The Rape Capital and Rape Island

1 January 2013 08:27 pm - 1 - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

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New Delhi has been dubbed ‘the rape capital’ of the world, and one would have thought that the latest case to be added to this appalling list would have been greeted with a resigned shrug.

Instead, the gang rape inside a bus of a 23-year old physiotherapy student sparked off mass protests and riots in the Indian capital, prompting police to ban protests and fire tear gas and water cannon in a futile bid to quell the fury.

The ban backfired. Protests continued despite it and prompted Congress leader Sonia Gandhi to try and appease the protesters from her balcony, promising them firm action from the government.

The victim and a male friend boarded a bus with darkened windows after an evening out. The four male passengers were friends of the driver and cleaner, and began making lewd remarks. When the victim’s friend objected, they beat him senseless with iron bars. The young woman was then raped for one hour inside the bus, and both were left bleeding, senseless and naked by the roadside, where passers-by just watched for one hour until the police arrived and took them to hospital. The rape victim remained in a critical condition for several days, and recovered enough to give a statement only to die in a Singapore hospital this week.

All the attackers have been arrested and now face murder charges, but public outrage remains unabated, and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh promised to look into demands of better policing and harsher punishment for convicted rapists, though exactly what could be done isn’t clear enough in a country where a high proportion of policemen are working for VIP security –just as in Sri Lanka.

Protest in New Delhi

Interestingly, doesn’t the New Delhi outrage ring a bell somewhere? Complacent types will say that Colombo is relatively safe for women even after dark. But, for the benefit of those with very short memories, there was a similar incident last Christmas Eve in Sri Lanka. The two cases are very similar, they are quite identical, except that in our case it happened in a tourist guest house in Tangalle, where a young Russian woman was allegedly gang raped in a brutal manner and her British male companion was assaulted and killed.

In this case, too, no one went to their aid even after the gang’s departure from the guest house in the pre-dawn hours, even though the British national was said to be personally known to the enterprise’s owner, and the place presumably had a staff, manager and a security guard on the Christmas Eve.

Police arrived in the morning to find the Russian woman unconscious and naked inside a room, and her companion dead from injuries sustained. The attackers were a powerful government Pradeshiya Sabha Chairman and his close companions. But the story soon became just one of those things very soon forgotten because of two factors. Both victims were foreigners, and some of the press reports suggested that the rape victim was a Russian sex worker whom the British national had befriended in Colombo, and not his girlfriend (in other words, serves them right!).

The case, which few people remember now though court proceedings are supposed to be going on, took some bizarre turns. Powerful political interests took over. The rape victim was transferred from a government hospital to a private concern. Though she stated initially that she could identify some of her attackers, she retracted this later and began to suffer from a ‘sudden case of amnesia.’

The British embassy made the usual diplomatic moves and the deceased British national’s brother flew over, to be promised a fair investigation by the authorities. But that seems to be that. With no one there to identify the assailants, the case is as good as dead (circumstantial evidence is useless unless politically correct; we as adults should know that by now).

suspects of tangalle rape taken to court (file photo)

In the Delhi case, a professor of economics was quoted as saying that the magnitude of the protests had much to do with the social status of the female victim, coming from a middle class background. He added that the attackers were migrant workers coming to Delhi from remote villages, hence ‘third class citizens.’ But Prof. Dipankar Gupta, a sociologist at Shiv Nadar University, Noida, said the public outrage was partly due to the victim’s background.

According to Dr. Gupta, “there is a strong resonance. She doesn’t come from a particularly wealthy family. Her parents had sold their land and paid for her education rather than a dowry. The attack happened in a normal part of Delhi, at 9 pm and no one can possibly allege that she was behaving in a way that was ‘not in keeping with Indian traditions’ and all that junk.”

In our case, of course, it’s the other way round; two‘second class citizens’ (foreigners) attacked by a group of ‘first class’types. It may well be that both groups of rapists saw their victims in the same light – in our case, a white woman (as for Russian women, they are all deemed to be tarts), and hence decadent and fair game; the Delhi student, socially a class apart, sophisticated, and in reality a world apart for a migrant worker, too, would be seen as equally decadent.

Complacent voices would declare that Sri Lanka’s position regarding sexual violence against women in better than India’s (which is ranked No. 4 by the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s TrustLaw website, after Afghanistan, Pakistan, Zaire and Somalia). We are always very good at making such comparisons with India and feeling complacent. But assuming that the victims at Tangalle had been our own university students, it is doubtful if public protest would have gone beyond a picket line in Colombo, or if the course of law would have taken a better turn.

The body of the slain tourist being taken to Matara Hospital (file photo)

Unfortunately, a ‘hang them, they deserve it’ mentally pervades the public in India as it does Sri Lanka. But those who’d gladly see criminals hanged probably haven’t seen conditions inside jails in both countries. General prison life is horrible enough, but death row is abominable. As neither country carries out the death penalty (India makes exceptions only in such cases as terrorism), those condemned to death here as well as there face life imprisonment. And that, Kumbhakarna firmly believes, is worse than death. If anyone wants to argue with that, visit a jail and see for yourselves.

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Comments - 1

Darky Wednesday, 02 January 2013 03:30 AM

Any way, Rape Capital is hundred-times better than Rape Island!

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The Rape Capital and Rape Island

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