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It can be even harder outside the glare of city lights. At the edge of a wheat field, Badshahpur's villagers held a funeral on New Year's Eve for the 17-year-old girl. Like the victim in New Delhi, she had a dream: she wanted to be a police officer. After she was attacked in November, she pressed the police to take action, but no arrests were made until Dec. 26, the day she swallowed poison and died.
After their daughter's funeral, the victim's parents sat in the courtyard outside their two-room house. This region has been in the spotlight before: in 2006, scores of female fetuses were found in a mass grave nearby. Sitting next to her husband, the victim's mother asks a tragic and understandable question: "Who wants to have a baby girl when the attitude of the police and society will be to deny her justice?" If India does not take its inhumanity toward women seriously, it will always be a lesser nation than it can be.