The extremist and alarmist nature of Indian society

Has the horror about sex attacks in India caused public opinion to swing so far the other way that intelligent discourse becomes impossible, asks Amrit Dhillon.

Anyone watching the anguished debates on Indian television after the 2012 Delhi gang rape would have been forgiven for thinking that India has the world’s worst record for sexual violence against women.

In an endless lament, Indians reviled a culture that was impossibly cruel to women and did so as though they had a monopoly on such behaviour. That perception seems to have persisted. A new survey by the Pew Research Centre in the US shows that nine out of 10 Indians think that sexual violence is a “very big issue”.

I’m all for self-criticism, but I fear that many Indians believe they are uniquely cursed when they are not. An average of 80,000 rapes take place every year in England and Wales. One in five American women is sexually assaulted or raped during their time at college and university. In Europe, an EU survey found that one in 20 women has been raped. Yet, in none of these places, I suspect, would nine out of 10 people say that sexual violence is a “very big problem”.

In citing these figures, my intention is not to claim that one country’s sexual violence cancels out another’s or makes it less serious. Sexual violence against women anywhere, at any level, is repugnant. My point is that Indians need to regain a sense of perspective. The distressing fact is that terrible violence continues to blight the lives of millions of women the world over.

Indian society has not had the benefit of a cultural revolution of the kind that swept through the West. The average Indian man is steeped in patriarchal ideas that he has never been forced to question. He has a very long way to go before he starts revising his world view.

Until that happens, it does not help when admittedly well-meaning people keep debating the issue of sexual violence in catastrophic terms.

Part of the reason for this extremism is the Indian tendency to become overwrought. You only have to watch a television discussion for two minutes to see high-emotion, finger-wagging and slanging matches when individuals disagree.

An extreme position, combined with shrill emotion, leaves no space for a more reasoned debate – and the consequences of that can be unpleasant. Because society was baying for retribution as a form of catharsis after the Delhi gang rape, the government responded by pushing through tough new anti-rape laws last year.

Last month, a Mumbai court sentenced three men, who had raped a photojournalist at a deserted textile mill, to hang under the new law that carries the death penalty for those convicted of multiple sexual assaults.

The three were the first to be tried and convicted under the new law aimed at repeat sexual offenders. The judge was reported as saying “there needs to be zero tolerance for such incidents”.

Her words capture the new orthodoxy now prevailing in India, predicated on the belief that the harshest punishments are necessary to deal with sexual violence, a conclusion that was reached because everyone talked themselves into thinking India had a unique problem.

Dissenting voices are being drowned out. Some women’s activists argue that to prescribe the death sentence for rape puts women in greater danger because the rapist will think he might as well murder her too if he is going to hang anyway for the lesser crime.

Moreover, such a savage punishment also feeds the patriarchal notion that rape is “worse than death” for a woman.

India needs to temper its responses to rape. Savage punishments are inevitable if you place a crime within the kind of apocalyptic and exceptional framework that some Indians have been doing for the past year with rape. Too many savage punishments end up brutalising a society.

Now, anyone who criticises the new laws – by saying for example that it is wrong for the accused to have to prove his innocence rather than the other way round – receives a barrage of the same extremist condemnation that gave rise to the new laws in the first place.

In fact, the Pew study shows that 74 per cent of Indians think the laws on rape are too lax.

Perspective is what is lacking in all of this. And balance. After years of doing nothing about sexual harassment, never mind violence, India has swung to the other extreme – and neither outcome is satisfactory.

Amrit Dhillon is a freelance journalist based in New Delhi