Why Delhi gets away with rape

I haven't been able to stop thinking (and tweeting) and giving my opinion on The Rape Case. Each one is horrifying, the only silver lining is that this one somehow got everyone's attention and people are actually talking about rape in a real way now.

A version of this short opinion piece appeared in Tehelka. You can read the full article here.

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When I was in high school, a popular local boy’s school had a fad with their car horns. Any time you heard these teenage boys, zipping across the city, they’d beep continuously, almost like a tune or a ditty: beep-beep-beep-beep-beeeeep-beep. It was a code, someone told me, laughing, but didn’t reveal the code till later. “Pakad, pakad,ke chod do.” Catch ‘em and fuck ‘em, for those who didn’t grow up in this city where ‘chod’ is one of the first Hindi swear words you learn, ‘chutiya’ is almost refined, and I will rape your ass tossed around at any altercation.  I didn’t think the boys meant it, they were nice boys, my friends, and plus boys schools are dens of sexual deprivation, right? But then, later, I overheard a classmate in my co-ed school laughing about this “really cool” trick he pulled on weekends, going for a drive with a friend around M Block Market, slowing down when he saw a pretty girl and leaning out of the window, grabbing her breasts and driving away before she could react. 

It may not even have been a pretty girl.

The fact is, when the boys got to drive around in their cars, beeping, we were given notes on safety by our parents and our other girl friends. Rules of the rickshaw: never get in when there are two drivers. Rules of the teenage house party: if someone feels you up at a party, obviously it’s your fault, because you were drunk, and you mustn’t be a tease. We were very hard on each other. Girls regularly developed “reputations”, I remember being totally tongue tied face-to-face with one of my peers once, because I had heard behind her back of all the things she did. We never blamed the boys.  It was always the outfit (so low cut!) the booze (she can’t control herself, ya!) the she-asked-for-it (well, she’s always hanging out with boys, anyway.) The boys spoke of it, if you asked, somewhat sheepishly and yet, with a certain amount of pride in their voices, and you’d have to be the Cool Girl, listening, nodding wisely, thinking privately that you’d never be in a situation like that. We let them get away with it, and these were nice boys, boys who were educated and well brought up and probably don’t even think about that part of their lives anymore. Boys who were socialized with girls, who had “rakhi-sisters” and yet.

People say Delhi is the rape capital of the city, and I was hotly defending it on Facebook when I thought about that beep-beep and what it stood for. I know sexual harassment is universal, but what does it say about this city that we flaunt it blatantly? That there’s no going to a dark alleyway or an empty room, nope, people are able to rape people in broad daylight, in a moving vehicle on a main road, and the only thing they have to worry about is banging into someone else’s car, because then people can get really angry. I can bet the men in the situation wore an expression of sheepish pride too, “oh well, it was nothing really that I was able to do it for so long”. They clapped each other on the back. They might have gone to get a cup of tea. What a nice night out, they probably said. How nice to be in Delhi where you don’t have to pay for or beg for sex, you can just pluck it off the street and no one does a thing.