The case could have been a tragic incident, but it has triggered a real earthquake in Indian society. Nearly two weeks after the rape and murder of a 31-year-old medical intern in a Calcutta hospital, the Supreme Court, which itself took up the case, denounced this Tuesday a “horrible” and “appalling” crime, raising the thorny question of the frequency of sexual assaults in India.
“As more and more women join the workforce, the nation cannot wait for another rape to change things on the ground,” Chief Justice DY Chandrachud said. While the police have arrested a suspect who worked in the same hospital as the victim, the victim’s family suspects gang rape, a practice that is not uncommon in Indian society.
Rape culture
In 2018, the Thomson Reuters Foundation gave India the unenviable title of “the most dangerous country for women.” The situation has hardly improved, in a state where the crime rate against women has increased by 50% over the past decade. By 2022, there were nearly 90 reports of rape per day.
A relatively small number when compared to the size of the Indian population (1.4 billion inhabitants) and to the 250 rapes committed every day in France. But it remains very far from reality, to the extent that social pressure encourages most victims not to file a complaint. In 2016, 79% of Indian women reported having suffered at least one sexual assault.
The cause is “entrenched patriarchal attitudes and prejudices” in Indian society, which expose women in particular “to sexual and non-sexual violence,” according to the Supreme Court. “Patients’ relatives are more likely to attack female medical staff,” it continued. The use of violence is commonplace even within the home, since 65% of Indians consider it normal to beat their wife “in certain cases,” particularly if she goes out without permission (39%), neglects household chores (35%) or does not cook well (29%).
“Enough is enough”
The Calcutta incident, like an electroshock, triggered a wave of protests initiated by doctors and health professionals, soon joined by tens of thousands of Indians. Starting in Calcutta, the protest quickly spread across the country. “Enough is enough,” read the placards held by doctors at a rally in New Delhi on Saturday.
The wave of indignation goes beyond the condition of doctors. “If women cannot go to work and the conditions are not safe, we are denying them equality,” acknowledged DY Chandrachud, representative of the country’s highest court.
A facade of equality
Although the Constitution of India, adopted in 1950, grants women equal status to men, the traditional vision, inherited from Hinduism, continues to strongly permeate Indian society. A sign of this divergence between custom and law is the practice of dowry, which remains extremely common despite its official ban since 1961.
According to the National Crime Records Bureau, nearly 7,000 women were killed in 2020 over dowry, while 700 committed suicide for similar reasons. The caste system that structures Indian society also encourages a form of impunity for men from upper castes, as police are more reluctant to convict them.
Laxity of the authorities
The reason is that Indian authorities are often accused of being lax when it comes to sexual assaults. After the incident in Calcutta, the local police were singled out for a number of failings, so much so that the city’s High Court decided to transfer the case to the Central Bureau of Investigation, a federal agency, to “inspire public confidence”.
In 2012, the rape and murder of a medical student on a bus in New Delhi had already sparked strong emotion in the country, prompting the government to pass, a year later, a law criminalizing rape and strengthening criminal penalties against attackers.
However, the text is struggling to be applied, particularly at the first level, that of the police. In May 2022, in the state of Uttar Pradesh (in the north), a 13-year-old girl from the lowest caste came to file a complaint at the police station for having been forced for several days to be gang raped by four men. The police officer in charge of the report then subjected her to another sexual assault.
