The New Year eve incident in Mumbai has shock value. But that should lead to introspection and a reality check on why crimes against women continue to hit the headlines

When 70 to 80 men surround two women, push them, touch them, pounce on them, it is not “molestation”; it is sexual assault. So before we even begin to discuss the incident that took place in the upmarket Mumbai suburb of Juhu in the early hours of January 1, 2008, we should call the crime by its real name.

The assault happened not because a group of “lustful louts” were indulging in “Mumbai molestation”, as the media put it by using sexy shortcuts to describe the incident. It was in fact an illustration of a range of assaults on women that take place every day of the year and in every part of this country. It became national news because there was visual evidence. The other thousands of similar and worse crimes get only a brief mention in the newspapers because cameras are not positioned to record them.
Other crimes

On the same day that the Juhu attack took place and a few days later, here is a list of some of the other crimes against women that occurred in Mumbai and Maharashtra as reported in the English press:

On December 31, a 28-year-old woman in Khadegolavali, Kalyan (east) was raped by two men who entered her first floor room in a chawl, beat up her husband who is a zari worker, and raped her. This was at 2.30 pm in the middle of a working day.

On December 31, in Maharashtra Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh’s constituency of Latur, a 14-year-old girl was found hanging from a tree. When her body was exhumed, there was a suspicion that the men who killed her had also raped her. She had complained about these men “teasing” her but no one paid heed.

On December 31, the conductor and driver of a state transport bus raped a woman who was on her way to a village just north of Mumbai.

On January 5, a 13-year-old girl was gang raped and burnt alive, her body found in the fields in a village in Ahmednagar district, Maharashtra. She was on her way back from school.

Maharashtra is competing with other states in its record of crimes against women. Last year, Mumbai police registered 356 cases of “molestation”, that is almost one a day and the railway police have a record of 1,068 cases, almost three a day.

None of these incidents was reported in any detail, nor did they make it to the front page or “national news”. Crimes against women don’t always make news. They hit the headlines only when they are particularly horrific, or when they affect women like us (that is urban, middle class women) or when they are captured on visual media.

The Mumbai incident has shock value. But that shock should result in introspection and a reality check. The reality is that crimes against women occur, have been occurring and have not stopped just because there is more money, more education, more urbanisation, more globalisation, more liberalisation. The difference is that more of them are being noticed and reported.
Broader perspective

The incident reveals the indifference and moral callousness of society to dignity and human rights of women, girls, minorities, adivasis and the poor. The media ought to have shown greater sensitivity about the identity of the victims.

Teesta Setalvad

Of course, no woman  who has had to suffer the pushing, shoving, groping, unwanted stares and comments that are part of the daily occupational hazard of daring to be out in the public space in any of our cities  will object to the focus this one incident has brought to the issue of safety of women in cities in general and in Mumbai in particular. But the discussion and comment that has filled many pages in the Mumbai newspapers needs to be placed within a broader perspective.

Firstly, Mumbai did not become unsafe overnight just because two women were attacked. As a matter of fact, Mumbai has the reputation of being “safe” for women because millions of women have claimed its streets and pavements and its public transport system out of economic necessity. “Working women” have been a part of Mumbai’s life-blood for many more years than other cities in India. And the city’s public transport system, however flawed, and its spatial layout that necessarily means most areas are crowded day and night, provides safety of a kind.

But for the majority of women in cities or villages, “safety” is an unfulfilled wish most of the time, depending on how you define it. If by “safe” you mean that a woman should be able to walk on the street, travel on a train or bus, go shopping, go to the cinema, go to a restaurant or a pub, go to a cyber cafe, go to college or school, go to an office, drive a car or scooter, work in factory, work in a field, play any sport  in other words do what any human being would wish to do without being pushed, hit, abused, attacked, then all Indian women are “unsafe”. Millions of women are not “safe” even within their homes.

Secondly, there is the class angle that the debate following the Mumbai incident has thrown up. Newspaper reports emphasised that the suspects  12 of the 14 came from the same building, one constructed under the slum redevelopment scheme and were encouraged to surrender by their families  were “school dropouts and from a lower middle class”. The assumption made is that class envy and lack of education drives these men to participate in such attacks  “an explosion of barely exposed class tensions in Mumbai”, as one newspaper put it.

The Shiv Sena has taken this further by claiming that “migrants” are responsible for such actions and that they are giving the city of Mumbai a bad name. However, the Sena has quietly dropped that campaign when the names of the suspects revealed that the majority were “locals” and not recent “migrants”, by which the Sena usually means people from U.P. and Bihar.

Both these propositions hardly merit discussion. How does the origin of a man, his religion, the colour of skin, level of education, where he works and whether he works, his caste, his nationality matter when it comes to the question of sexual assaults? Are such crimes committed only by the poor, the lower caste, the unemployed, the uneducated? Those who make such an argument should analyse the data on domestic violence that is available through the latest National Family Health Survey (NFHS III).
The real issue

It’s wrong to blame the media for highlighting the Mumbai molestation case. It was the onlookers’ responsibility to take to task those who were responsible. Such incidents can be prevented only if people stand up to such anti-social elements.

Kiran Bedi

Thirdly, each time an incident like this becomes “national news”, there are demands for more stringent laws, better policing, more effective courts and greater vigilance. After a particularly horrific rape case, there were demands that rapists should be hanged. There is no doubt that if the culprits of the crime are caught and punished after such a high-profile incident as the one in Juhu, it will be exemplary.

But this alone will not stop the crimes. Laws have never succeeded in changing mindsets. The death penalty has not reduced the number of murders. The Dowry Act has not stopped the custom of giving and taking dowries. Stronger laws dealing with crimes against women, although essential, have not reduced the incidence of crime.

The real issue that we must grapple with when such incidents occur has a name; it is “patriarchy”. It includes the inability of men to accept that women have rights, that they are human beings, that they should be left alone, that they have a right to occupy space in the public arena.

Time and again, deep-seated patriarchal attitudes are laid bare when an assault on women, particularly in cities, is reported. The time-worn arguments about the way women should dress in public are doled out. Women will be “safe” if they stay away from certain places, we are told. Women must not go out in the middle of crowds of men, we are advised. Men will be men, so women must be careful, we are warned.

The basic attitude that still prevails, irrespective of caste, class or creed, can be summed up as follows: Men know, women don’t; men must teach, women must learn; men can behave as they like, women must conform. Need one say more? The exceptions do not make the rule, as we have seen time and again.

How do we change these patriarchal values? There are no easy answers. Women’s groups the world over have been struggling to do just this.

But it is this issue that needs to be debated. It is these attitudes and the many ways in which they continue to be reinforced through the popular media that we need to expose.

E-mail the writer: sharma.kalpana@yahoo.com

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It happened to me

One evening at 7.30 p.m., I was walking back home on the footpath of busy Convent Road in Bangalore where I live. Two men on a two-wheeler wanted to beat the traffic by using the footpath and yelled at me to get off. When I refused, the driver threatened to run over me by revving up the engine. When I would not give way he verbally abused me, got off and pushed me against the wall. The pillion rider, in turn, kicked me when I hit back. Despite the road-long traffic-jam and a crowd of onlookers who didn’t intervene, except for shouts of protest, nobody wanted to get involved. After filing an FIR and a case of violation under law and order, the two riders who were arrested were found to be engineers holding MBA degrees, presently working for a prominent software company (TCS). The case is under progress.

Ayesha Matthan

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Alarmingly women are increasingly given the onus of taking care of themselves. Society and the law and order machinery are more inclined to blame the woman rather than take responsibility for the unsafe situation.

Sushma Verma of Samanata Mahila Vedike, Bangalore

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Earlier only some places were designated as "dangerous" for women. Today violence lurks anywhere, any time. The large migrant population of womenface an even greater risk. Most do not even have access to basic amenities like toilets and have to search for empty spaces at unearthly hours.

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