Mixed reactions ranging from shock, amazement, incredulity and scorn greeted the verdict of a Thomson Reuters Foundation report released on June 28 that ranks India as the world’s most dangerous country for women, more dangerous than Afghanistan, Syria and Saudi Arabia. According to the report, India’s 600 million women are more at risk of sexual harassment, human trafficking, forced labour, sex slavery and domestic servitude than in any country worldwide. Soon after, the London-based The Economist ran a cover story titled ‘How India is failing its women’ detailing that Indian women are less likely to work than their peers in any G20 country except Saudi Arabia, and contribute only one-sixth of India’s GDP, among the lowest worldwide.
Inevitably the conclusion of the Thomson Reuters Foundation was outrightly rejected by the BJP/NDA government in New Delhi, which slammed it for using “flawed methodology to present an erroneous picture” to “malign the nation”. Outrage was expressed not just by the Central government but by the media and the intelligentsia. Mint, a national daily, published a study with data indicating that the incidence of sexual violence reported by women is lower in India than in 43 developing countries. Another research study highlighted that the incidence of rape is 15 times greater in the US than reported in India. But curiously these studies overlooked the inconvenient truth that most rape cases in India are unreported because of fear of social opprobrium and police personnel notorious for patriarchal attitudes and proclivity for custodial rape.
Outraged nationalists who adduce rape statistics as evidence of the degree of gender violence, also tend to obfuscate the ugly reality of the thousand unnatural shocks — lewd language, touching, groping, stalking — that women and young girls have to suffer on a daily basis at the hands of tens of millions of uneducated, under-socialised sex addicted males, their vulnerable minds addled by low grade popular cinema and unchecked pornography streamed onto ubiquitous mobile phones over the Internet. Constant fear of molestation in India’s crowded public spaces influences the education and work choices of the country’s beseiged women citizens.
Unfortunately five years after the infamous rape and murder of Nirbhaya, a young para-medical student in Delhi, sparked countrywide anger and revolt, overdue police and justice system reforms (India’s police to population ratio (13/million) and judges (19/million) are the lowest worldwide), are hanging fire and little has been done to upgrade shabbily designed school curriculums which perpetuate gender stereotypes and patriarchy. Obsessed with electoral calculuses centred around religion, caste and social engineering, the country’s political leaders and ineffective intelligentsia have little time or inclination to address education, law and order and justice reforms which are necessary preconditions for making the country safe for its 600 million women citizens.