Burgeoning Concern Over Safety Of Women In India’s Public Places – Analysis

Maltreating women in public places is rooted in the socio-cultural and political environment in changing India.

entire medical fraternity in the Indian State of West Bengal has been up in arms since August 9 against Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee for not resigning over the gruesome rape and murder of a junior doctor (now known by the pseudonym Abhaya) at the government-run R.G.Kar medical college and hospital in Kolkata. 

As the State government was dragging her feet on the matter despite burgeoning public anger, the Calcutta High Court ordered the transfer of the case from the Kolkata police to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

In addition to tying the hands of the Kolkata police, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee transferred the Principal, Dr.Sandip Ghosh, to the more prestigious Calcutta National Medical College, instead of punishing him. Her actions have given rise to the suspicion that some of the influential members of her Trinamool Congress (TMC) party were involved in the clandestine business of selling cadavers and hospital waste in cahoots with Principal Dr. Ghosh.

"Namata Banerjee has to resign because she is not only the Chief Minister but also the Health and Law and Order minister," an agitator reasoned.

The Chief Minister however attributed the mass upsurge to the machinations of the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and also the Marxist Communist party (CPM), her rivals in West Bengal politics. Both these parties had bitten the dust in the parliamentary elections held earlier this year in West Bengal.

The Chief Minister suspected the hand of the State Governor, Dr. Ananda Bose in the agitation. Bose bears a grudge against the CM as she had exploited a recent sexual harassment complaint made against him by a female employee of his household. The Mamata-Bose standoff was part of an ongoing Centre-State conflict.

As of now, there appears to be no meeting ground between the Chief Minister and the agitating doctors. But like all agitations, this too will end. However, the issue of women's safety in public spaces will remain unaddressed as it is knotty problem deeply rooted in the cultural, social and political conditions in India.

Dimensions of the Problem

In their World Bank blog dated December 22, 2023, Dina Umali-Deininger and Patricia Fernandes said that sexual harassment limits career and educational opportunities for women.

"In India, women attending Delhi University were willing to go to a college in the bottom 50% in quality, rather than one in the top 20% just to be on a safer route to college," the authors said.

"This reality co-exists alongside another grim statistic: South Asia has the second lowest female labour force participation at only 25%, even though it is well established that when more women are in the workforce, economies tend to grow," they added.

In Bangladesh, the ready-made garments industry had brought women into the labour force. Yet, according to an UNDP report, sexual harassment remained a concern. Most factories lacked anti-harassment committees or grievance redress mechanisms to handle harassment cases. The affected women were likely to have higher levels of absenteeism, resulting in lost pay.

A United Nations Population Fund report found that 90% of women surveyed across all nine provinces in Sri Lanka had been sexually harassed on public transport, and 37% said their workplace performance was impacted by such harassment.

An International Finance Corporation (IFC) study in Sri Lanka found that three out of five people surveyed experienced some form of workplace violence or harassment, costing companies at least US$ 1.7 million annually.

In her book,Labour Law and Relations: A Human Resource Management Approach'Dr.Arosha S.Adikaram of the Management Faculty of Colombo University said that in Sri Lanka, the companies concerned should pay heavily for sexual harassment in their institutions as companies do in the West.

In Sri Lanka the maximum penalty for sexual harassment was just LKR 10,000, Dr.Adikaram pointed out.

The Justice K.Hema Committee, which went into complaints about directors and others higher ups in the Kerala film industry seeking sexual favours from female artistes, found that passing through the"casting couch" was the norm.

Women's Status in India

Women are celebrated in Indian mythology, and the Hindu pantheon has Goddesses as well Gods. Women have ruled India at the Centre and the States as elected leaders. And yet, the safety of the average woman is not guaranteed in public places.

Because of a lack safety for women in the public sphere, Indian families tend to be over-protective, a major flaw in their acculturation seen from the point of view of a modernizing country.

Families are not confident enough about their women's safety outside the home. This partly explains why women constitute only about 25% of the Indian labour force.

Sociologist Dr. Patricia Uberoi wrote in one her newspaper articles in the 1970s, that within the confines of the home, the family, and the kinship and caste group (which she calls the "private sector" ), the behaviour of both men and women is controlled by traditional norms and buttressed by sanctions.

But behaviour in the public sphere which she calls the "public sector" the behaviour of men is uncontrolled while that of women is controlled. It's a free for all for men, which means that men with gumption can do pretty much what they like, including misbehaving with females. The women are expected to keep away from such wolves rather than take them on.

Harassment of women in the public space is born out of patriarchal norms sociologists say. Under patriarchy, men are expected to be macho, daring and even abrasive, but women are expected to be accommodative and giving in. The most that the woman can do in case of sexual harassment under the given cultural rubric is to get away from the trouble spot or avoid any such troublesome situations in the future. There is no will to change the conditions.

Loci of Harassment

A 2013 survey in Delhi, conducted by the International Centre for Research on Women and the UN Women found that 73% of women and girls faced sexual violence "in their own neighbourhoods."

Streets were reported to be the most unsafe (80%), followed by markets (50%), parks (47%), and bus stops (37%). Moreover, a staggering 63% felt fearful when they went out alone after dark and 21% did not venture out alone at all.

Therefore, in the eyes of women, going out of the house to work was problematic and this is especially true for those who were dependent on public transportation. In the absence of any effective control over behaviour of men in the public space, families tended to keep their women tied to the home or sent them out to places considered relatively safe. This contributed to the poor participation of women in the formal Indian labour force.

Landmark Cases Harassment

In Delhi in 2012, a 23-year old physiotherapy intern known by the pseudonym "Nirbhaya" was gang raped in an empty night bus and left to die on the road. This incident sent shockwaves through India. People came out on the streets demanding an end to such horrors.

But even years after that tragedy, nothing seemed to have changed in Delhi, lamented Swati Mahiwal, chairperson of the Delhi Commission on Women recently.

In May 2023, some champion women wrestlers resorted to a long sit-in at the centre of New Delhi to press the government to take action against Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, President of the national wrestling federation for sexual misconduct. But given Singh's links with the ruling BJP (he was a Member of Parliament), he got off with a light rap. He lost the Presidency of the federation but his writ still runs there.

In highly politicised countries like India, almost any controversy gets politicised and responses from various quarters acquire a political colour. Partisan thinking clouds reasoning. Extraneous issues come into play, preventing decisive and quick action on the issue at hand. The original problem remains unsolved.

And when the political dust settles, the issue of women's harassment in public places is brushed under the carpet, though only to rise again, and again.