India’s reputation has taken a massive beating in recent years due to some infamous incidents of rape. One of the most gruesome of these was the gang rape and murder of a girl in a bus in Delhi in December 2012. That episode had angered the whole nation and brought furious crowds out on to the streets of Delhi.
A British filmmaker recently released a documentary featuring interviews of a convicted rapist from the gang that had carried out that rape, and his lawyers. The Indian government banned it. A huge controversy erupted over this.
While this was being debated on TV and Twitter -- hotly and without substance, for the most part –- a mob attacked a jail in Nagaland in Northeast India, dragged out a man accused of rape, beat him to death, and strung him up in the middle of Dimapur town.
The local media in Nagaland had reported that the man was an “illegal Bangladeshi immigrant” who had raped a local Naga girl. It later turned out that the man was Indian, his father had served in the Indian Air Force, and his brothers are soldiers in the Indian army.
Moreover, the rape case itself is an odd one. The girl had accompanied the man to a hotel, after allegedly having been raped once earlier in the day. There she was allegedly raped a second time. Hotel CCTV footage showed them checking in and out together. If there was any coercion, it was not visible.
Suspicion of outsiders in general, is old in the tribal societies of Northeast India. Among the Nagas, the tribalism can get very specific. For instance, the Angami Nagas are different from the Sema Nagas and both are different from the Nagas of the Manipur hills. These differences can at times lead to conflict between the Naga tribes. Conflict with those who are not Nagas is, therefore, hardly surprising.
The greatest suspicion, however, is reserved for suspected illegal immigrants from what is now Bangladesh. This has been a feature of politics and society in Northeast India since at least the 1960s, though the roots of the suspicion go back much further. The usual explanation for this is fear of being overrun by Bengali settlers, as happened in Tripura, where the local tribals -- who had a narrow majority before Partition with 53 % of the population -- were reduced to a minority due to the influx of Hindu Bengalis displaced by Partition. The term “Bangladeshi” as it was, and largely still is, used in Northeast India generally to mean anyone who spoke the Bengali language, irrespective of their religious identities.
In the case of the man who was lynched in Nagaland, the narrative of the illegal foreign immigrant sullying the pristine local girl was added to the ongoing media hype over sexual crimes in the country. While a lot of the hype is generated locally, there is also a global discourse that gives it direction.
The Western media has an old habit of Orientalism. This has been evident in its coverage of the Arab world and of South Asia, including India. Edward Said in his book had said: “I myself believe that Orientalism is more particularly valuable as a sign of European-Atlantic power over the Orient than it is a veridic discourse about the Orient.”
Colonialism is officially over, but the power equations have changed little. The power equations allow elites in the Anglo-Saxon West to set the standards of right and wrong, good and bad, for the whole world. It allows them to pass moral judgment on the rest of humanity by their standards.
By those standards, all societies, except theirs, are bad, or at least, not good enough. The Muslim world is in need of being remade in their image. So is the Hindu world. Russia is a problem too, even after its Soviet days. China will become a problem soon, so the Nato military apparatus is now doing a “pivot east.” And so on.
Basically, these problems will continue until everyone on planet Earth learns to dress, eat, talk, and think like them, at which point Marx will presumably leap out of his grave and do a jig.
The filmmaker who made the film on the Delhi gang rape called India a “sick society.” The sickness of the society had made itself apparent in the statements and acts of the convicted rapist Mukesh Singh and his lawyers, and the Indian government’s argument that the documentary should not be screened.
The statement of perhaps the worst rapist in India, or his very crude lawyers, is really not a fair measure of the health or sickness of a society of 1.2 billion people. The United Nations Crime Trends Survey data is a better measure.
From the UN data of 2010, we find that India has among the lowest rate of rapes in the world, with a “rape rate” of 1.8 per 100,000 population. The US, in comparison, had a rape rate of 27.4 per 100,000, which is 15 times higher. The UK rate in 2010 was not mentioned. However, the previous UN survey had put it at 25.6 for England and Wales, which was 15 times higher than the Indian rate of 1.7 at that time.
Recording and reporting of cases is, without a doubt, better in the UK and US than it is in India. However, even allowing for that, it would seem that those societies are sicker than our admittedly sick one. The reason this never gets mentioned is because people from here don’t have the means to go to those countries, dig out the worst they have to offer, and file what Mahatma Gandhi had called the “drain inspector’s report.” If we go to those countries, it is still mainly as supplicants and servants.