At one incident every 55 minutes, India's stalking cases doubled in 4 years

It was over a decade ago, but Isha Arora clearly remembers the day she was first stalked. She was 13 then and a Class VII student. She was going to a foreign language class close to her home in Ghaziabad. A man stopped her and told her he had been following her for months and that he was “in love” with her.

“He told me that he knew where I stayed, the school I went to and when I left home for tuition,” Arora said. “He even knew that I usually went out with my brother, but I was alone that day. I started shivering.”

The man gave her his number and threatened to pester her over her home landline if she did not call. “I informed my father and he told him he would complain to police if he didn’t leave me alone.” The man heeded the warning and stopped harassing Arora.
 

This kind of harassment is rampant across India, showed the government data. In 2018, 9,438 cases of stalking — one every 55 minutes, on average — were reported in India, according to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) report released in January 2020. This is more than double the cases (4,699) reported in 2014.

In January 2020, a 19-year-old was killed by her stalker at her home in Karakonam in Kerala, 30 km from Thiruvananthapuram. The same day, a 17-year-old was repeatedly stabbed on her way home from work in Kakkanad, in eastern Kochi by a man whose advances she had spurned, reported The NewsMinute.

In 2016, a 15-year-old was allegedly raped and set on fire on the terrace of her house by a  20-year-old stalker in Gautam Buddh Nagar in Uttar Pradesh. The class  X student had dropped out of school a year before the incident because she could not  deal with the  harassment.

“There are certain perceptions about stalking cases — they are not taken seriously by society or police,” said Ranjana Kumari, director at the Centre for Social Research.

Data and text: IndiaSpend