Indian women issue
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
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