Fear, loathing, fight-back

When the Dhaula Kuan rape happened, I told myself she was out on the road at two in the morning. So I won’t ever do that and I’ll be safe. When a girl was recently gang-raped in Gurgaon, I told myself that I would just never go to Gurgaon. But this time, the girl got into a bus at 9.30 in the evening. She had a male friend with her. She had broken no rules, but she was still raped.Now there’s nothing left to tell myself... apart from maybe I should stop living in Delhi,” says Yashodhara Bhatt, 26, a fashion stylist, as she recounts the dreadful sequence of events that has convulsed the national capital in the last one week.
Bhatt is articulating what millions of Indian women, both young and old, across the country are feeling today — fear and loathing. If you turn an ear towards it and listen carefully after 6 pm, when it gets dark, you can almost hear it. Delhi suddenly seems a little quieter, and one half of its population a little more scared than it already was before. A question mark hangs over the capital of India. Look closer and the question mark morphs into the face of an anxious woman, any woman. She wants answers, but there don’t seem to be any. Parul Kumari, 30, the owner of a home furnishings store in Delhi, says she’s had friends call her over the phone and begin to cry. And that she herself has trouble sleeping because she cannot stop thinking about what the girl must have had to live through while she was in the bus. And Nazoo Sharma, who is 23 and a lawyer in Delhi, says she is the same age as the victim. “She was watching a movie — The Life of Pi — with a friend. They were trying to get home. That girl is me. She was doing exactly what I do. Go out with a friend. Chill out. But now when I call my mother for reassurance, she says, ‘I cannot protect you’.” The fear has spread, outwards across the country. In Bangalore, Shraddha Selvan, 39, a dentist, reminds you her city is home to the second-highest number of crimes against women, after Delhi. In Kolkata, Divya Banerjee, 27, a lawyer, remembers the argument six bikers picked up with her and a male friend as they sipped on beer in their car near Salt Lake. “They were muscle for a political party. They wanted money because we were indulging in ‘wrongful activities’. They let us go because, thankfully, I knew the local party leader. But what if I hadn’t?” And in Mumbai, Caroline D’Souza, 35, a merchandising manager in a garment export house, says “After you’ve been raped, at least then your ordeal should stop. But it doesn’t.”
To placate Bhatt, and Parul, Nazoo, Shraddha, Divya and Caroline, the Karnataka state assembly has dusted off the “draconian” Goonda Act for use against rapists. In Nashik, police have begun to note down the numbers of autos ferrying lone passengers from the railway station to the bus stand. In Lucknow, the police say the beat system and foot patrolling will now be vigorously carried out.
But if the anxiety has multiplied, so has the anger. And there’s a fight-back happening across towns, cities and metros. Groups of enraged women demanding justice for the bus rape victim and better protection for the vulnerable in future have already been water-cannoned twice. They have been shoved into waiting police vehicles and have endured the severe Delhi chill during night vigils at India Gate. But they are in no mood to relent.
“A tipping point has been reached,” says Deepak Mehta, associate professor with Delhi University’s Department of Sociology. “It should first force us to clean up our transport system. Because if you look at the figures, an unproportionally large number of rapes by strangers (as opposed to rape by men who know their victims) happen in moving vehicles.”
Then, he adds, perhaps we will move on to educating boys and girls about the opposite sex. “But that begins in the classroom. It takes years and is harder to do.”