Amid strong views that India is going to the pits when it comes to cases of rape and crimes against women across the country, Union Minister Maneka Gandhi has come up with a statement that would make the nation sit up and take note.
What the Woman and Child Development Minister has said is that India is ranked among the four countries in the world where cases of rape are to a minimum. Set this against the latest report released by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) two months ago.
The report said that the total number of rape cases in the country in year 2015 stood at 34,651. This kind of figure has probably earned India the tag of being the “rape capital of the world” in recent years.
The report released by NCRB is the latest of the studies in this matter, which formed a part of the overall crime scenario in the country. This figure works out to a staggering hundred rape cases a day.
In a population of 1.25 billion, it works out to about four rape cases in each state on an average. And these are just the reported cases. Everyone is aware that a bulk of the cases go unreported because of societal stigma and the victim’s unwillingness to deal with the police.
The Minister has noted that the issue has taken centre stage due to reasons that “we have zero tolerance to rape and our newspapers will write about it every day.” This, she said, was unlike in the West, where such crimes do not become big news.
That statement itself is debatable. The zealousness on the part of the media to publicise such crimes does, in no way, make the crime less evil.
Maneka said that the high interest that the Indian media takes in reporting even minor instances of molestation is creating a major image problem for India. An instance she cited is of people in Sweden telling her that women in the West are now scared of coming to India on a visit.
They were probably expecting an Indian woman minister to take the matter back to powers that be, to be discussed seriously as a national problem.
Tourism is a major money-spinner and some nations’ economies thrive solely on the earnings from this sector. However, the turnout of tourists who spend big money in India is progressively on the downslide if one pits it against global figures.
India has been at the bottom of traveller’s wish list for quite sometime now. Crass behaviour by shopkeepers and street vendors, harassment of foreign women at tourist spots, instances of cheating and trying to make a quick buck out of hapless travellers and foremost, a feeling of vulnerability of tourists, has dampened their interest in India.
When traveling to a foreign location, safety and security, apart from a good time, is of primary concern to most people. Indian women do not feel safe to travel alone in this country. Understandably, tourists would not want to take a risk.
We need to work out our internal problems first, before placing the blame on media or someone/something else. Media reflects what’s happening all around. If there’s chaos, media would project that chaos. If India was a country where women felt confident, secure and respected, that is the word that would spread, irrespective of statistics.
We need to look inwards and speculate whether empty advertisements calling tourists are enough to make them feel welcome when the Tourism Minister (Mahesh Sharma) himself says that women tourists should refrain from wearing skirts and moving out after sunset. And then the Woman and Child Welfare Minister blames the media for the feelings of insecurity that women have in this country. Talk about misdirection!