Delhi bus rapist Mukesh Singh is only a symptom of a bigger problem

The truth is that this is a very small part of the narrative of violence and assault women are forced to endure

“A decent girl won't roam around at 9 o'clock at night… A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy.”

That’s how Mukesh Singh rationalises his role in the inhuman gangrape and murder of a 23-year-old woman in Delhi. These and other remarks in the same vein were part of an interview Singh gave BBC from the prison where he is serving his sentence.

In short, the girl whose gangrape shook our collective conscience was also, according to her assailants, “asking for it”.

Singh’s remarks may conform to many of our stereotypes -- of men from lower socio-economic classes or villages feeling threatened by young urban women and taking out their frustration by assaulting and raping them. But the inconvenient truth is that this is a very small part of the narrative of violence and assault women are forced to endure.

The same article in The Daily Telegraph where the interview appears, quotes the rapists’ lawyer as having said: “If my daughter or sister engaged in pre-marital activities and disgraced herself and allowed herself to lose face and character by doing such things, I would most certainly take this sort of sister or daughter...and in front of my entire family, I would put petrol on her and set her alight."

A lawyer, one assumes, is not illiterate or a frustrated member of the “Great Unwashed” as we might like to think. So, what box would you put him in? What kind of twisted society do we live in, where a lawyer feels it’s better to murder his daughter than let her live life on her terms?

When a passenger was raped by an Uber driver, similar voices were heard, on Twitter and other forums -- again hardly illiterate, “uneducated” voices but they were singing the same chorus: why did she fall asleep in the cab? Why did she drink? Why was she out so late? At times, these remarks were coupled with the clever caveat “I don’t intend to blame the victim but…”  Such examples are legion and include women as well as men.

Even more shocking are the regressive results of a recent survey of school and college students, titled “Yuva Nagarika Meter”, which found that “87% of college students ‘agree’ that women have no choice but to accept a certain degree of violence”. If this is the view of our youth, you can’t help but clutch your head in despair. (On a related note, what are these degrees, you wonder - a slap, two slaps, a black eye or rape? Oh, but I forget, we live in a progressive country that does not recognise marital rape as rape at all so then what on earth could these women be complaining about.) 

Don’t make the mistake of thinking Singh’s remarks are an exception, and that they need to be seen in isolation. In complaints of rape, sexual harassment and similar crimes, victim-blaming is a favoured sport, across society, class, gender and age.