The outrage has sustained many news cycles in India over this fortnight. Yet to many Indians and human rights activists, this handwringing seems disingenuous, if well-meaning. After all, the Kathua victim, who became “India’s daughter” in death, was in fact a vulnerable resident of one of the most heavily militarized zones in the world: Jammu and Kashmir, a state in northern India. Many in the region were outraged at the sight of locals swaggering in support of the accused rapists, invoking the name of the Hindu deity Rama and flying the Indian flag. Yet this perversion of national and religious identity has long been supported on the ground in the region, where muscular Hindu pride cuts across party lines.

Jammu and Kashmir reports the highest number of human-rights abuses in the country. The extreme militarization of the region, critics say, has enabled Indian armed forces as well as local police to target children frequently. It has also helped to instrumentalize sexual violence in the conflict. Kathua is part of Hindu-majority Jammu, where the insurgency and political dissent in the neighboring Muslim-majority Kashmir Valley has resulted in a surge of support for Hindu conservatism. In this wider context, it is, at best, bleakly unsurprising that a policeman and a temple caretaker were among her attackers.

Beyond all this lies the question many have asked in despair: Is there something irreducible about Indian misogyny? After the 2012 rape, protesters agitated for and were partially successful in obtaining stricter laws and procedures to prosecute sexual violence. But even at the time, some feminists saw clearly that criminal procedures would hardly “stop rape,” to quote a popular catchphrase. Men do terrible things to women the world over, for personal as well as political reasons. The real difference is that in India, their fearlessness is enabled by something that mere punitive justice cannot uproot from this old and vicious patriarchy.

For decades, Indian women have been fighting for jobs, education, and increased political representation—all good and necessary instruments of progress. Any change in the status quo, where an atmosphere of macho nationalism perpetuates increasing violence within and outside of India’s conflict zones, can only be sought by political means. Yet all these are arguably second-order solutions, a shoring up of support for a more fundamental battle to remake the hidebound Indian family, the small but inescapably powerful social unit in which the country’s egalitarian constitution and liberal politics hold little sway.

It is here that India’s outrageous culture of son-preference enables widespread reproductive control, including but not limited to illegal sex-selective abortions and female infanticide. It is here that Indian courts hesitate to intrude by criminalizing marital rape. And it is here that strictures of caste, religion, and sexuality inhibit women’s freedom with fatal consequences. To seek punitive justice for women and girls in such a culture is little more than melodrama. The real task at hand is to shift attitudes toward sexual violence at the level of the family. It’s not enough to mourn for rape victims post-facto as India’s daughters; it’s more important to accept the fact that the rapists are India's sons.

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