Every Indian media outlet has
a name for her: Amanat (Treasure). Nirbhaya (Fearless). Braveheart. India's
Girl. She can't be named, but she bears the name of every woman in India.
Suketu Mehta
If she had been allowed to live, she would have been a paragon of the progress Indian women are making. She was studying to be a physiotherapist. She was the only person supporting her rural family. She was going to marry a software engineer in February. She was 23. She was, for God's sake, only 23. But she lived — and has now been cremated — in Delhi.
Every one of my female friends
who's visited or lived in New Delhi has a story about the men there. Christine
from Paris was walking in Connaught Place, the heart of the city, with her
mother. Christine is an anthropologist who wanted to show her mother, who was
in India for the first time, what a wonderful country it was. A man came up to
them and thrust his hand between Christine's legs, grabbing her crotch. He
laughed and sauntered off. "My mother had to watch this," Christine
said, weeping. But she knows that Indian women — especially the poor and the
low caste — suffer worse.
New Delhi isn't the only
Indian city where bad things happen to women, but it has a special reputation.
Perhaps it's the political corruption that transforms into moral corruption;
perhaps it's North Indian machismo; perhaps it's the skewed sex ratio — 866
females for every 1,000 males, because many girls are killed at birth by
parents who'd rather have a son. The numbers bear it out: New Delhi has more
rapes than Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad put together.
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In Delhi, marchers face water
spray from police. Photo: Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images/TIME
|
All over the country, the gang
rape has galvanized Indians into an agonized national discussion about how
badly we treat our women. But some of the proposed solutions are wildly off the
mark. Internet forums seethe with demands for the death penalty for rapists.
Given the promptness with which Indian police round up the usual suspects in any
high-profile case, this would result in many innocent men being hanged.
"Enforcement is more important than a new law," pointed out the
victim's fiancé, who was attacked with her.
The way the country deals with sexual assault has to change at the most basic level: at the police stations where rape is reported, in the doctors' clinics where the victim is examined and in the courts where the victim is cross-examined.
Many doctors still use the
"finger test," in which they penetrate the rape survivor with one,
then two fingers. The medical report will note such things as the "laxity
of the vagina": the implication is that if it is lax, so are the woman's
morals. If two fingers can enter her vagina, the report might say she has been
"habituated to sexual intercourse" — a term that the defense will use
in questioning her credibility. No wonder that three-quarters of rape
prosecutions end in acquittal. Although the Supreme Court has ruled that the
finger test cannot be considered as evidence, it is still used in many states.
Most women in that part of the
world stay clear of police stations for their own safety. A friend, an
influential filmmaker, told me about what happened when he reported the
embezzlement of a large sum by his accountant. The accountant had fled town, so
the police arrested the accountant's sister — who had not been involved in the
crime — to put pressure on her brother to surrender. When my friend went to the
station, the officer in charge told him that the sister was in the lockup and
invited him to "do what you want with her." Fearing for her safety,
my friend had a man from his office sit at the station day and night, guarding
her from the police.
The rot begins at the top. Six
sitting members of state legislatures have been charged with rape; two members
of Parliament and 36 state legislators have been charged with crimes against
women. In the 2009 national elections, political parties fielded no fewer than
40 candidates who were charged with rape or other crimes against women.
The country seems to have had
enough. There are silent marches, candlelit vigils. There is outrage in the
papers, on television. Thus did people gather after the 2008 terrorist attacks
here to demand better security; thus did people gather in 2011 to protest
corruption. This is the third massive wave of protest, and this time it's to
demand the most elementary respect for India's 591 million females. But can it
be sustained?
"Here's the bottom
line," said Barack Obama about gun control. "We're not going to get
this done unless the American people decide it's important." About
fighting rape in India, here's the bottom line. We're not going to get this
done unless the Indian people decide it's important.
Suketu Mehta is the author of Maximum
City and a journalism professor at New York University
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