People often ask me if India is safe. I always tell them yes. I feel safer in Mumbai than pretty much any city that I’ve ever lived in and will walk around just about anywhere 24 hours a day. Mumbai feels safer, aside from the traffic, than New York. Aside from being run over, I really don’t worry about anything. I’ve lived here 6 years and have never had a single violent incident occur against me (well, aside from two terrorist attacks, which I don’t really consider part of day to day life). Foreign women have it differently, they get groped and harrassed pretty much all the time if they get in any proximity to Indian men. But its almost never violent.
There is a time, however, when India is not safe. It is when we are talking in groups of people or better yet mobs of people. In India, nobody openly commits violent crime alone in public. Nobody walks up to you with a gun and says, “give me your money, bitch” like the people on The Wire do. It just doesn’t really happen that often.
However, if a mob of people get together they will do pretty much whatever they like in India. There is a strange tacit belief in India that in a mob of people you are somehow not responsible individually for your actions or the mob’s actions. If the entire bus is raping the girl then it doesn’t really matter if you do too. The mobs in the London Riots collectively felt similarly and were surprised when this wasn’t the case.
When I see a mob of angry people in India I get away and quickly. If that mob wants to kill somebody, then the mob seems to be allowed to do so. Unless, one person can be singled out easily, no politician or policeman will actually go after the entire mob which might very well be somebody’s voting base. This is why, in the 90’s, we had all sorts of violent murders in Mumbai carried out by angry mobs, in a good old fashioned neighborhood genocide, and nobody was really prosecuted for their crimes.
The bus rape is a similiar situation where the mob believes it can do whatever it wants and get away with it.
There is also a strange belief in India that if the girl has already been “devirginized” once and and lost her purity then she is "spoiled’ and you can treat her body like that of a dead crack whore. A second rape somehow doesn’t matter, nor a third, nor a forth once the first one is out of the way. The subsequent gang rapes somehow don’t matter as much as the first one. The woman is effectively the house with a broken window after the first rape and everyone is allowed to desecrate her now that her purity is lost.
I’ll never forget the Indian guy on NBC’s “To Catch a Predator” who gets caught red-handed soliciting sex online from a 13 year old girl. His defense is, “She told me she is not a wirgin [sic] anymore,” implying that she is already “spoiled” and therefore having sex with her doesn’t matter even though she is massively underage. This logic seems to work in India, but not so much on US TV.
On the bus, If there were just one rapist then it would be easy to punish just that one guy. But because there were many it seems difficult to assign blame to the entire group and also difficult to decide how to equitably assign blame. Furthermore, for the rapists, who are sexually frustrated, they see themselves as somehow less culpable than if they were to go out and rape one woman on their own. The Indian herd mentality somehow means that this is acceptable behaviour. To the extent that nobody thought to stop them. Some apparently, even joined in. I doubt that these guys would be willing to commit the crime on their own.
The message that your average North Indian male needs to get from this, at least the one that the media is hoping that people will get, is that, “Yes, you are responsible if you are involved in this in any way. Equally responsible as the first guy.”