If I delete ‘’Why do’’ from the title the rest becomes a widespread statement, rather a fact that “Indian men rape ‘’ or ‘’Only Indian men rape.’’ Before I begin I would like to state that this is not an apologetic article to defend the men who have actually committed a heinous crime. Recently I came across a twitter handle @WhyIndMenRape. The handle name amused me and appalled me at the same time because rape as a crime is not limited to a geographical location and it is not something which is ‘’Practised’’ only in India but still Indian feminists make sure that this is what Indians and the world should believe about us.
But how did we start using Indian men and rape together. To shed light on this I would like you to travel back in time when the Nirbhaya gangrape was making headlines all over the world.
“India’s daughter” – one of the most controversial documentaries which covers the infamous 2012 gang rape in Delhi that shook the conscience of the entire country – was banned by the Indian Parliament after the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting issued a warning the day before, advising against the screening of the film Government. When the news of release broke out, parliament witnessed outrage over this issue and Parliamentary Affairs Minister M Venkaiah Naidu said “there is a conspiracy to defame India and the documentary can be telecast outside”, though a lot of our MPs supported the release and were of the view that India should not shy away from this.
Machiavellian deception
In the above tweet Mr Dhume finds no reason to doubt the agenda western media has been carrying since the December 2012 Rape. But here is something which contradicts his claim. Just few days ago documentary filmmaker of India’s daughter Anjali Bhushan alleged that Leslie Udwin (producer and director of India’s daughter) “coached” Mukesh the rapist and even attempted to get Nirbhaya’s parents to mouth the exact lines from the script outline that she was adamant on.
Though the allegations haven’t been proved yet there is a good chance that this might be true.
Udwin described the documentary as “an impassioned plea for gender equality … This is a documentary I left my young children and the comfort of my home for, to spend two years dedicated to a crucial cause in the public interest of women, not just in India but worldwide,” she said.
Her intention appears to be flimsy or she is trying kill two birds with one stone; the other Bird being India’s image worldwide.
Apart from the allegation made by Anjali Bhushan there are a lot of other discrepancies in the way the film was shot and released. Leslie Udwin had claimed to have spent two years In India but documentary film maker is granted a visa only for 6 months as per the rule and needs to be renewed time to time (there is no record of her visa getting renewed) apart from this shooting a documentary on a tourist visa is not permissible under law. And She had originally sold the film not as India’s daughter but as “Delhi the Rape Capital of the World.”
She did not submit the full, uncut footage of the interview for approval by jail authorities; An accusation she denied saying that she said she had taken the full 16 hours of “raw, unedited footage” to the jail, but a three-member review committee, after watching it for three hours, told her; “We can’t sit through all this, it’s too long.” So, she submitted an edited version which was cleared.
The Hatchet Job
Coming back to the “Western conspiracy” I would like to quote Maria Wirth’s words from her blog
“On my last visit to Germany, I jolted when on 27. December 2013 the most popular TV news ended with “another gang rape in India”. It was one of only five topics of the 15 minutes broadcast.”
This gang rape received unprecedented publicity. It reached national and local news all over the globe. It reached even a friend in Slovenia, who is usually oblivious of what is happening. Why was it broadcasted all over with such intensity? Was it because Indians protested in a big way and demanded harsh punishment? Those protests should have actually gone in favour of India, as they made clear that a common Indian consider rape as completely against their culture. But The opposite happened.”
While the whole country was burning in rage, the western media was busy sabotaging India’s image world-wide. Most foreign newspapers and news channels carried out the report as if rape is a phenomenon which takes place only in India but none of them acknowledged the fact that countries in west seem to be way ahead of India when it comes to sexual Violence. Media reduced India’s rape crisis to a cultural problem and Indian men being culturally lacking and barbaric. The obsession is woven around the hypothesis that Indian men are born and bred to sexually assault and degrade women and revolves around the Indian “rape culture”.
People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones at others
Four months before the Delhi case in Steubenville, Ohio, a 16-year-old girl was raped by members of the high-school football team. The case is that the young woman was dragged, drunk and unresponsive, from party to party, where she was sexually abused. In contrast to India where the case lead to protests and demand for changes in law and raised question on Women safety and existing rape laws the 16-year-old victim of the Steubenville case was blamed for the mishap. Not only the girl was raped but a Steubenville football player posted a 12-minute video related to the incident on YouTube that was deleted before police got the report. Quoting Emer O’Toole’s words from her article:
“In Steubenville, football-crazy townsfolk blamed the victim and it took a blogger – Alexandria Goddard, who is now being sued – and a follow-up article from the New York Times four months after the incident to get nationwide attention for the story .”
The arrest In the Steubenville case took place only after the Delhi rape case became a global Issue. Ignoring the fact that Indian women are actually respected in their country which lead people to come out on streets to fight for their respect the foreign media got busy in portraying as If India was the country of rapists and men in India were of bestial character.
Exhibit-1: A recent report carried out by International business times on the lines of Rape an epidemic in India.
Exhibit-2: Continuing the propaganda, LA Times’s article
It is not India which is in denial of its rape problem but the west which they sadly don’t acknowledge.
Writer Kenneth Turan finds the following part “Jaw dropping”:
Speaking to BBC in an interview, one of the rapists, Mukesh Singh said, ‘A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy’. According to a report in The Telegraph, the rapist also went to say that if the girl (nicknamed Nirbhaya by the media) and her friend and hadn’t fought back, the gang wouldn’t have inflicted the savage beating. Calling her death an accident, he said: “When being raped, she shouldn’t fight back. She should just be silent and allow the rape. Then they’d have dropped her off after ‘doing her’, and only hit the boy”.
(Source –India.com)
Of course, no crime is less than the other but I am sure if he cared to find out the ground reality of his own country and tried to interview the perpetrators or citizens of his own country he would know that thinking is no different than ours.
I would like to draw his attention towards similar remarks made by his own countrymen which of course he may not find jaw dropping.
This is not about which lesser evil of the two is but the constant effort to jeopardise India’s cultural image while hiding their own misogynist mindset.
There are several other international cases which needed media attention, but the foreign media kept on highlighting India. The Rotherham Child abuse case, Vatican City child abuse, Calderdale sex assault, Paedophile ring involving 40 British politicians, Oxfordshire case…
…And many more cases (which didn’t get much airtime); was such focus given to these cases and were these places branded as the rape capitals of the world? Do they ever discuss the cultural baggage US/UK carry which encourages sexual violence? Or the attitude of men in western countries towards women? Or how many headlines even clearly accused Pakistani men for Rotherham case, most headlines disguised them as men of Asian origin. How many news channels gave soundbites on Vatican City? Even when the UN has accused the Vatican of “systematically” adopting policies allowing priests to sexually abuse thousands of children I don’t see investigative coverage of these cases by the media. And this of course is fuelled by our eminent feminists who never dare to comment on atrocities carried out in other countries but always jump the gun whenever Rapes in India are mentioned.
If only Leslie Udwin had spared a thought for the girls in Rotherham or cared to interview Vatican’s paedophiles; Or if she paid attention to glaring statistics of rape in her own country (United Kingdom)
“Only 1,070 rapists are convicted every year despite up to 95,000 people – the vast majority of them women – suffering the trauma of rape – according to the new research by the Ministry of Justice, the Home Office and the Office for National Statistics.
The figures have reignited controversy over the stubbornly low conviction rates for sex crimes, as well as the difficulties in persuading victims to go to police in the first place.
Although 90 per cent of rape victims said they knew the identity of their attacker, just 15 per cent went to the police, telling researchers it was “too embarrassing”, “too trivial” or a “private/family matter”.
Only 1,070 rapists are convicted every year despite up to 95,000 people – women being the vast majority of them – suffering the trauma of rape.”
(Source: http://t.co/5o0npMmcx3)
Why this posturing?
An argument may arise that She can’t reach each and every rapist in the world but my question to them will be why Just India’s daughter? If she really wanted to help the victims and fight for gender equality and justice how could she forget 1200 girls of Rotherham? Yes we can’t compare two rapes but a gang of 5-12 men raping 1200 girls definitely required her attention but amazingly I haven’t read any comments on that by her on this issue.
I urge Ms Udwin to spend at least a month on investigating rape problem of UK and try to expose UK’s law enforcement, courts, and politicians who worked so hard to cover up the issue for so long.
Religious and cultural motivation
Bias of media in reporting these cases may have a religious connotation which was already mentioned by this article on Niticentral. The article deals with the notorious reporting carried out by the media as India is a Hindu majority country and how this is eagerly used as a marketing tool by evangelists. Indian mainstream media is no exception in covering up for such crimes by priests and clerics and most media houses didn’t even reveal the name of the worst offender of the 5 men who raped Nirbhaya as he was a Muslim.A recent case where a Priest raped impregnated a minor and later on forced the girl’s father to take the blame,this case should have caught media’s attention but sadly it didn’t. A bowdlerized version of truth is presented by national/international media due to left-liberal bias and hypocrisy at work while dealing with social and political issues.
“India” the made up rape capital
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”- Joseph Goebbels
Now let’s come to the part where one needs to challenge this theory of India being the “Rape capital”.
Now, as figure-1 shows, India has much lower number of reported rape cases per 100000 people; in fact, India is nowhere in the top fifteen. This could provoke an argument about rapes being less reported in India – but that problem is hardly with India or ‘Indian system’. Almost every country has problems with under-reporting of rapes for several reasons – low conviction rates for rape cases being the prime reason. (Actually, India has a higher rate of conviction for rapes than UK, for example – so the numbers mentioned in the figures above do have solid basis for not considering India as a specifically bad case in terms of women security).
Much to my amusement that no Indian media outlet/publication house challenged this hype created by western media. This indulgent attitude of our media lets the calumny continue. Aftermath of Delhi gang rape was particularly hard for the India tourism sector – worldwide promulgation of this case led to drop in tourism to India by 25%.
For our mainstream media, indulging a fraudulent narrative that ended up harming the country’s reputation and following that – economy, was not an issue.
As an Indian I am ashamed that women have to face such heinous crimes and the perpetrators roam around without compunction. No crime whether it takes place in US or UK or India is less pain inflicting than others but I am also saddened by the fact that the inferiority complex and self-flagellating attitude we have in abundance about our own country helped western media to make a great play of our patriarchal mind-set; The “Slumdog Millionaire” syndrome where with great pride we accepted Oscars for a movie which derided and caricaturized our country in the worst possible manner on the global platform (Actress Meryl Streep backed Leslee Udwin’s “India’s daughter” for Oscars, she is on a campaign to get it nominated for the academy awards.)
We don’t think twice before mentioning how safe US or Europe is whereas hard data counters this claim. We let the westerners get away easily with contrived, pretentious, absurd, hollow, inauthentic, pseudo-statements about India’s gender equality. Gender equality for which the western women fought for years while most countries didn’t even give voting rights to women – whereas women in India had no issues in being considered equal citizens, legally.
This is not an attempt to prove that India is better than other countries but the question remains; why is only India in focus?