Not just Bengaluru's shame: Rising India can't afford such lawlessness

Can't afford to have half the population so intimidated

The mass molestation of women in Bengaluru on New Year’s Eve has aired for the global public another invidious facet of India’s deep-seated gender prejudice. This version of gender chauvinism is a slightly updated variation on an old theme; it posits a reluctant acceptance of the growing crowds of women in the workplace but within strictly defined behavioural boundaries. That means that, today, it is deemed tolerable for women to educate themselves to the highest levels, and work as accountants, bankers, hoteliers, chefs, programmers, back-office executives, marketing managers, even be chief executive officers and own and run their own businesses. Indeed, the big change in 21st century India is that the political discourse and popular culture have increasingly embraced the concept of the working woman. But when it comes to the social sphere, the stereotypes reassert themselves. Where it is okay for men to party, drink in bars and engage in noisy celebratory revelry, women appear to be judged by a different standard of behaviour. This attitude, in turn, becomes the justification for harassment by lumpen elements. Karnataka Home Minister G Parameshwara was almost West Asian in his approach, blaming the victims for being “westernised”, the sub-text being that it was they who had provoked their attackers. This worldview made him disinclined to urge the police to take action until he was forced to backtrack, using the age-old excuse of being “misquoted”. 

But why single out Mr Parameshwara? In 21st century India, the Ram Sene attacked women drinking in pubs in Mangaluru in 2009. And the chief ministers of Delhi and West Bengal – both women, it should be noted – had similar reactions to, respectively, a murder (2008) and a rape (2012) in their states. Sheila Dikshit deplored the “adventurousness” of young women who drive themselves home at night after a TV journalist was found murdered in her car. Small wonder, then, that Ms Dikshit was physically attacked when she appeared at a mass protest against the rape of a young paramedic in 2012, the incident that captured headlines worldwide. Mamata Banerjee questioned the victim, a mother of two, who was kidnapped from a Kolkata pub and raped, for being in a pub in the first place. More recently, Manohar Lal Khattar, chief minister of Haryana, said he wanted girls to dress “decently”. 

Note that none of these politicians has singled out for criticism the boorish behaviour of men. To be sure, harassment of the kind that occurred in Bengaluru represents a minuscule percentage of the oppression to which Indian women and girls are subjected within their homes by male relatives and neighbours. But in an India that has been enjoying steady economic growth, social tensions are being accentuated with growing cohorts of confident women enjoying independent incomes, careers and lifestyle choices, and confronting predatory male bigotry. History has demonstrated the power of the state in enforcing social change and leaders need to treat the harassment of women not as occasions for airing personal prejudices but for enforcing law and order. This is a practical imperative too: A rising India can no longer afford to have half its population so intimidated that its stays outside the workforce.