Item numbers? Are you retarded? I blame it on India having a sexually repressed, backwards, paternalistic, f’ing stone age culture by and large where you can get away with pretty much any crime so long as the victim isnt poltiically connected. The only good news is that parts of the country are finally starting to leave the stoneage. These non-stone-age people are the ones making sure that this story doesn’t go unreported, which is how India usually likes to treat these things.
This shit has been going on forever in India and goes unnoticed usually because journalists don’t like reporting bad news in India, families don’t like the public shame associated with it, and the Indian government would rather just ignore it than get out of their cushy chairs. Litererally these Indian politicians and bureaucrats sit in cushy chairs giving dictation like it is 1920. Then they take four hour lunch breaks. So pretty much everybody was incentivized to bury the girl, the story, and pretend like it never happened. Some blood money might exchange hands quietly, but that’s it.
Just 10 years ago nobody would have noticed or said anything about it. Back then hardly anyone had the internet in India. No Internet meant that as soon as its not in the newspapers it’s out of mind. Newspapers deal almost exclusively in good news in India, so rapes like this would not have been reported. the editor of Mint told me as much once, bad news doesn’t sell in India. It’s quite the opposite of e Us in this regard where we obsess, probably to a fault, over bad news. In India, people want to hear about a bull market, how rich the richest rich guy is,what GDP numbers are, that Pakistan sucks. Nobody wants to hear the shit news about India. In fact if you mention it you are attacked. Just as these protestors are.
So a decade ago the chick would have been silenced and presumed a slut. Well, now the world is taking notice of India and that means India needs some growing up. The Internet saved India from itself. Personally, I think this is progress. I’m really excited that people in India are getting pissed about this and actually demanding their government do something for a change other than demand baksheesh and pretend like there aren’t any problems. India will be the country it wants to be, says that it is destined to be, when its citizens and leaders grow up and takes responsability for stuff like this and do something about it.
I also think we’re gonna see a lot of stories like this. India is backwards as Hell. Good people are hard at work here to try and change that, but a lot of shit is gonna have to see light in the media before anything changes here. Foreign journalists were afraid to be critical of India before, kinda treating India with kid gloves. But now that it is a country full of prosperous people, this is gonna change. I’m still waiting for the ground shaking anti corrpuption event to come and rock this place. But when you see the kind of paternalism that they have here you start to understand why the feminists got so pissed off in the 60s. It’s shameful, and I say this as a cardo carrying sexist male.