They Don’t Want to Become ‘Bravehearts’

Jagadeesh Nv/European Pressphoto Agency Media professionals during a candlelight vigil in Bangalore, Karnataka, on Saturday to protest the gang rape of a photojournalist in Mumbai.

A 22-year-old Mumbai photojournalist has become as unfortunately iconic as the young woman known as “Nirbhaya,” the 23-year-old physiotherapist student who became the rallying call to the barricades after she was gang-raped on Dec. 16, 2012 in Delhi, while returning home on a bus. A male companion proved to be no safeguard and was also severely assaulted. She later died from her injuries.

Like Nirbhaya, the Mumbai girl gang-raped on Thursday was doing nothing more reckless than being on a routine assignment, again with a male colleague, at a derelict textile mill in the heart of the city; it was close to the peak-hour Mahalaxmi commuter railway station. This equally fearless girl has fortunately survived, and, despite her trauma and injuries, has helped the police make swift arrests.

The Mumbai gang rape disrupted Parliament, the opposition seizing this as one more weapon against the Congress-led alliance already staggering under serial corruption scandals, rising prices and a rupee in free fall. But the Indian media has led from the front as it had done in the Nirbhaya case, as it had to gain justice for Jessica Lal, the vivacious model shot dead by a politically connected man in 1999 merely because she refused to serve him a drink at a Delhi nightclub after the bar was closed, and as it had for Ruchika Girhotra, the 14-year-old athlete who committed suicide after being molested by no less than an inspector general of police in nearby Chandigarh in 1990. This time, the media is fighting for one of its own.

Among ordinary citizens there is both outrage and fear. But, alas, no disbelief â€" the unrelenting vortex of sexual violence has left no room for that. For the past year,  Mumbai has squandered its reputation as a city safe for its working women.

Just weeks after the Nirbhaya case had paralyzed the capital, a child as young as 5 was raped in Delhi. The grim rollcall continued with blatant perversity even as the Justice Verma commission, set up to sharpen the law on sexual violence, completed its task with exemplary diligence and speed.

By April, the resulting Criminal Law Amendment bill had breezed through Parliament. But the reports of rape, vindictive acid attacks and other gender-based violence have increased. The police defensively argue that so has the conviction rate, which is not saying much. In Maharashtra, of which Mumbai is the capital, thanks to slovenly evidence collection, it was an abysmal 8.2 percent in 2011, inching to 9.1 percent in 2012. Even the 15 percent of the first quarter of 2013 gives no cause for reassurance.

The increasing vulnerability of Indian women is all the more ironic in its cities flaunting their new mall-to-mall carpet of globalization. It is most unnerving in Mumbai, whose women across classes had long been empowered and safe on its streets.

This was because they had made themselves visible here long before anywhere else. They went out to work as clerks in the Indo-Saracenic headquarters of city hall or the neo-Gothic Victoria Terminus, as white-lace collar stenographers in the imposing stone edifices of Ballard Estate, as magazine journalists and in the city’s flashy advertising business. They went on to seize their place in new media, software and financial services, sashaying through the power towers of newer business districts.

In a symbiotic sisterhood, their empowerment was made possible by Mumbai’s unique army of part-time bais, no-nonsense domestic helpers from the city’s ubiquitous slum-tenements who moved briskly from house to house to sweep, swab, wash dishes and dust the furniture. You could stand up to your boss, but if you wanted to keep your job, you never messed with your bai.

Punit Paranjpe/Agence France-Presse â€" Getty Images A view of the skyline in Mumbai, Maharashtra, as seen from a seaside promenade on Jan. 12, 2012.

Mumbai was once the friendliest city for working women. But overcrowding and underemployment, the clash between liberalized and hidebound attitudes, a decay of values, vigilante policemen going after private partying with a hockey stick instead of alertly patrolling beats to prevent rape and other crime - all these have turned India’s showpiece into a city where dog can survive only by eating dog.

Mumbai’s women may still be the most liberated, boldly asserting themselves while they work and in their dealings with men, but even this intensifies their vulnerability. The 22-year-old photojournalist out with a male colleague in an abandoned mill at dusk could have been considered fair game by sexual predators. Quoting a police source, the Mumbai Mirror reported that One of five suspects crudely texted to the others to come over: “The guests have arrived, come over to help us serve them.”

Last September, Pallavi Purkayastha, a young lawyer with a live-in boyfriend, was viewed in much the same way by the watchman of her building in newly gentrified Wadala. He entered her flat with keys he had stolen when he was called up to attend to a power outage he had engineered, raped her and killed her when the plucky woman resisted.

The man who threw a corrosive substance on Aryanka Hosbetkar’s face three months later belonged to her cycling club, but he too didn’t think she had the right to say “no” to his advances. Just a day earlier,  a Spanish exchange student had been sexually assaulted by a cat burglar in her apartment in the upmarket suburb of Bandra.

Destructively, often fatally, Virginia Woolf’s caution has come to haunt India’s most ostensibly emancipated women: “The eyes of others are our fetters, their thoughts our cages.”

Bachi Karkaria is a media consultant and columnist with The Times of India.