Race and Society by Tina Patel

Author:Tina Patel [Patel, Tina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General, Discrimination & Race Relations, Anthropology, Physical
ISBN: 9781473986961
Google: l4OuDAAAQBAJ
Publisher: SAGE
Published: 2016-11-08T05:38:57+00:00

Case study: Victims and offenders in the Jyoti Singh Pandey case

One evening in 2012, a 23-year-old female medical intern, Jyoti Singh Pandey,9 was travelling on a bus with a male friend through a South Delhi neighbourhood. Also on the bus were six other men, including the bus driver, all of whom gang raped Pandey and beat up her friend. Over two weeks later Pandey died from the injuries she had sustained during the attack. The attack attracted heightened attention by the world’s media and led to a number of public protests highlighting the issue of rape in India and the failure of India’s government to provide adequate security for women. The six men accused of the attack were all arrested and charged with sexual assault and murder, and (in light of India’s overburdened legal system) were put on trial in a fast-track court. In March 2013, one of the accused was found hanged in his cell, and later that year the remaining five accused were all found guilty and sentenced. One (juvenile) was given the maximum sentence of three years’ imprisonment in a reform facility, and the others were sentenced to death by hanging. Following the case, the issue of rape (especially of women) in India became the subject of widespread discussion.

Although anti-rape and women’s rights organizations valued the heightened attention into the vulnerability of women to rape in India, critics argued that, in reality, the incidents of rape per population are no greater than figures in the USA. Critics went on to claim that the media’s selective, biased and sensationalist reporting of the case actually served to damage the reputation of all Indian men and to present the nation as backwards and culturally deficient. This was illustrated with the wide reporting of comments made by one of the attackers in a documentary called India’s Daughter, which was made about the case. Very much like other rapists across the world, he ‘justified’ his actions via the use of a victim-blaming logic: ‘A decent girl won’t roam around at nine o’clock at night … a girl is far more responsible for a rape than a boy’ (Mukesh Singh, quoted in India’s Daughter, broadcast on the BBC (UK), 4 March 2015). In discussing the cultural reasons for the rape, a New York Times Editorial contrasted ‘India’s “patriarchal village culture” with the ostensibly true cosmopolitanism of Western cities, which, in doing so relied on the problematic assumption that the latter is somehow definitionally safer for women’ (Roychowdhury, 2013: 283–284). The context of rape anywhere, argued critics, is about the gender inequalities and power imbalances that exist everywhere – not just in India – and, as such, the issue of rape must be addressed as a global issue, not just as a symptom specific to Indian culture. However, Roychowdhury (2013: 282–283) goes on to note that the international media presented ‘their’ Pandey as ‘emblematic of a decidedly modern Indian woman’ who became a symbol of ‘the battle between two Indias: the first, new and modern, and the second, old and backward’.

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