Is any woman in India safe? Reuters/Amit Dave
“Is Mumbai going the Delhi way?” a poll by a newspaper
asks. Insensitive? Flippant? Divisive? All that and more—with
absolutely no thought to nuance, opening no new discourse, asking the
wrong questions, and trivializing the issue.
The
posturing, the silly games of one-upmanship played across cities—mine
is safer, mine is better—lull us into a false sense of security. Keenan Santos and Reuben Fernandez would not have been stabbed to death two years ago for standing up to hooligans
who were harassing the young women they were out with, if Mumbai was
particularly safe. Cities don’t rape, men do. Bombay might seem safer by
default because it is so crowded that you rarely find a secluded corner
to conduct a rape. In the case making headlines
now, the suspects in the gang rape of a photojournalist found an empty
mill and they used it. Violence comes in many forms and to the most
unexpected places; last year Mumbai had the case of a Spanish tourist raped
in her own bed by a thief who shimmied up through the window. And being
a stranger in any part of the world, not knowing how to play by their
rules, leaves you most vulnerable. That partly explains why a recent CNN
report went viral as Michaela Cross, a US student at the University of
Chicago, who spoke out about her sexual harassment in India.
We
all have stories: I was new to Bombay and waiting to board a local
train. I didn’t know where the ladies coach stopped and happened to be
near the door of the general compartment when the train pulled in. The
crowd pushed me in with one mind and then molested me for what felt like
a lifetime. I fell out a few stations later, in tears, my clothes in
tatters. A few days later, my cab was followed home from Churchgate
station by another cab with a man reaching in to grab me—I made the
cabbie drive straight to the police station. Some weeks later on an
early morning, a pujari, mind you, a man of God, followed and propositioned me on a relatively empty stretch of road.
