The Big Story: No respite

There is no end to horrific stories of sexual assaults on Indian women. Half a decade after the 2012 gangrape-murder incident brought crowds of protestors onto the streets in Delhi, little seems to have changed. And a new media report reveals that the rot in the way people respond to rape allegations, far from being confined to India, pervades some multinational companies whose services many, at least among the Indian affluent, hoped would offer a sense of security while travelling.

First, on Wednesday, there was news of the Gurgaon horror that had occured on May 29. A 23-year-old woman walked out of her house after a dispute, and tried to head to her parents house carrying her eight-month old baby. She boarded a truck, but stepped off after the driver allegedly attempted to molest her. Then, she took up the offer of a ride by an auto-rickshaw. The driver and two other men in the auto proceeded to attack her, clamp their hands over the mouth of the baby – apparently causing its death – and then stopped at a field where they took turns to rape the woman.

Four hours later, the woman made her way to a hospital in Gurgaon, where she was told that her baby was dead. Unable to accept this, she took the metro to the All India Institute of Medical Services, along with the body of her child, where doctors also confirmed the death. Worse, the police did not immediately register a First Information Report in the incident, and only included the gang-rape charge five days later.

Being affluent doesn’t not guarantee safety for Indian women. For upper-class women, the rise of ride-hailing apps Uber and Ola were supposed to make life easier. Yet an article on Recode reveals that when the Delhi Uber rape case of 2014 came to light – an incident involving the rape of a 26-year-old woman by an Uber driver – the company attempted to question the intent of the woman. The Recode piece in fact mentions that a top Uber executive obtained the medical records of the woman and presented them to the company’s CEO, while the company discussed whether Uber’s main competitor Ola was behind the charges with an intent to sabotage its business.

The fallout of that incident forced Uber to take additional measures to ensure the safety of its passengers, but the latest revelation again forces one to question the sincerity with which the company makes these assurances. Passengers who could afford them hoped that GPS-monitored, app-based systems would keep them safer than autos and public transport, but the attitudes of the executives in charge suggest this too may be a mirage.

Put together, the two stories are a reminder that traveling in public spaces continues to be a deeply unsettling, dangerous task for most Indian women, with little help to be expecting from an apathetic public, unfriendly men in positions of power and an uncaring police force.

Subscribe to “The Daily Fix” by either downloading Scroll’s Android app or opting for it to be delivered to your mailbox. If you have thoughts or suggestions about the Fix, please email rohan@scroll.in.

If you have any concerns about our coverage of particular issues, please write to the Readers’ Editor at readerseditor@scroll.in.

Punditry

A setback to the proposed neutrino observatory in India should eventually be overcome, but the scientific community must remember that it needs to communicate better with the wider public, write Jaiby Josephy and MP Ram Mohan in the Hindu. “The monetary policy committee’s decision points to several indicators that are bubbling just beneath what look like benign conditions for an interest rate cut,” write RK Pattnaik and Jagdish Rattnani in Mint. Modi needs “diplomacy, not militarism; genuine nationalism, not jingoism; social cohesion, not majoritarian rabble-rousing; contemporary vision, not mythological mumbo-jumbo”, says KC Singh in the Tribune. “Trump’s quickness to deflect blame, readiness to designate scapegoats, unpredictable tirades and stinginess with the loyalty that he demands from others aren’t just character flaws. They’re serious and quite possibly insurmountable obstacles to governing,” writes Frank Bruni in the New York Times.



Giggle

Don’t miss

Scroll.in’s Priyanka Vora, Ipsita Chakravarty and Rayan Naqash won RedInk awards for excellence in journalism in Wednesday.

Read Vora’s coverage of Japanese encephalitis breaking out in Odisha, and how poor healthcare and malnutrition contributed to the deaths of nearly 100 children in just one district.

“The reason the central government is placing such an emphasis on determining the cause of this round of encephalitis, and isolating cases of Japanese encephalitis, is because the outbreak was preventable. The Japanese encephalitis virus is transmitted by the Culex mosquito from pigs to humans, and better mosquito-control can prevent its spread. In addition, there is a vaccine that can protect children from the infection, which is administered by the central health agencies in areas in which the disease is endemic. Some experts say Malkangiri should have been placed on the vaccination programme years ago. In addition to 2014, the district had seen an encephalitis outbreak in 2012. Mishra remembers spending nights in the district hospital that year, treating children with symptoms similar to Madkami’s. As many as 38 children died of what he suspected was encephalitis caused by the Japanese encephalitis virus.”

Chakravarty and Naqash covered the shutdowns and curfews that were put in place in Kashmir in 2016, after the killing of Hizbul commander Burhan Wani, and how citizens coped with it. The piece highlighted by the RedInk awards focused on how the Indian Army did not even spare its own staff in a raid on a Kashmiri village.