When I first went to Delhi some 30 years ago I stayed in some flophouse. Men knocked on my door all night. They wanted two things. Sex and Johnnie Walker. I barricaded myself in, got out my Swiss army knife and my hat pin. The hat pin was to come in most useful especially on public transport.

Nonetheless I fell in love with India, for India is not one country but several. Though I have been going back ever since, I know a lifetime here would only scratch the surface. I am a tourist not a traveller, I don't kid myself, and now I am in Goa on holiday with my family on beautiful beaches where westerners and wealthy Indians live the high life. These beautiful people are here to party, to drink strawberry mojitos, to dance.

But I can't stop watching the news. Something is happening here that is more important than the latest trance mix. The outpouring of anger about "Damini", the young woman who died after being gang-raped on a bus by six men, is something I have never seen before in India. This anger has been a long time coming and the protests and vigils are not just in central Delhi but all over from Kolkata to Panjim. North and south are for once united. Kashmiri rappers are producing music to support the women of Delhi.

The statistics are not new but they are as visible as the families, men, women and children at the protests. More than 635 reported rapes in Delhi last year, one conviction. In places like Karnataka it's worse, but Delhi, remember, prides itself on being modern India. As the Guardian's correspondent Jason Burke rightly said, what is happening in this peculiarly Indian mix of anger, sentimentality and denial is a clash between the new and the old.

The new, modern, techno India, the image this country wants to sell, is tainted by its attitudes to women. I watched the news as "Braveheart", as the victim is nauseatingly called, was flown to Singapore. Why? Out of sight, out of mind? India has some of the best hospitals in the world. You cannot move in places like Chennai for Europeans coming for hip and knee replacements. Who moves a patient with organ failure, brain injury, infection, who has already had a cardiac arrest? Young men were calling up news stations to offer their own intestines as hers had been removed as the result of the damage done to her with an iron bar.

This is the crux of it and not yet a discussion that many are prepared to have here. Rape is not about sex. It is about power. It is about torture. It is about brutality. Yesterday, another girl was assaulted on a bus. Last week a two-year-old girl was raped to death in Gujarat while the victim of another gang rape committed suicide. Her choice was to drop the charges or marry one of her attackers.

Arundhati Roy has spoken about how the army uses rape as a weapon in Kashmir and Manipur. As do the police and the upper caste. Surprise has been registered that Damini was not even a dalit. For untouchables rape is everyday; where there are no toilets, women are raped in the woods.

Yet what is emerging is that middle-class women are not safe. They do not go out after sunset. One told me India is worse than Saudi Arabia. No one trusts the police. A raped woman may have to undergo "a finger test", where a doctor determines whether the woman's vagina is "habituated to sexual intercourse". Ordinary women here are angry. They carry placards saying "Kill the cruels" or "Torture them to death", but it is heartening to see young articulate women on TV having a long overdue conversation.

The political response has been appalling. Sonia Gandhi's address to the nation was totally inadequate. Some female politicians blame rape victims for their "adventurous spirit". The president's son spoke of women protesters as "highly dented" and "painted". The statements of the political class have been slammed as inane and meaningless.

Damini's body was brought back from Singapore and cremated at night, surrounded by huge security to avoid more protests. She was not taken to her village as is the custom. Her mother collapsed.

Damini is not her name. She remains unidentified. To be raped, after all, is a shameful thing. Damini is a word from Sanskrit. It means lightning. It is also the name of the heroine in a famous Indian movie who refused to let a rapist escape justice, and several big Bollywood stars have expressed their outrage. Nonetheless, Bollywood continues to churn out movies in which women are harassed into submission in the name of romance.

What some politicians fear most is that this young, educated population reminds them of the Arab spring and they are demanding change. They fear what they call "the pink revolution". When people say, as they so often do, that feminism is the preoccupation of a few white middle-class women in the west agonising over whether to wear lipstick or not, I wish they could see these angry men and women out at night demanding that women be safe, who say rape is always a weapon used to keep women in fear.

For something is happening here, anger is overtaking fear. The dam has burst. The debate the politicians want is one of law and order, but the radical one is about how to change the culture itself. And because this is India we are taking about a myriad of cultures. Somehow, though, through the shock and the trauma, this country is examining itself and its much-vaunted modernity does not look so modern.

The new India can only be birthed through the rights of women to be free, safe and equal. Maybe some always knew that. All I know now is that so many more Indians do. The political talk is of the "supreme sacrifice of that young brave daughter" of India. This woman did not choose to die. She was murdered. It disgusts those who sit at night holding vigils. It disgusts me. It cannot be airlifted out, hushed up, burned to ashes. It is alight. And it will keep burning.

• This article was amended on 31 December 2012. It originally stated that the Bollywood film character Damini fought back against her own rapist – in fact she took up the case of another woman who had been raped. This has now been corrected.