Via The Guardian, a commentary by an English woman with long experience in India: Delhi gang-rape: in India, anger is overtaking fear. Click through for the full article and links. Excerpt:
The statistics are not new but they are as visible as the families, men, women and children at the protests. More than 635 reported rapes in Delhi last year, one conviction. In places like Karnataka it's worse, but Delhi, remember, prides itself on being modern India. As the Guardian's correspondent Jason Burke rightly said, what is happening in this peculiarly Indian mix of anger, sentimentality and denial is a clash between the new and the old.
The new, modern, techno India, the image this country wants to sell, is tainted by its attitudes to women. I watched the news as "Braveheart", as the victim is nauseatingly called, was flown to Singapore. Why? Out of sight, out of mind? India has some of the best hospitals in the world. You cannot move in places like Chennai for Europeans coming for hip and knee replacements. Who moves a patient with organ failure, brain injury, infection, who has already had a cardiac arrest? Young men were calling up news stations to offer their own intestines as hers had been removed as the result of the damage done to her with an iron bar.
This is the crux of it and not yet a discussion that many are prepared to have here. Rape is not about sex. It is about power. It is about torture. It is about brutality. Yesterday, another girl was assaulted on a bus. Last week a two-year-old girl was raped to death in Gujarat while the victim of another gang rape committed suicide. Her choice was to drop the charges or marry one of her attackers.
Arundhati Roy has spoken about how the army uses rape as a weapon in Kashmir and Manipur. As do the police and the upper caste. Surprise has been registered that Damini was not even a dalit. For untouchables rape is everyday; where there are no toilets, women are raped in the woods.
Yet what is emerging is that middle-class women are not safe. They do not go out after sunset. One told me India is worse than Saudi Arabia. No one trusts the police. A raped woman may have to undergo "a finger test", where a doctor determines whether the woman's vagina is "habituated to sexual intercourse".
Ordinary women here are angry. They carry placards saying "Kill the cruels" or "Torture them to death", but it is heartening to see young articulate women on TV having a long overdue conversation.
The political response has been appalling. Sonia Gandhi's address to the nation was totally inadequate. Some female politicians blame rape victims for their "adventurous spirit". The president's son spoke of women protesters as "highly dented" and "painted". The statements of the political class have been slammed as inane and meaningless.
Damini's body was brought back from Singapore and cremated at night, surrounded by huge security to avoid more protests. She was not taken to her village as is the custom. Her mother collapsed.
Damini is not her name. She remains unidentified. To be raped, after all, is a shameful thing. Damini is a word from Sanskrit. It means lightning. It is also the name of the heroine in a famous Indian movie who refused to let a rapist escape justice, and several big Bollywood stars have expressed their outrage. Nonetheless, Bollywood continues to churn out movies in which women are harassed into submission in the name of romance.
What some politicians fear most is that this young, educated population reminds them of the Arab spring and they are demanding change. They fear what they call "the pink revolution".
When people say, as they so often do, that feminism is the preoccupation of a few white middle-class women in the west agonising over whether to wear lipstick or not, I wish they could see these angry men and women out at night demanding that women be safe, who say rape is always a weapon used to keep women in fear.
For something is happening here, anger is overtaking fear. The dam has burst. The debate the politicians want is one of law and order, but the radical one is about how to change the culture itself. And because this is India we are taking about a myriad of cultures.
Somehow, though, through the shock and the trauma, this country is examining itself and its much-vaunted modernity does not look so modern.
