Violence against women is endemic in India. But the details and aftermath of one assault have shocked the country into a public and agonizing round of soul-searching. On Dec. 16, a 23-year-old physiotherapy student in New Delhi was raped inside a private bus by the driver and five other assailants as she and her fiancé were returning home from a movie. After being raped and beaten with an iron rod for over an hour, she was thrown out of the vehicle and left for dead along with her fiancé, who was also attacked. As she struggled on life support, the streets erupted in protest over the heinousness of the crime, as well as the complacency that has allowed India to become such a dangerous place to be a woman.
While India is rightly praised for its economic growth and other modernizations, its attitudes toward women seem stuck in the Dark Ages. And India's future as a democratic and economic superpower may well rest on whether its long-oppressed girls and women are allowed to become more equal members of society.
Female feticide is still in practice in India, as is making sure boys get more food and schooling than their sisters. "Eve-teasing," the local term for sexual harassment, is unsettlingly common, and unfortunately, so is rape. The problem is not limited to India's cities. Days before the New Delhi rape victim died from her injuries on Dec. 29, a 17-year-old girl in Badshahpur village in northern Punjab state killed herself after waiting for police to arrest two men who had allegedly raped her weeks earlier. "A woman is a possession, like a piece of land," says Aman Deol, general secretary of a Punjab women's-rights group. "She does not have freedom of any kind."
But there's more to it than that. To paint Indian women as a faceless group of passive victims is not only a disservice; it's wrong. After all, India's most powerful politician, Sonia Gandhi, is a woman, with peers across many other fields. Middle-class women in particular have greater opportunity than ever. The accomplishments of the New Delhi victim, who was a medical student and among the first in her family to get a higher education, epitomize the best India can offer its young women. That her future was so violently stamped out underscores the conflict between the injustices of the old India and the promise of the new. As millions more Indians no longer live on the brink, what men and women alike want is "accountability," says Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director of Human Rights Watch. "They want a system that works for them."
But accountability and reform are tricky things. Facing a nation in uproar, the police have arrested all six alleged assailants and are set to charge them with murder, for which they could face the death penalty. Officials have pledged to toughen up existing antirape laws and have set up a task force to oversee women's safety in New Delhi. They have also created special commissions to fast-track other cases of aggravated sexual assault. But improving safety in New Delhi will not help women in other parts of the country. It will take a concentrated effort to see that new or improved laws passed in the capital are enforced nationwide. "It has to be a systemic change," says Ganguly. "That's a much harder task."