what ails the Indian capital, says Delhi-based sociologist Dipankar Gupta, lies in better law enforcement. As Delhi has spread and incorporated villages from the region, the city has inherited a mix of communities with clan-based loyalties, rootless migrants and a population that can “touch the fruit of economic development but not quite grasp it.”

It’s a combustible environment in which crime, unfortunately, has been allowed to flourish. “In India, our law is not enforced,” Gupta says. “We don’t pick up small crimes. We don’t pick up large crimes.”

The only way that India can change for good, Gupta says, “is not by holding hands and singing songs but through the law. Once the law is applied systemically, it becomes a habit.”


[Courtesy: TIME Magazine. Edited for sikhchic.com]
January 8, 2013
 

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