Belatedly as usual, India’s lackadaisical academics and the intelligentsia are beginning to weigh the socio-economic costs of the gender crimes epidemic allowed to spread almost unchecked across the subcontinent. Women are being forced out of academia, corporates and industry resulting in huge economic loss to the nation. Urmila Rao & Summiya Yasmeen report

The vicious gangrape of a 23-year-old paramedic student (christened Nirbhaya (‘fearless’) by the media) in a moving bus in Delhi on December 16, and her subsequent demise in Singapore (where she was belatedly flown for medical treatment) on December 29, outraged the nation and focused intense public and media attention on post-independence India’s open secret — the rising incidence of gender crimes. It has beamed a searching spotlight on the legal, psychological and emotional damage caused to half the national population by official indifference and societal acceptance of gender violations as minor aberrations. This patriarchal mindset has imposed a heavy burden on the Indian economy in terms of education, career choices and low productivity from women in homes, schools, colleges and workplaces.

Pallabi Roy, a 20-something sociology postgraduate student of the prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Delhi, begins her day with a 10 km auto-rickshaw ride from C.R. Park to the sprawling JNU campus. She used to take the bus earlier, but after the heinous December 16 incident, has chosen this relatively more expensive commuting option for personal safety. However, auto drivers haggle aggressively, often decline to ply and are rude to women.

But even within the greater personal space of the autorickshaw, Roy is made aware of her gender. Drivers stare into rear view mirrors and passing youth on motor-bikes casually whistle and jeer at her. Non-verbal abuse is also common-place with lounging males rubbing themselves suggestively. Flashers are not uncommon either.

Within the confines of the salubrious campus of JNU — a postgrad institution — as well, Roy is conscious of her gender. “Women are constantly being judged and evaluated and often harassed by male students,’’ she complains.

For safety and security reasons and because she can’t work late in the JNU library, Roy usually returns home early.  She balks at taking an evening stroll in the nearby park where she is likely to be besieged by leering men. “On field trips, I have to take innumerable precautions. I don’t trust cab-drivers, police or even fellow students. I am well aware there’s no forum where I can register a case and get speedy justice,’’ says Roy.

Three months after Nirbhaya breathed her last and the subsequent national outrage and numerous government assurances to improve law and order in the national capital, little has changed for Delhi’s 7 million women citizens, particularly its girl and women students exemplified by Roy who live in 24×7 fear of being molested, assaulted and violated in buses, autos, campuses, workplaces, on the streets, and at home. However the unprecedented protests spearheaded by students and women’s organisations had the beneficial effect of forcing the Union government to constitute a three-member committee headed by former Supreme Court judge J.S. Verma, to recommend amendments to laws relating to crimes against women.

Remarkably, within a month of its appointment, the Justice Verma Committee (JVC), which received a whopping 80,000 suggestions from the public (but none from the government or Congress party), submitted a detailed 630-page report to the UPA-II government. While faulting the government, police insensitivity and patriarchal mindsets for the rising gender crime wave, the committee recommended stricter implementation of current laws, police reforms, gender sensitisation of security agencies and judiciary along with several changes in the Indian Penal Code (IPC). It also proposed stiffer sentences for rape convicts and inclusion of voyeurism and stalking as offences attracting up to three years imprisonment.

Pushed into a corner by national anger and media onslaught, the UPA-II government issued an ordinance on February 1, within a week of submission of the JVC report. But the ordinance has been criticised for being a substantially diluted version of the Verma report. While it proposes capital punishment in cases where rape leads to death, and enhanced punishment for rape and other crimes such as stalking, voyeurism, and acid attacks, it has rejected the Verma Committee’s recommendation to criminalise ‘marital rape’, to ban politicians accused of sexual offences from contesting elections and for exempting soldiers on active duty in areas in which the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958 is applicable, for gender crimes. As per legislative practice, the ordinance has been transformed into the Criminal Law Amendment Bill, 2013 (aka anti-rape Bill) which was passed by the Lok Sabha on March 19 and Rajya Sabha on March 21. In the public domain, the anti-rape Bill has been criticised for making stalking and voyeurism bailable offences and increasing the age of consent for consensual sexual intercourse from 16 to 18 years, thus criminalising voluntary teenage sex.

Meanwhile belatedly as usual, India’s lackadaisical academics and intelligentsia are beginning to weigh the economic costs of the gender crime epidemic allowed to spread almost unchecked in the subcontinent. “The constant harassment faced by women is a deterrent to their mobility, independence, and workplace productivity. It adversely impacts academic performance and limits their career choices. The Justice Verma Committee’s report is most welcome. It argues that for women to become equal partners in public life, education and work, the state must acknowledge the challenges posed by a deeply patriarchal society and make changes in the Constitution, law, governance, policing, and education systems, and society. The committee’s proposals to overhaul the country’s police and legal systems are unexceptionable and should have been included in the government’s anti-rape Bill. The JVC has also proposed that the Sexual Harassment Bill, 2012 which is expected to be tabled in Parliament shortly, must expand its ambit beyond workplaces to include education institutions. Young women students too require institutional support to redress sexual harassment faced inside and outside their institutions,” says Dr. Albeena Shakil, professor of English at Bharati College, New Delhi, a women’s rights activist and member of the All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA), which boasts a membership of 9 million.

That fear of sexual and other harassment forces many girl and women students in schools and colleges to abandon their education mid-way is a major issue in most of the country’s 260 million households, of which the Central and state governments have been in denial for decades. In particular, this factor coupled with apathy towards toilet facilities in government schools (47 percent of schools countrywide don’t provide separate toilet facilities for girl children) explains why 56 percent of girl children quit school after class VII. According to Dr. Janaki Abraham, professor of sociology at Delhi University, harassment of women students is pervasive in college campuses countrywide.

“Many women students have to abandon their doctorate studies midstream to escape sexual harassment from their guides. When women are not allowed the freedom to pursue their academic interests, it reduces the chances of what they want to achieve and are capable of achieving. Because of the failure of the State to provide adequate safety, women don’t get equal education and career opportunities. Women students have to carefully plan what to wear, their mode of transport and what time to leave the campus, use libraries and laboratories. These safety issues take up a lot of mind space and affects their academic performance. It’s time the government demonstrates the will to provide real safety to women instead of mere tokenism,” says Abraham, an alumna of Delhi University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA who has published several research papers, most notably in the Asian Journal of Gender Studies and Indian Journal of Gender Studies.

The conventional institutional and societal approach to dealing with sexual harassment and gender crimes in India has been to off-load the responsibility of women’s security and safety upon women themselves, by way of prescribing restrictions upon travel and social interaction, self-defence training and moral rectitude. This abdication of the State’s responsibility has been strongly criticised by the Justice Verma Committee which has made a forthright call for viewing gender crimes from a perspective of human rights as opposed to societal norms. The committee reminded the Central and state governments that India is obliged to honour the Charter of the United Nations, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and CEDAW: Elimination of Discrimination against Women, which it has signed, to protect women’s civil and political rights.

“Indian officialdom and society tend to view the issue of women’s rights through the prism of modesty and conservative sexual morality, rather than respect their right to bodily integrity. One of the key elements central to the concept of bodily integrity is that women have the right of mobility, freedom of movement and association with individuals of either gender. Notions such as chastity are outdated. Any type of verbal or physical assault of a woman is an infringement of her civil and political rights. Government and society must address these issues urgently as women not only constitute half the population, they are a significant economic force as well,” says Dr. Ratna Kapur, an alumna of the Harvard Law School (HLS) and visiting fellow of HLS, Cambridge University and Yale Law School, who is currently professor of global law at the Jindal Global Law School, Delhi.

The hidden outcome of the pathetic inability of the Central and state governments as also institutional managements to provide safe environments for women to study, live and work in, is that even highly qualified women are almost forced to opt out of academia, corporates and industry resulting in huge economic loss to the nation. “Lack of safety for women means the country could be deprived of at least half its talent pool, which in the aggregate translates into massive economic loss. Therefore ensuring safety of young women by investing sufficiently in law and order and justice systems is important not only as an end in itself, but also for the realisation of broader national development objectives. National productivity is being severely jeopardised by women having to live in fear of life and liberty, and failing to realise their full potential. Moreover there are socio-economic costs of widespread gender criminality. If women are prevented from augmenting household incomes, living standards will fall and they could be subjected to even greater harassment at home,” says Prof. Hardayal Singh, an alumnus of University of Bath, UK and Royal Institute of Public Administration, London, former chief income tax commissioner and ombudsman, and currently dean of the School of Inspired Leadership (SOIL), Delhi.

State and societal neglect and failure to invest sufficiently in law and order maintenance not only hits household budgets, it also negatively impacts corporate profitability and reinforces gender biases against women. Other things being equal, business enterprises and corporates have to incur additional expense to ensure the security of women employees.

According to an HR manager of a top corporate who wished to remain anonymous, his company prefers to hire males because they tend to be more cost-effective. “When our women employees need to travel out of town on work, in view of unsafe road and train travel for women, we have to pay for air travel. And if they can be persuaded to visit tier-II cities, we have to make elaborate arrangements for their safe passage and stay. If they work beyond office hours, we arrange safe taxis for transport. All this adds to our expense and hurts profitability. Moreover unlike their Western counterparts, Indian women seldom bother to learn self-defence, martial arts or even carry pepper sprays. They are always helpless damsels in distress,’’ he complains.

Meanwhile even though the tsunami of protests nationwide has forced an all-party consensus to enact legislation to punish and deter gender crimes, better policing and prompt redressal mechanisms for sexual assault victims are a long way off. The low priority accorded by the Union and state governments to the critical issue of maintaining law and order is evident in the pressing short-age of policemen nationwide. According to data compiled by the Bureau of Police Research and Development, the ratio of police personnel per 100,000 citizens in India is a mere 134 against the United Nations prescribed norm of 200. Against this, the Russian ratio is 976:100,000, Italy 552, France 369 and the US 233. Moreover the number of police-women is declining. In 2008 there were 57,466 women police nationwide; in 2009, the number declined 1.4 percent to 56,466. It’s also pertinent to bear in mind that almost 30 percent of police personnel are assigned for VIP security — to safeguard politicians, bureaucrats, retired military brass etc.

The original sin of under-investment in law and order maintenance (the Union Budget 2013-14 allocates a mere 3 percent of its total expenditure of Rs.16.65 lakh crore for police, law and order) is compounded by the perfunctory job training given to the country’s 2 million police personnel, the majority of them school dropouts and rustics. Even officers let alone the men in state police forces (under the Constitution, law and order is a state subject) are uncouth, ill-trained in civil discourse and ignorant of the most elementary policing norms, techniques and forensics.

Angered by a series of rapes and other atrocities visited upon unprotected women in Bangalore, last March (2012) your editor sent a query under the Right to Information Act, 2005 to the police commissioner of this garden-turned-garbage city enquiring how many times the policing technique of deploying undercover policewomen as decoys to flush out rapists and sex offenders has been used in the past three years. The police commissioner forwarded the query to all 91 police stations in the city asking them to answer the query directly. The 21 sub-inspectors who replied reported that none of them had ever employed this elementary technique.

The poor and obsolete training that police personnel — the officer cadre of the exalted Indian Police Service (IPS) included — receive is reflected in their boorish and insensitive attitudes towards gender crime victims. The indifference of IPS officers became manifest in the Delhi gangrape case, when not a single senior police officer appeared before the Verma Committee to offer advice or suggestions to shape the anti-rape legislation, forcing the committee to publicly criticise the force’s “institutional bias against women”. “On account of the patriarchal structure, male police officers do not take complaints of rape seriously,’’ says the report (p. 48). Moreover in one of the appendices, the Verma Committee included the testimony of four trafficked children who witnessed three policemen gangrape a minor in a police van.

Indeed there is a mountain of evidence piling up in support of an emerging consensus that the collective mindset of India’s 2 million police and paramilitary forces hasn’t changed since 1861, when the Indian Police Act was legislated in the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny of 1857. At the time the police were given the mandate to brutally subjugate the native population in the service of the British raj. Since then the recommendations of several police reform commissions including the Rustomjee (1975) and Justice Malimath (2003) committees have been cold-storaged by post-independence India’s amoral political class which maintains tight control over the police at the Centre and in the states. In particular, a detailed 2006 judgement of the Supreme Court stipulating seven urgent reforms to insulate the police from political interference and make it a people-friendly force, has remained a dead letter.

Colin Gonsalves, a senior advocate of the Supreme Court and a counsel member of the JVC, is of the opinion that “half the police force is criminal, sexist, communal and rotten”. “We need to purge 40-50 percent of the police force. But since that may not be possible, it’s important to intensively train them to deal with victims of gender crimes efficiently, with sensitivity and compassion. There’s also an urgent need to induct more women into the police force,” says Gonsalves, an IIT-Bombay alumnus who gave up a promising engineering career to qualify as a lawyer and co-found Human Rights Law Network in 1983. Currently the network comprises 200 lawyers who file pro bono PIL (public interest litigation) writs in the Supreme and high courts to provide relief and succour to human rights violation victims countrywide.

The shortage of cops, and sloth and ineptitude of in-service policemen is complemented by a crumbling and pathetically under-resourced judicial system. The number of judges per 1 million people in India is a measly 13.5 against 105 in the US and 55 in the UK, and the criminal and civil procedure codes which govern the country’s courtrooms haven’t changed for a century. There’s universal agreement that the precondition of meting out speedy and exemplary punishment for gender crimes is at least doubling the number of judges and training the learned justices in life skills and gender sensitisation. The JVC, in its report (p. 290), stresses the importance of sensitising judges and magistrates adjudicating crimes against women and children. “We need five times the number of judges we have today, and fast track courts across the country to deliver speedy justice,” says Gonsalves.

While misplaced socio-economic priorities and the failure of the political class as a whole to upgrade and reform the law and order and judicial systems within a stubbornly patriarchal society are undoubtedly contributory causes behind the surge in sexual crimes against girl children and women, the greater failure is of the nation’s educators and education system. Progressive values such as respect for the autonomy of women and gender egalitarianism are conspicuously absent from the archaic utilitarian curriculums of India’s 1.30 million government and private schools.

A Quality Education Study (QES) 2011 conducted by Wipro and the Ahmedabad-based Educational Initiatives (EI) covering 23,000 students of 89 English-medium private primary-secondaries, found that students enroled in the country’s top metropolitan schools exhibit “lower sensitivity” and “demonstrate lack of progressive thought” on issues related to gender equality, people diversity and civic responsibilities. According to QES field researchers, 40-43 percent of classes IV, VI and VIII students opined that educating girl children is not as important as educating male children and that educating girls is a waste of household and public resources.

“Schools and teachers have a crucial role to play in developing students into sensitive adults respectful of women’s rights. School managements should consciously remove gender bias and discrimination within education institutions and provide equal opportunities for girls and boys. Stereotyping of roles and jobs for girls and boys should be removed from syllabuses. Group discussions, mock sessions and role play on issues related to violation of women’s rights should be organised. This will help to shape the thoughts of children at an impressionable age and mould them into responsible and sensitive citizens,” says Brinda Ghosh, principal of Ecole Globale International Girls School, Dehradun, a CBSE-affiliated all-girls’ residential school.

In a society in which the dominant religions/cultures — Hinduism, Islam and to a lesser degree Christianity — are predominantly patriarchal, most educators and teachers are unwilling to explain the nation’s gender-biased school textbooks and even collegiate curriculums. But following the recent upsurge in gender violence nationwide, the intelligentsia and teachers’ community have become aware of the need to teach gender sensitivity and equality from primary school onwards.

Nitin Saxena, president, All India Consumer Education Society, says it’s high time all schools compulsorily educate children about the legal consequences of violating women’s rights. “Most people are unaware of the legal implications of disrespecting women’s personal rights. In the absence of this awareness, crimes such as stalking, voyeurism, inappropriate touching are rife. It should be mandatory for all school syllabuses to include gender sensitivity and women’s rights in civics studies so that children learn from an early age that breach of the law can have severe legal consequences,” says Saxena.

In step with the new spirit of awareness within middle class India, the JVC report has also strongly recommended introduction of gender-sensitivity and sex education in schools, and the enactment of a ‘Bill of Rights’ for women to create an alternative gender-sensitive ethos within Indian society. “Sex education must be made an integral part of each Indian student’s curriculum, to be delivered by well trained and competent teachers,” says the report.

This advice has been heeded in the Union HRD ministry which is struggling to push several slapdash Bills drafted under the supervision of its previous minister Kapil Sibal. According to the new, low-profile incumbent Dr. Pallam Raju, the ministry has begun to deliberate ways and means to incorporate women and girl child rights in school curriculums. “We are examining to what extent the Justice Verma recommendations can be implemented in NCERT textbooks,” says Raju.

The University Grants Commission (UGC) has also set up a task force to assess if all higher education institutions countrywide have policies and procedures to deal with sexual harassment complaints on campuses. In February, UGC circulated a questionnaire to all college principals and university vice chancellors to acquaint themselves with women’s rights laws and establish sexual harassment adjudication committees in their institutions.

Quite clearly, the issues of gender parity and women’s right to bodily integrity and equality before the law and in society have been permitted to languish on the peripheries of the national radar for too long. Although radical reform of the education system is a necessary condition of abating the tide of crimes against women, this overdue initiative has to be urgently complemented with rigorous implementation of law and order and gender justice, police and judicial reforms and implementation of the Justice Verma Committee in letter and spirit.

A first step has been taken with the passing of the Criminal Law Amend-ment Bill, 2013 by Parliament on March 22. But gender discrimination, bias and violation of women’s rights have deep roots in Indian society and require coordinated action on several fronts as discussed above, because apart from the moral stature of the world’s most populous democracy, its economic prosperity also depends on it.

More than half a century ago Mao Zedong (1893-1976), the leader of the Chinese Communist Party which despite its faults and infirmities has transformed the People’s Republic of China (PRC) into a genuine global power, presciently observed that “women hold up half the sky”. The PRC practiced what he preached; India didn’t. In 2012 PRC’s per capita income which was lower than India’s in 1949, was $9,100 (PPP), India’s was $3,900. Draw your own conclusions.

With Hemalatha Raghupathi (Chennai); Praveer Sinha (Mumbai), Baishali Mukherjee (Kolkata) & Paromita Sengupta (Bangalore)