In India, Women’s Issues Are Finally Out Front

Having recently returned to the United States from a four-year assignment in India, I’m often asked about events in that country. And so it was with the brutal rape and murder of a 23-year-old student in New Delhi in December that set off big protests across India and was covered widely around the world. Why has this particular rape inspired so much outrage, people ask, when sexual violence is, sadly, so pervasive and commonplace there?

The savagery of the attack and the young woman’s inspiring story as the first in her poor family to pursue an advanced education and a career in medicine made this case deeply affecting. But this kind of crime and public awareness of it should not be seen as exceptional. In fact, outrage about the mistreatment and abuse Indian women suffer on a daily basis has been building over the last two decades. The rape in December may have drawn great public anguish because it came to symbolize the collected grievances of hundreds of millions of women.

Devesh Kapur, who leads the Center for Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that gender violence is coming to the fore as a public issue partly because India is now less divided by other big fault lines: religion and caste. India has not achieved universal communal harmony, but violence between Hindus and Muslims or members of different castes has declined, especially in the last 10 years.

“For 20 years, or at least 15 years, India was obsessed at least in the chattering classes with two cleavages: religion and caste,” he said. “The other cleavage, which is gender, was ignored.”

Those communal tensions have subsided thanks in part to two decades of faster economic growth. As that was happening, public attention shifted to issues that had always been below the surface and cut across religious and caste lines, including violence against women. The attention partly reflects the impressive gains Indian women and girls have made in education and health: female literacy jumped to 66 percent in 2011 from 54 percent a decade earlier, and maternal mortality fell by nearly half from 1998 to 2009.

Another big factor is the nation’s changing demographics: more than half of the population is 25 years or younger. This group appears to be more socially aware and liberal and is starting to find its voice. College students, for instance, organized many of the protests after the New Delhi rape.

Young people and an increasingly activist news media helped force politicians to respond to the Delhi rape case by quickly bringing suspects to trial and setting up a commission led by a former Supreme Court chief justice. The commission issued a thorough and scathing report on violence against women and last week Parliament passed a law adopting some of its recommendations. The new law is incomplete. It does not, for instance, allow a married woman to file rape charges against her husband. But it did break new ground by defining stalking, a big problem, as a crime for the first time.

India has a notoriously poor record in enforcing laws and this statute is very likely to suffer from that deficiency because it will be enforced by corrupt, poorly trained police officers. But the fact that it was adopted at all is a small step forward.

Another development that some find hope in is that women are reporting more rapes. Experts say this suggests that women are more willing to speak out and are having more success in getting police officers to register their complaints, which they are very reluctant to do.

The number of reported rapes per 100,000 people increased by 28 percent from 2001 to 2011 even as the incidence of other violent crimes like murder and rioting fell. The absolute numbers of rape cases, however, remain tiny for a country of 1.2 billion people: the government recorded just 24,206 rape cases in 2011, or about 2 per 100,000 citizens. By contrast, American authorities recorded 26.8 rape cases per 100,000 people that year (not including statutory rape cases).

“To the extent that reporting has increased because women feel more empowered and willing to come forward rather than suffer in silence, the increased reporting could represent good rather than bad news,” Rupa Subramanya, a Mumbai-based author and columnist, wrote recently. She and Vivek Dehejia, an economist, highlighted the increased reporting of rapes in their recent book, “Indianomix: Making Sense of Modern India.”

Real change will happen when norms and mores evolve. Most Indian families, like most Chinese or Vietnamese families, are still patriarchal and strongly prefer boys to girls, a preference they often exercise by aborting female fetuses. That historical preference has left large parts of India with many more young men than women, which partly explains the phenomenon of gang rapes.

Yet, traditional views about women’s place in society and the home are changing. The fact that the parents of the Delhi student knew that she was out watching a movie with a male friend the night she was raped is striking. Until about 15 years ago most unmarried couples would rarely venture out alone in public and would certainly not tell their parents about it.

Indian women are not as marginalized as they once were, and the reaction to this senseless death provides hope that bigger changes are coming.