February 2015


While sexual violence against women has taken centrestage across the nation, a slew of initiatives have been started by men over the last couple of years in the city. In fact, they have been working against gender-based violence and encouraging men to stand up against such cases.
One such example is YES i.e. Youth for Equal Societies, a project kickstarted by NGO Samyak to bring together young men and women from college campuses to initiate a process to fight harassment. The YES network has reached to thousands of college students and has a core active network of 200-odd students, who run various activities in city colleges.
“Through YES, we have formed small groups in various colleges who tackle issues like eve-teasing, violence against women and use novel mediums such as film screenings, social campaigns, exhibitions to put their message across to peers, said Anand Pawar, executive director, Samyak.
Another city NGO Equal Community Foundation engages young men and boys as a positive force in demanding women’s rights and end violence against them. For example, their graduate programme places mentors in low-income communities to mobilise men in ending sexual violence, realising role and value of women at home and in community and finally, drawing up a personal action plan to identify and reduce unacceptable behaviour towards women.
While Pune also saw the birth of Samanthesathi Apan Purush (SAP), a group of men from various organisations to fight violence against women, various bodies are now gearing up to be a part of the global One Billion Rising Project on February 14, 2013.
“It is a global project where on the said date, millions of people across the globe would rise against violence on women. As part of this project, many NGOs’ are mobilising communities to participate in the project where through song, dance or even a strike, we will say no to violence against women. Our NGO has mobilised men in 30 villages across Maharashtra as part of this project,” said Milind Chavan, spokesperson of SAP and senior member of MASUM.

A Gallup poll finding that women in Rwanda and Bangladesh felt safer on the streets than women in the UK and Sweden needs to be treated with great caution. There is no correlation between 'feeling safe' and the objective reality of whether women are actually safe or not, says Rahila Gupta.


In a recent article on openDemocracy arguing that the pornification of Western culture undermines women’s fight for equality, Markha Valenta quoted a Gallup poll carried out in 143 countries in support of her argument.. The poll found that women in countries like Rwanda and Bangladesh felt safer on the streets than women in developed Western countries like the UK, America or Sweden. Really?  Valenta uses these findings to ask Western politicians, Why did they not feel deep shame that countries poorer, many much more religious, some even totalitarian, offer women so much more safety and comfort in public spaces?... How many would dare to say, as they ought to, that when it comes to public space, we must create environments as safe for women as they are in Ghana, in Bangladesh, in China?’
There is no correlation between ‘feeling safe’ and the objective reality of whether women are actually safe or not as the readers of that article pointed out. In the UK alone, we have seen that women’s anxiety about safety exists in inverse proportions to the crime rate: anxiety rises even as crime rates fall. According to the poll, in the UK, 62% of women feel safe as compared to 82% of men, a gap of 20 per cent, whereas in India 69% of women as compared to 71% of men, a gap of only 2 per cent, feel safe walking alone at night. At the same time, a Trust Law/Reuters survey found that India was the worst of the G20 countries for violence against women, after Saudi Arabia. Either Indian women are deluded or such surveys need to be unpacked and treated with caution because incidents of violence against women in Indian cities are rife.
Newspapers report that women are snatched off the streets in Delhi and gang raped in moving cars. The shocking episode of a young woman being molested by a gang of 20 men outside a nightclub in Guwahati, Assam is only the latest in a series of gruesome attacks. The men who lay in wait for her had apparently harassed her inside the bar: because she had the ‘cheek’ to rebuff them, they planned to teach her a lesson. Apparently, when a TV camera crew turned up, they were trying to swing her around to face the cameras as a form of public shaming for visiting a bar as an underage girl!
Much of the public debate that followed was an agonised soul-searching about the nature of Indian society and the ethics of non-intervention both by the journalists and random bystanders, followed by the revelation that the news reporter himself egged the men on in order to get his scoop which shifted the focus to press ethics. Whether the men were egged on or not is a little beside the point: what is appalling is that these men think that their gross actions are justified in the name of upholding public morality by punishing the ‘bad’ women who frequent bars in order to protect the ‘good’ women who remain indoors. Just like the code of ‘honour’ is upheld by dishonourable means, notions of decency are upheld by indecent means.
It is the same frame of mind which drives the zealous policeman of Mumbai, Vasant Dhoble, whose moral crusades have taken him into bars to round up women drinkers and parade them in front of cameras as ‘prostitutes’. In a casebrought by two sisters against the police for wrongful detention, the courts backed him saying that he was just doing his job. Unsurprisingly members of religious groups have supported his Taliban style policing. Women have been organising and fighting back.  In January 2009, 40 men from a right wing Hindu group, Sri Ram Sena (Ram’s army), attacked women, who had ordered beer along with their lunch in Mangalore, so viciously that it resulted in two women being hospitalised. Video footage of this episode went viral, as did the humorous and innovative Pink Chaddi (knickers) campaign organised by the ironically named Consortium of Pub-going, Loose, and Forward Women. They encouraged their supporters to send pink knickers to the leader of the Sri Ram Sena: 2000 knickers of a target of 5000 were sent.
Whilst safety has always been a problem for women on the streets of Indian cities, this kind of vigilante action is relatively new and appears to be more prevalent in those cities where economic development has exploded since the 1990s, when new economic policies marked the end of the siege economy, opened India up to foreign INVESTMENT and created employment for educated, young women to work in call centres and transnational manufacturing zones.  Mumbai, as the primary commercial city of India, contributing the most to national revenue, has bucked the trend: it has a long tradition of women going out to work, cultural attitudes have had a chance to catch up which means that it has proved to be one of the safer cities in India for women, thuggish policemen notwithstanding. But the rapid and uneven transition in other cities has not only forced a realignment of the interface between the public and private domains but created starkly different communities with starkly different value systems – India shining, technologically advanced, leading the field in the new economies and the old India driven by superstition, religion and conservatism. Although these binaries are not mutually exclusive, it has given rise to parallel, niche lives.  Women find themselves trapped in an explosive mix of traditional attitudes and new roles when overlapping economic and social systems – feudalism, agrarian economy and neo-liberal capitalism – come crashing into each other.
These different Indias, living side by side, are like gated communities rarely interacting with each other, but when they do the consequences can be dire. If the young woman in Guwahati had been taken home by a chauffeur driven car, a facility available to most middle class women, she would have escaped that mauling.  Gurgaon, a satellite city of Delhi, crammed full of malls and transnational companies built on agricultural land epitomises this clash. In the remains of the agricultural community not yet displaced by technological developments, there are high levels of female infanticide, caste violence and women trafficked from even poorer parts of the country to make up for the shortage of brides caused by infanticide. At the same time, women working in the malls and transnational companies, who frequent pubs after work, are exposed to harassment and violence from men because,  ‘Public spaces have historically been thought of as male spaces and Gurgaon's men find it particularly difficult to deal with the fact that an increasing number of women - armed with their own resources - seek to share such spaces on equal terms.’  However, those women workers who use private transport like taxis and company cars  provided by their transnational employers to go home are less likely to face harassment.
The police are often slow to act, not just because of corruption, but because like Vasant Dhoble, they may share the views of the perpetrators of such harassment that a bar is no place for a woman. And when such thinking is rubberstamped by religious forces, also on the rise because neo-liberalism rolls back the state and creates a vacuum for the growth of religious fundamentalism, then Indian women, who choose not to conform, place themselves beyond the pale. Whatever the Gallup poll may say, the truth is that public spaces in India are more hostile to women than the streets of Europe and recourse to the law even weaker.

When the international community came together in 2000 to agree the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDG) that it would prioritize over the next 15 years, it did not include the issue of violence against women. Perhaps the problem did not appear sufficiently important or perhaps it was hoped that progress on the gender-related goals and targets that were adopted – education, labour market opportunities and political representation – would take care of the problem.
The horrific gang rape of a 23 year old para-medic student in Delhi on 16th December 2012 suggests that such hope is misplaced. Yes, the gender gap in education in India is closing. Yes, many more women are now in the labour force than ever before. And yes, political quotas and reservations have increased the percentage of women in elected office.   But blocking the transformative potential of this evidence of progress is an age-old patriarchal system which regards women as inferior to men and its toxic interaction with the new global culture of consumerism and its relentless sexualisation of women’s bodies. 
The young woman who was raped had been one of the few from her village who had made it into college, she had promising professional career ahead of her and she was the citizen of a country with a long track record of democracy and increasing numbers of women elected into office.  None of this was sufficient to protect her from a sexual assault the sheer ugly brutality of which has brought thousands of horrified and grieving protestors onto the streets across the country.
Named ‘Nirbhaya’ (‘without fear’) by some of the press who, in an unusual show of sensitivity have not revealed her real name, the woman was returning home from the cinema with a male friend at 9 o’clock in the evening. They boarded a bus in the belief that it would take them closer to  home. Instead her companion was beaten badly and she was subjected to an extended period of rape and violence that left her brutalized and unconscious. Their naked bodies were thrown out of the moving bus to be found by passersby. Nirbhaya recovered sufficiently to give a statement to the police but died on the 29th December. She was named ‘fearless’ because of the fight she put up against her attackers (she left teeth marks on at least one of their bodies), because of her determination that her attackers be brought to justice and because of her struggle to live, despite horrific injuries to her internal organs.
Mixed group of people seated in a circle around messages and candles.A vigil in Delhi. Photo: Demotix / Jiti Chadha
There are a number of reasons why I think that what is happening in India right now is important, not only for its citizens but for the rest of South Asia. We share a great deal of the same misogynistic culture and we all have our own shameful roll call of women who have paid the price for it.  In Bangladesh, we remember 14 year old Yasmin, a young domestic trying to return to her parents in the village, picked up, gang-raped and murdered by three policemen; Seema travelling home with her boyfriend, was picked up by the police on grounds of suspicious behaviour, put into ‘safe custody’ in the police station where she was  gang-raped by four policemen and died a few days later; Sima, a young college student who suffered daily sexual harassment at the hands of the hoodlums in her neighbourhood, found no support from the police in her area and killed herself to spare her parents further harassment.  And on the December 21st of this year, a week after the Delhi case, a fourteen year old tribal girl was raped and killed by 3 Bengali settlers in the Rangamati hills of Bangladesh.
In Pakistan, there is Muktharan Mai, gang raped on the orders of council of elders in her village; Kainat Somroo, gang raped by local village thugs at the age of 13; Naseema Lubano, raped by the local landlord and his henchman.  And in India, there is Mathura, a 16 year old tribal girl gang raped by the police in the police station even as her relatives who had come to file a complaint waited outside, not knowing what was happening; Bhanwari Devi, a lower caste woman gang raped by men from the upper castes for her temerity in challenging the practice of child marriage; Rameeza Bee, who was returning home at night with her husband, a rickshaw puller, was picked up by the police and raped while her husband was killed; Maya Tyagi, on her way back from  a wedding with her husband, was stopped on the road by plainclothes policemen, stripped and paraded naked through the city bazaar and then raped in the police station. The list goes on, but it only names those women whose cases came to public attention. It is the tip of a very ugly iceberg whose hidden depths we know very little about.
A young women speaks into a mic to a large crowd. Poster of the three wise monkeys behind, plus a 4th covering genitals.A youth leader speaks at a Delhi protest.
Photo: Demotix / Jiti Chadha
So the first reason why what is happening in India right now is important for all of us in South Asia is that, in a region where women’s movements have been fighting almost on their own on the issue of violence against women for so many decades, the sheer scale of the public response to the gang rape of Nirbhaya has been astonishing, moving and inspiring. If it can lead to lasting change in India, then perhaps it will lead to change in the rest of the region. But at the very least, it has seared the issue into the public consciousness and put it onto the public agenda. Certainly there have been vigils and demonstrations in solidarity with Nirbhaya in Nepal, Bangladesh and Pakistan.
The second reason is the very visible presence of men. One of the most discouraging aspects of women’s struggles for justice, not just in South Asia, but across the world,  has been how few and far between have been the men prepared to stand up and be counted.  Not this time. Men, mostly but not only young men, are speaking out in the press and taking their place alongside women on the streets.  Such male support is critical. Without it, the question of sexual violence will remain ghettoized as a women’s issue and efforts to eradicate it remain ineffective.
There are many theories floating around as to why, in a country with so many well publicized incidents of violence against women, it was this case that seems to have galvanized such large-scale public response. One theory points to the class dynamics of the case. A great deal of the sexual violence in India is perpetrated by men who hold positions of power against women in positions of structural subordination: by higher caste men against women from the ‘untouchable’ castes or tribal groups;  by the police against women from poor households; by the army against women deemed to belong to the ‘enemy’ within - women in India’s insurgency-hit areas such as Kashmir, Chhatisgarh, Jharkhand and the north east region.  The ferocious brutality of the attack on Nirbhaya has revealed something frightening about the consequences of widening inequalities in a rapidly growing, modernizing and globalizing economy.  This was violence perpetrated by men from the underclass of Delhi, men who will never share in the benefits of ‘shining’ India, against a woman who symbolized the country that India hopes to become.   
The six men in question came from one of the squalid slum neighbourhoods of Delhi and there is little question that, had this or something like this not happened, they would spend their lives in the same or similar slums. The youngest of them has been living on the streets since the age of 13. They fit the face of the image of the rapist ‘monster’ in the public imagination in a way that rapists in the police force, the army and the upper castes do not. According to this theory, the scale of the response we are seeing is a manifestation of class outrage.  The rage that her rapists enacted on the body of Nirbhaya is being met by an answering rage in those who now call for the death penalty or chemical castration of the rapists.
But this does not suffice to explain the demographics of the protestors, the way that the protest appears to have broken through class and gender barriers. I think there are different elements to such an explanation.  One element is captured by the sentiment expressed in different words by many of the protestors: ‘That girl could have been any one of us’. What happened to Nirbhaya could have happened to any of the thousands of young women currently attending university. They do not necessarily come from privileged backgrounds. Many, like Nirbhaya, come from humble backgrounds and have had to struggle to find a place in what the new India has to offer. Many, like Nirbhaya, are the first generation of women in their family to make it into college. In Nirbhaya’s case, her father had to sell what little land he had in order to make this possible. In that sense, she was ‘everywoman’ for this generation of university students.  Her very anonymity, what one writer has called her status as ‘the unknown citizen’, has allowed each person to see their own story in her life and death.
A second element is captured by the fact that India, except for its cosmopolitan elite, remains a highly gender-segregated society. Universities are one of the few places where men and women can interact as friends, as ordinary human beings doing ordinary things on a daily basis, something not easy to do in the highly charged nature of gender relations in most spheres of public life. Nirbhaya went that evening to see a film with a young man who, contrary to some newspaper reports, was a friend, not a lover, not a fiancé. While many of the young women demonstrating on the streets today could have been Nirbhaya, many of the men on the demonstrations know someone like her – as daughters, sisters, friends. What these men have learnt additionally from this case is that their presence cannot protect their friends, sisters, and daughters from what happened to Nirbhaya.
However, while students were the first out on the streets, and joined by women activists, many other women from different social backgrounds began to swell their numbers.  Most women in India – in South Asia – feel vulnerable to sexual violence. Commenting on the large scale turn out by aam aurat, the ordinary women of India who do not take time off from their daily lives to march and protest, the Times of India said’ At the root of this unwonted outpouring is empathy.  Women teachers, students, shopkeepers and homemakers alike find themselves in Nirbhaya’s shoes every day. Their privileges are few and they chase their dreams in buses and autos, suffering a thousand indignities...’.  These women have had to put up with being groped, leered at and often assaulted as they seek to go about their daily business.  The brutal assault on Nirbhaya is just the extreme on this daily continuum of sexual harassment.
In addition, there are certain groups of women who are more vulnerable to such harassment by virtue of their identity or the work they do: for instance, the Delhi protests were joined by migrant women from the hill regions who come to work as domestics in the city, a group particularly vulnerable to sexual harassment, as well as by women activists from the north-east where the military stands accused of molesting and raping women. 
Finally, there is a third aspect to the current response which I think holds out particular hope for all of us in South Asia.  While many voices have been raised in India against the indifference, often collusion on the part of politicians (quite a few of them have rape charges pending against them), against the corruption and brutality of the police who are seen as part of the problem rather than the solution, against the justice system that has systematically failed the victims of rape (635 cases of rape registered in Delhi in 2012, only one conviction) and, of course,  against the ‘monsters’, ‘beasts’ and ‘demons’ that perpetrate these atrocities, a recurring theme in the current response is the need for serious introspection. 
The problem does not simply lie ‘out there’, ‘the problem is us’.  There is much talk of the collective mindset that has developed in a culture in which violence against women is not only widespread, not only condoned, but is frequently blamed on women themselves. When Niyabhaya boarded the bus with her companion, they were asked by one of their would-be rapists why they were out so late in the night.  This was clearly not an expression of concern for her safety on the part of a kindly stranger.  In retrospect, it can be seen more in the way of comment that she had only herself to blame for what came next. 
We continue to hear the voices of misogyny speaking even as the country turns a troubled gaze inwards and acknowledges the need for vast behavioural change at the grassroots level.  One of the most notorious statements has came from Abhijit Mukherjee, the son of the President of India and an elected MP who claimed that the women protesting on the streets had ‘no contact with ground reality’  and indeed were probably not students: ‘These pretty women, dented and painted, who come for protests are not students. I have seen them speak on television, usually women of this age are not students’.  He suggested that these women, who apparently frequently went to discotheques, were holding candles and protesting as a form of fashion statement.
His comments were slammed by many fellow MPs, disowned by his sister and later apologized for by Mukherjee himself, but not before the Shiv Sena, an extremist Hindu party, supported his statement, saying that he had merely said what most Indian men were thinking anyway, only his timing had been wrong. Then there is the leader of a caste panchayat in Haryana who declared that most rapes were fabricated, anyway; the elected Member of the BJP party in Rajasthan who called for a ban on skirts as a part of school uniforms as it attracted ‘sharp and dirty glances and lewd comments’; and the opinion expressed by Khushwant Singh, one of India’s leading writers, that rape had to be understood as the inability by men to control their libido so that they took their lust out on unwilling women.
Nor it is only men who subscribe to these misogynistic views.  Women too, many of them in elected office, have also expressed them.  According to Mamata Banjerjee, Chief Minister of West Bengal, ‘rapes are happening because men and women are interacting too freely’.  Of a woman who accepted a ride home from a pub in Calcutta and was then raped at gun point by five men, Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar, leader of the party in power in West Bengal, said, ‘That was not a rape, that was  a deal gone wrong’.   Sheila Dixit, now Chief Minister of Delhi, once said of a female journalist who was murdered in Delhi that she should not have been so ‘adventurous’ as to be out on her own in the night. 
While well-known Bollywood figures have joined the national protests, questions are being raised about the role of the film industry in promoting the sexualisation of culture.   While kissing on screen is still rare, recent articles point out that there is a long tradition of heroes stalking, harassing and pressing their unwanted attentions on heroines but ending up getting the girl anyway. Rape scenes too have been part of the staple diet of Indian cinema, but becoming increasingly explicit over the years.  And where once it was the lone ‘vamp’ in the film that flaunted her sexuality while the heroine exuded virtue, the vamp figure has all but vanished in today’s films since it is now the scantily clad heroine who gyrates provocatively to the approval of leering crowds of men.  In a society that remains highly segregated by gender, where sexual mores remain highly repressed, what messages do these images communicate to men about women and what they want?
Expressions and evidence of a misogynistic culture are so routine on the part of both men and women, so deeply woven into the societal fabric, that it would not be possible to exhaust even those that have surfaced since Nirbhaya’s rape and death, but one more example is worth citing. The Hindustan Times reported on a survey carried out  among men and women using public transport in the last week of 2012. 78% of women had been sexually harassed in the past year: of these, over 90% reported lewd comments and whistling; 69% reported groping and 69% reported forcible assault. 56% of the men believed that women had to learn to tolerate some level of sexual harassment. Similar percentages of women and men said men engaged in sexual harassment to feel powerful ( 40% and 44% respectively) but while 35% of women believed they did it to show off in front of their friends, only 18% of men agreed with this statement and while 18% of women believed men ‘did it for fun’, 30% of men agreed with this. Finally, 59% of men but just 14% of women agreed that ‘most women invite harassment because of the way they dress and behave’.
I have dwelt at some length on the issue of culture and mind set because I think it is an important reason why violence against women has proved so difficult for feminists to get onto the public agenda.   It is not clear why this particular gang rape was the one that has provoked so much grief and anger, but the question is whether this grief and anger can now be harnessed to bring about sustained change in the way that violence against women is dealt with by society.  In India, there is a serious debate going on about the kinds of measures that are likely to bring about such change, but the problem of violence against women, within the home and outside it, is not unique to India nor indeed to South Asia.   It occurs in all countries, though some countries deal with it more effectively than others.
We are now looking ahead to the post-MDG era and discussions are taking place in various forums as to what the priority goals should be for the next phase. There are many new and burning issues jostling for attention: climate change and growing global inequalities, for example.  But why can we not now at last turn our attention to an old problem that will not go away? Making zero tolerance on violence against women a central platform in post-MDG agenda would have, at the very least, a powerful symbolic impact. Given the long-standing culture of silence that surrounds violence against women, the fear and shame that so often silences its victims, the belief that it is men’s prerogative to beat their wives, that women invite rape by their clothes and demeanour, a clear and uncompromising statement that such beliefs and behaviour will no longer be tolerated will help to show the problem for what it is: the denial of dignity and bodily integrity to half of humanity. For that statement to carry weight, it has to be made by those with the mandate and power to make change happen.  If the world’s leaders who came together in 2015 to discuss the post-MDG agenda committed themselves collectively, loudly and clearly to a policy of zero tolerance and put in place the enforcement mechanisms that demonstrated the seriousness of their commitment, women’s rights activists across the world might finally be able to shame their governments into action.  And if that happens, that as yet unnamed young woman whose terrible fate shook her country out of its apathy towards its female citizens may do the same thing for women in the rest of the world.

Until a few weeks ago, most of us had a barely passing familiarity with Badaun in Uttar Pradesh. Around 200 kms and less than a four-hour drive from the national capital, Delhi, the area hit the headlines after the brutal rape and murder of two teenaged girls. It is an old story, told again with callous violence and viciousness. Two cousins — some accounts put them at 12 and 15 years of age, others at 14 and 15 — had to attend to nature's call. They had no toilet in their house and they went to the fields to relieve themselves. They never returned home. Their bodies were found hanging — their dupattas tied around their necks — from a mango tree. They had been raped, strangled and strung up like the spoils from a shikaar. Two young men from a neighbouring village, and two police officers are believed to be the culprits.
This is not the first rape in India, and it is unlikely to be the last. A report by PRS Legislative in 2011 looked at the abysmal state of women's safety in India. According to the report there were 23,582 rapes in India that year — almost 65 rapes on a daily basis and around 3 every hour. But, most experts believe that the number of rapes is underreported. There are several reasons for this — the starting point being the social stigma assigned to the rape victim and the perception of her having lost her honour. Rather than being seen as a survivor of a heinous crime, she is seen as the provoker of the crime. And, her gender is enough to stigmatise her for life. Different views are put forward: maybe she was dressed provocatively, maybe she led the boys on, maybe she had 'loose' morals, maybe she said no, but meant yes. We have all heard these comments from people who should know better — politicians, policemen, 'elders' of the community and the likes.
At the core of the debate on women's safety lie three main issues. The first is the availability of safe spaces — sanitation within the house, or rather the lack of it, and lack of street lighting indicate the paucity of safe spaces. The second is the dearth of spaces where the boys and girls, men and women can meet socially on an equal footing — schools, colleges, employment, and social occasions. The third issue is the age-old problem of the distinctions in social hierarchies and the acceptance of the rapist in the society while the victim is shunned.
The one thing you realise when you travel the length and breadth of India, visiting small hamlets and villages, is the lack of sanitation. There are few public toilets that are usable, even on state or national highways. Those that do exist make you fear attack from scorpions and snakes, not to mention the fact that they have doors that don't shut and windows that give you full view of the world, and the world a view of you — without any means of securing your privacy. Schools and colleges — public spaces where both genders congregate — show a similar problem. Toilets, and the privacy to use them, are such an important facet of safety and we don't discuss this problem enough. The norm is to use the world at large as a public toilet. Apart from health and hygiene issues, there is also the very grave issue of safety. The first thing to do is to address this. Young girls, even if they lived in the most secure state in the universe, should have the right to perform their bodily functions in relative privacy. This is something that most of us living in relative middle-class comfort in cities take for granted. Associated with this is the problem of darkness due to massive power cuts in towns and villages. And darkness encourages the breach of law.
Where boys and girls grow up, studying together, sharing playtime and understanding and respecting differences, there tends to be a natural evolution of gender sensitisation. On the other hand, when girls and boys are segregated and social intercourse is considered taboo, you have scenarios where stereotypes and old mindsets are perpetuated. The second important factor to help build a safer world for women is creation of spaces where they are not just considered to be equals, but also where their individuality and personal preferences are respected. The creation of these spaces needs to be backed by education not just of young boys and girls, but also of their parents, teachers, elders in the community and administration. Police reforms and judicial reforms would help, but unless society as a whole is in sync with the need for social reform that prevents young men from seeing young women as prey for the taking, no amount of policing on the streets or stringent punishment is going to help.
And lastly, there is a problem of social hierarchies and what is considered acceptable behaviour. While caste is as much of a factor as class, there is a third problem, and that is the unwillingness of those who wield power to bring about change. Caste and class reforms may take generations and women's safety cannot be held in abeyance till that is achieved. And, this is where the Indian State needs to step in. With the recent changes in law, rape trials are speedier and more stringent. We have seen the effects of this in both the Nirbhaya and the Shakti Mills rape cases – due process was followed and the guilty were punished. This needs to extend to the smallest hamlet in India. Women will be safer, if the system punished the guilty, without fear or favour of powerful local interests. However, as long as the guilty walk around with their heads held high and their chests puffed up with pride, and the victims cower in their houses in fear and shame, nothing will change.

 I want to make India a safe country – Would we wake up when 6 billion citizens of the world will ask us Is India safe to travel?
News on Rapes in India, a most common crime must go out of India. It only needs attention of the Governance and change in mind-set of every individual especially men. Police cannot drive it out of our country, politicians will never utter a word since they worry of their vote bank, media can only report about it in its most romanticized approach,and you and I consider ourselves too insignificant to drive any change. Let me assure you, that if any change can come, it would only come from what we do to bring world’s attention to this gruesome fact that every 22 minute a rape occurs in India as per Indian Government statistics.
There is no point discussing about the context of why rape happened, who was the victim, who are the perpetrators, what is the class, caste or background? It is simply to stop RAPES in India. The question is what can we do that brings public to vote for PAARI (People’s Action Against Rapes in India).
We voted for the new Prime Minister and his governance model, and I am hopeful that our Hon. PM would take a serious note of this situation and we will vote for PM acting against RAPES in India and be brutal in his verdict and provide safe environment to women in India. At this juncture, it is no tall ask but to demand resignation of current UP Chief Minister for the recent news from his state.
In India, for centuries discussions on rapes have been dealt with silence and victims as well as governance have found it difficult to deal with it. Has anyone questioned, Why? I feel, each one of us is responsible for it. The stigma and discrimination that we practice with the victim ensures that the accused are set free and give license to repeat their crime and encourage others to do it. Oxfam India released a report stating that there are 85.1% of rape cases investigated in 2012 were still awaiting trial and interestingly if we see the number, 93,000  rape cases are pending in various Indian courts.
During my work in the Water and Sanitation sector, I have traveled over 1200 villages and met men and women, girls and boys to know their views on water and sanitation facilities in their village. It was always girls who demanded for a toilet in school and women demanding bathroom along with toilet in their homes. Because they do not feel safe to defecate in bushes where they could be attacked by men. Wateraid in India has brought this issue in light several times and if we don’t review government policies and programmes to tune to what people really want – we shall be failing as a state, and as a nation.
How many of us know that there is an online campaign ‘I am Nirbhaya’ that gives important information and reports/cases on rapes in India. But truly, what is the impact on ground. Are we ready to hang rapists publicly? Is government ready to invest money to treat these diseased minds through psychiatric help and keep them indoors since they are menace to society? Are there other solutions that we have not looked for? I feel there is nothing that can work, other than constantly putting pressure on the government and create threat to their revenues. We are indeed a capitalist mind-set where everything is money.
Delhi is the epicentre of rapes in India, as the official sources declare and is the residence of the President of India and the Prime Minister of India. Is it fair to the women in Delhi? This also brings another important dimension of the whole issue – Media. What can media do about it? They can stop selling women as an object. They can educate and sensitize men about women’s issues. When children can teach a father why it is important to wear a seat belt and is rated as one of the favorite ads watched online, there could be better ideas to make men more sensitive towards women. Our media needs gender training and they need to learn making gender positive journalism a practice.
If media needs gender training then what do we want our Police to do to curb cases of rapes in India. Police is the most well informed citizen of our country and we can only prevent crimes with their help. This can only happen, if we respect them and give them more freedom to operate, to prosecute and to question the accused. They know the criminals network, vulnerable hot spots and places in the city and critical issues. We need to empower them to deploy more forces in such places, keep a tight vigil and work with public to prevent such cases. I do not mean to say, police don’t need gender training they too need to become sensitive to women’s issues.
We need to build accountability at every level whether legislature or judiciary to deal with cases on rape. “Some reforms are necessary and they are urgent. We could form special courts in every district that deal with cases on violence against women and make these courts fast track” opines Advocate Shaurya Gohil, Gujarat High Court. One of the objectives of judiciary is to punish the accused so that it sends a message to the citizens and deters them from committing a crime. The punishment should be such that it remains in public consciousness and memory to prevent such crimes. At the same time, women or people using rape to falsely accuse individual for personal vendetta should be dealt with equal seriousness when proven guilty. They also cannot be pardoned and left for pittance. We would also need to train professionals who run the fast track courts to be practical, sensitive and maintain confidentiality & dignity of the victim. In addition to increasing the number of courts, judges and prosecutors dealing with rape cases, we will need ‘Good Governance Model Code of Conduct’ for them. Public scrutiny should not only be made possible, but facilitated for better transparency and accountability.
Consistency in efforts and joint action is necessary at all levels including media, police, judiciary and public. We cannot give up and make sure that we work together without blaming each other, but creating a relationship of trust and respect.
If we want to set India on the path of accelerated development, women need to come out and participate in economic activities in more number than ever. And for this we need to provide them safe environment and secure habitats. Day or night, it should not matter what time of the day women are out of their homes – it should be safe all the time for them. Also, for this purpose every citizen needs to recognize women are important for economic growth of this country. We cannot get away from saying rape is India’s culture like US has gun culture. We have not taken responsibility so far to say RAPE must go out of India. Everyone keeps passing the buck and waits for others to fail so they can pounce upon them and take mileage. Here, we need a hard hitting campaign that does not blame but brings action.
Only if it hits the pockets of Indian government, hospitality industry and other service industry, then alone we will take Crimes against Women especially RAPES seriously. Accept, India is not safe for women. We have had enough!

Shalabh Mittal, currently serving as Faculty, with Entrepreneurship Development Institute of India, in the areas of Development Studies, Social Entrepreneurship and CSR.

Recently two rape cases occurred in Pakistan. A five year old girl was raped by five men in Lahore and a thirteen year old girl was left dead after being raped in Karachi. These incidents ran over children rights as well as human rights tragically. Incidents that disgraced dignity of women in the global society. This wildish act ruined the future of like child whose whole lives were ahead to live.Government is acting against criminals and I hope they will be punished according the very law. Criminals may be treated in the way that no one in the future dares to act this kind of wildish act.
Apart from the law, we still need to make our societies better and stronger. We must secure our societies having no risk of such incidents. We must make our people stronger enough to resist these accidents. People can be made guided in the way that can help them in securing their families. Women dignity can be sustained and raised on that level where it should be.
What I am trying to convey are some basic steps that can reduce such incidents if followed by people. The main theme is “Don’t Let Them Be Alone”. A brief description is below that must assured by people.
ü Never leave children alone outside home.
ü Always a male family member should be with females when they are outside .
ü After sunset children under 18 must be with family.
ü Children must avoid unknown contact.
ü Women/Girls who are students must leave for institute with a male family member and they must be received by a male when back to home .
ü Women and girls having jobs should leave home with a family member to bus stops and family member must receive her on relevant stop and bring her to home.
ü Women/girls must travel in groups mostly with known ones e.g. friends, town fellows ,class fellows, colleague and neighbors etc.
ü Females leaving for shopping must be in groups or with males.
We can reduce rape cases if we make people fallow these simple steps. These steps are actually our duties but we have a loose grip on these rules. We just need to ensure them in our societies. These rules can be applied on every society because these are attached to every culture.
The places on earth where rape cases have increased such as India today, we can make people aware that they can protect their as well other families. We can save society and we can raise the dignity of women on earth.
One of the main and important thing is that we can save a large amount of economy that is supposed to be spent on police and other security services in an attempt to stop these cases. This large amount of money can be spent on other problem such as poverty, education and health. That attempt may no longer more useful if people don’t participate. So let us make the people ready to resist this crime and build a strong world where women’s dignity and status will be ensured.

New Delhi: Delhi High Court on Wednesday reserved its order on the plea of the accused in the Uber cab rape case for recall of prosecution witnesses and directed the trial court not to pronounce its verdict till then.
Justice Sunita Gupta said the order will be passed on March 4 on the plea of accused Shiv Kumar Yadav, who allegedly raped a 25-year-old woman in December last year, after the court concluded hearing arguments of both sides.
Yadav, through his lawyer D K Mishra had sought recall of the 28 prosecution witnesses on the ground that the earlier defence counsel was "incompetent".
Mishra later restricted the list of witnesses he wished to recall to 13, including the victim, who he alleged had improved upon her statements.
He also alleged that various crucial evidence, including DNA samples and sexual assault kits, had been planted and tampered with.
Advocate Rajesh Mahajan, appearing for Delhi Police, on other hand opposed the plea saying if it is allowed, it will amount to a re-trial.
He said that if the accused wanted to recall only a limited number of witnesses then he should have moved such a plea before the trial court.
Mahajan also said that its easier to find fault with the earlier counsel in hindsight and said that the strategy and focus of earlier defence lawyer may have been different.
He said if present plea is allowed, a third defence lawyer might come at a later stage and then there would be no end to it.
Yesterday, the high court had refused to stay the ongoing proceedings before a trial court here in the case after Mishra requested the bench that till his plea to recall witnesses to re-examine them is pending before it, the ongoing final arguments be stayed.
Mishra, who had challenged the trial court's February 18 order rejecting 32-year-old Yadav's plea for recalling witnesses, had contended that there were lot of discrepancies in the case for which cross-examination of the prosecution witnesses was necessary.
In the plea before the trial court, Yadav had sought to recall all the 28 prosecution witnesses on the ground that he was not given fair opportunity to defend himself.
However, the trial court had dismissed his plea saying there was no change in circumstances except for a change of counsel, which was no ground to allow the application. 
Mishra had submitted that the entire cross-examination of all the prosecution witnesses conducted by the earlier counsel was "prejudicial to the interest of the accused.
He had said the prosecution had twisted the facts in such a manner that the accused before conclusion of the trial "gets convicted".
As per the charge sheet filed by the Delhi Police, the incident took place on the night of December 5 last year when the victim, who was working for a finance company in Gurgaon, was headed back home.
She had taken the taxi from Vasant Vihar to go to her house in Inderlok and the accused after taking another route, raped her, police said.
Yadav was arrested on December 7 from Mathura in a joint operation by Delhi and Uttar Pradesh police.
The trial in the case had commenced on January 15 and the prosecution had concluded recording its evidence in 17 days by examining 28 witnesses. The accused had not examined any witness in his defence.
The trial court had also recorded the testimony of the accused in which he termed the charge against him as "false".
The court on January 13 had framed charges against Yadav under various sections of the IPC for alleged offences of endangering a woman's life while raping her, kidnapping with an intent to compel her for marriage, criminally intimidating and causing hurt.

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