NEW DELHIâ€"Over the past few days, following the rape of a five-year-old girl, the Indian government has been rocked once again by the alliance of the news media and Delhi’s street protesters. In my latest Letter From India I argue that Delhi’s new breed of demonstrators are getting better at street protests and sustaining the interest of journalists, while the government has yet to learn how to create a smart and dignified self-defense.
The child was not only raped, but tortured. The word “depravity†was used by several commentators. It was a crime the Delhi police could not have prevented, but the manner in which the police had conducted the investigation gave the protesters the opportunity to cast the capital’s police commissioner as the villain of the story. But there were public figures who reminded the nation that the incident also pointed a finger at Indian society and its deeply flawed analysis of the origins of its many evils.
A particularly obtuse analysis of why rapes occur in India was propounded by Mohan Bhagwat, the chief of the right-wing Hindu nationalist group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. In January, as the nation mourned the death of a young woman who was raped by six men in a moving bus in Delhi, he said, “Such crimes hardly take place in ‘Bharat’, but they occur frequently in ‘India.†What he meant was that rapes do not occur in traditional India, but they do in Westernized, urbanized, modern India.
In response to such views, which are repeated in different forms by several politicians, Javed Akhtar, a poet, film writer and a nominee for Parliament, said a few things in Parliament on Monday that are usually not said in that big, white building. He said that the real problem was that Indian society separates men and women in “an unnatural way,†leading most young Indian men to perceive women as if they were “animals.†He said that Indian society worships women by claiming they are goddesses, but that women would be better off if Indian society instead regarded them as human beings.
