Tasha Chauhan, 19, has always felt unsafe walking down a Delhi road after dark. “A couple of weeks ago, a guy drove up to me and asked me what my rate for the night is,” said the computer student. She walked off quickly in the opposite direction.

Last year, in her neighborhood in a well-to-do enclave in West Delhi, a boy threw acid in a girl’s face after she spurned his offer of love.

“I don’t feel free in the city to move around as and when I want,” said Chauhan, who took part in protests following the death late last month of the 23-year-old victim of a brutal gang rape on Dec. 16.

The physiotherapy student died in Singapore of grievous injuries sustained during her ordeal, so brutal that police are leveling charges of unnatural offences against the five accused.

It also reinforced the reputation of Delhi ― governed by woman chief minister Sheila Dikshit and home to India’s most powerful politician, ruling Congress party president Sonia Gandhi ― as one of the most unsafe cities in India for women.

Nationwide, rapes increased 25 percent from 2006 to 2011.

The worst city for women in 2011 was Durg-Bhilainagar in northern India, which recorded the highest incidence of rape at 5.7 per 100,000 people. In Delhi, which has a population of 18 million, 2.8 rapes were reported per 100,000 while it was 1.1 in Bangalore, 0.3 in Kolkata, 1.2 in Mumbai and 0.9 in Chennai.

Overall, North India, where patriarchal attitudes have strong roots, recorded 2,000 more rapes than the South, police data show.

“There is a high level of aggression towards women in Delhi, more than any other metro city like Kolkata or the southern states like Tamil Nadu,” said Ranjana Kumari, director of the Center for Social Research, which counsels rape victims.

“One reason is that there is a macho culture (here). People are coming and going from states like Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh which have deeply patriarchal societies,” she said. Haryana is the home of the khap panchayat, Taliban-type village councils known for banning women from owning mobile phones and advocating a lower marriage age for women to stop rape.

The capital has traditionally been shaped by outside influences. It has a history of invasion by marauders coming down the Khyber Pass, with the attendant rape, plunder and massacre, and the upheavals of the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan where many died in riots and massacres that affected all of northern India.

Delhi is swamped by the new rich who are well heeled on the one hand, and the underemployed migrants working in the informal sector on the other, said sociologist Anand Kumar of the Jawaharlal Nehru University.

“In between these two Delhis is a metro in transition,” he added, saying there was a breakdown in social and family values making the city unsafe for women.

Sociologists and police officers say migrants leave behind their families in the villages in search of better work opportunities and suddenly find themselves in a cosmopolitan city where there is no segregation of the sexes. “In Delhi, unlike in villages, sexual separation is not that important. So they think women are easy prey (and) they can do what they want and get away with it,” said former Delhi top cop Ved Marwah.

Though women in India have made huge strides, receiving better education and entering the workplace in larger numbers, they remain vulnerable due to deep-rooted patriarchy and misogynistic attitudes uneasy with the growing visibility of women in society. But safety for women is not a problem faced only in Delhi. Throughout India, crimes against women have been increasing, with reported rapes rising from 2,487 in 1971 to 24,206 in 2011.

Poor policing, a slow-moving judicial system in which rape cases can go on for several years, and a poor conviction rate have all aggravated the situation.

Kumar said the protests of the last two weeks showed change is taking place in Delhi, forcing the federal and state governments to put in place measures such as fast-track courts and reexamining laws dealing with rape.

“It is the tipping point.”

By Nirmala Ganapathy

(The Straits Times)