Women in India: Not yet safe

If you’re a woman in India and feel safe, consider yourself lucky. Leching, eve-teasing, catcalls, groping, and even sexual harassment at work, is passé. Today, any woman in any part of India can be raped, gangraped, and murdered. It could be an educated doctor resting within hospital premises during a gruelling 36-hour shift in Kolkata, or a nurse returning home from work in Uttar Pradesh, or a 3.5 year-old baby girl in a school van in Jharkhand — women in India are not safe from sexual assault. It can happen anytime, anywhere, and to anyone — that’s the sordid state of affairs.

As we step into the 78th year of our nation’s independence, Indian women today feel thoroughly let down. This is not what our foremothers and forefathers envisaged for us. What freedom is this if almost half the population struggles for safety? Women are shackled to an unbreakable feeling of insecurity. Our girls fight prejudice, social taboos, pay gap, burden of familial responsibilities, and several other obstacles every day. And after overcoming a retinue of problems, when they step out to work, we can’t even offer them protection. You want greater participation of women at the workplace, but do you ensure our well-being? While we are on the roads, when we want to rest between work, when we have night shifts? Do women have access to safe infrastructure? Can we travel on the road without a care in the world? Ask the hundreds of doctors and nursing staff who don’t have rooms to rest between long work hours or the thousands of women workers who jostle leering men and unsafe conditions daily while going to work. And then, comes the icing on the cake — we are told not to step out late at night, travel alone, do night shifts, dress the way we want — the victims are ensnared and asked to exist without basic freedoms while rapists roam free.

You know what really stings about the Kolkata rape case? That it happened in my city of birth, usually considered as one of the safest cities in India. But also that it happened within the confines of a woman’s workplace. How long are we going to dish out and believe the lie that women in India are safe? They are not and have not been for a long time. Maybe the Kolkata rape case has caught your attention because such an occurrence is untenable given the social strata of the victim, the site of the crime, and the presiding administration that’s led by a woman chief minister. And while this incident is heinous enough to make the bravest of us look over our shoulders, don’t for one moment believe that it’s a solitary one. 12 years after Nirbhaya, this is not Nirbhaya 2.0 — there have been scores of other women of different castes, work profiles, geographies. They have been exploited and abused, their bodies invaded against their will. This is not an issue that’s limited to one state, one city — the rot runs deep encompassing the length and breadth of our vast country. As per the 2022 annual report of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), over 31,000 rape cases were registered across India while the total number of crimes against women continued to increase — from 4,28,278 in 2021 to 4,45,256 in 2022. A breakdown of these statistics suggests that there are 51 cases of crimes against women every hour and at least one rape every 16 minutes. And the conviction rates are shockingly low. According to the NCRB, conviction rates for rape ranged between 27 per cent - 28 per cent from 2018-2022.

Today, we protest, tomorrow we forget. We don’t hold our politicians accountable, we don’t raise a hue and cry if a pervert on the road molests us, we don’t speak up against the latent misogyny that surrounds us in our neighbourhoods, WhatsApp groups, and even within our families. We have for far too long allowed, turned a blind side, and sometimes even, enabled harmful male behaviour that has no place in civil society. How many can afford to send their daughters overseas? How many can ensure eternally protected lives for their female kin? How long will we fall bait to politicos’ glib talk and not ask for comeuppance?

We, the people of India, who routinely bask in our global achievements, have failed the women of this nation. The executive and the judiciary must awaken from their reverie — mete out the harshest punishment, and make an example of these perpetrators. Two decades ago, Bengal led by example by judicially executing Dhananjoy Chatterjee for raping an 18-year-old girl at her Kolkata home in 1990. In 2004, he was hanged to his death. Maybe only executions can deter rapists and safeguard the women. Put the fear of the law in them and don’t make us wait 20 years.

The writer is an author and media entrepreneur. Views expressed are personal