A mural painted on a roadside wall in Ajmer, Rajasthan, condemning the rape and murder of a doctor in India’s West Bengal state. - AFP
BENGALURU: A Bollywood horror film showing to packed cinemas across India features a demon that hunts and kills “modern women”.
The headless bogeyman, the literal embodiment of patriarchy, targets women who work or study, wear Western clothes or simply use smartphones.
The roaring success of this campy movie aptly titled Stree, or Woman, is in part because it resonates deeply with Indian women who feel preyed upon at work and in public.
Its release coincided with a horrifying tragedy hitting the headlines.
On Aug 9, a 31-year-old trainee doctor, resting after a 36-hour shift in a government hospital in eastern India’s Kolkata city, was raped and murdered.
The incident unleashed protests across the country, as it was a graphic reminder that India has not become much safer for women in the past decade.
And just a few weeks before, a 33-year-old nurse in Uttarakhand state was raped, robbed and murdered, allegedly by a labourer, as she walked home.
“Why does this keep happening? When will this stop?” a teacher friend texted this reporter, echoing the existential question Indian women are asking today in family living rooms, hospitals, classrooms, offices and WhatsApp groups.
Women in India are constantly on high alert. Obscene comments from strangers on the street, molestation on buses, workplace harassment and intimate partner violence have schooled most women not to expect respect from men, even those who are friends or family members.
The Aug 9 attack has been a painful deja vu, reminding most Indians of the brutal gang rape of a 23-year-old physiotherapy student in a moving Delhi bus in December 2012.
She succumbed to her injuries about two weeks later in Singapore, where she was receiving emergency treatment.
The media, prohibited under law from disclosing the victim’s name 12 years ago, had called her Nirbhaya, which means “fearless”.
The August Kolkata incident bears distressing similarities to Nirbhaya’s: another female medical professional trying to make it in a city, another dehumanising crime, another death.
The local media has christened her Abhaya, another word for “fearless”, in homage to her tragic predecessor. It has forced an introspection about what has changed for women in India in the intervening 12 years.
Nirbhaya’s violent ordeal had sparked nationwide protests and garnered international attention, forcing the Indian government to reform rape laws and institute stricter penalties.
Recommendations by a judicial committee led to the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013, that increased punishment for rape from seven to 10 years.
If the victim dies due to the crime, or is below 12 years of age, the minimum jail term is 20 years, which can be extended to life imprisonment or the death sentence.
The definition of rape was also broadened from penile penetration to penetration by other means.
Procedural changes in the past decade have made it marginally less onerous for a woman to file a complaint. Victims can now lodge a complaint at any police station, not just within the jurisdiction where the crime occurred. The intrusive “two-finger test” that doctors conducted to confirm rape was barred in 2022.
More women in India are reporting rape than ever before.
Around the time of the 2012 attack, police records registered around 25,000 rape cases a year. Since then, there have been no fewer than 30,000 cases reported each year. It touched 39,000 in 2016.
More than 31,000 cases were recorded in 2022 – that is one rape reported every 16 minutes.
But studies estimate that 99.1 per cent of women who face sexual violence in India still do not report it, fearing social stigma and lack of family support.
The police also often turn away women who report stalking or rape threats.
Harsh punishment alone has not made women safer, activists and lawyers say.
In 2020, four men were hanged for Nirbhaya’s rape and murder.
“Did that scare predators? So many rapes occurred after that too,” said Rebecca John, a Delhi-based lawyer who works on sexual assault cases.
John noted that when judges look at high sentences like death or life imprisonment, “they expect the prosecutors to produce higher-quality evidence, which doesn’t happen”, partly due to indifferent and shoddy police investigations, she added.
Only 2.56 per cent of all rape cases led to the accused being convicted in 2022, according to a Ministry of Statistics report. For cases involving attempt to rape, the conviction rate was just 0.92 per cent.
Faced with the grim reality that even the death penalty has failed as a deterrent, many Indian women are today demanding other severe punishments.
“Burn the culprits and not candles,” goes one viral outcry. On Change.org, a petition demands castration as “a desperate plea for justice”.
Such calls reflect the “helplessness, anger and anguish women in India feel”, said Vimala K.S., vice-president of the Karnataka state chapter of the All India Democratic Women’s Association.
The current legal framework is sufficient to control violence against women, she said, as long as it is supported by reliable police procedures, like “serious inquiry, protection of witnesses, safeguarding the crime site and protecting the evidence”.
The Supreme Court took up the Kolkata case of its own volition. It has highlighted lapses in the investigation and raised questions not only about inefficient and delayed police action, but also suspicious cover-ups.
All these issues, activists say, are common in rape cases. As Delhi-based journalist Rituparna Chatterjee said, what needs fixing is “not the severity of punishment, but the surety of punishment”.
While the assaults emerge from patriarchal mindsets, protections like curfews, too, are oppressively paternalist, said Aishwarya Tandon, an economics student in Delhi.
She recalled that in 2023, her friends were celebrating the Indian cricket team’s win at around 11pm with ice cream at the India Gate in Delhi, when patrolling policemen scolded the young women, asking them to go back home.
“They said nonsense like ‘don’t come crying to us if something bad happens’. Police, college authorities and government bodies should facilitate, not restrict, women’s access to public places,” Tandon said.
The government has acknowledged that violence remains a significant barrier to women’s equality, employment, development and mobility.
But politicians do not prioritise building inclusive and safe public infrastructure, leaving women vulnerable to violence, wrote Shilpa Phadke, co-author of Why Loiter? Women And Risk On Mumbai Streets, in the news website Scroll.
The Indian government has allotted 72.12 billion rupees (S$1.1 billion) to the Nirbhaya Fund set up in 2013 for women’s safety.
States have spent much of it on installing CCTV cameras and creating apps, but several studies show that public infrastructure improvements, such as better-lit streets, safe toilets, frequent public transport and waiting rooms at bus stops, and responsive policing can be real game changers.
Most Indian women have long been forced to trade mobility and independence for safety, but more of them are pushing back today.
If the Nirbhaya protests called for legal protection and justice 12 years ago, Indian women today are demanding free and safe workplaces and streets, in the day and at night.
Thousands of women marched at midnight in cities including Kolkata, Delhi, Bengaluru and Trivandrum on Aug 15, India’s Independence Day, to “Reclaim the Night”. “A new freedom struggle begins tonight,” wrote Ms Rimjhim Sinha, a student who made the first call to this movement, in a Facebook post.
Even in the movie Stree, it takes women standing their ground and claiming their space before the monster can be slayed. - The Straits Times/ANN
