[A far more prominent
case, the brutal gang rape on a bus in New Delhi last month, and the later death
of the victim, has led to an anguished re-examination in India of
many of the nation’s age-old attitudes toward violence against women. But even
as India grapples with the polarizing issue, a powerful force stands in the way
of any fundamental change: a police force that is corrupt, easily susceptible
to political interference, heavily male and woefully understaffed.]
 |
Mansi Thapliyal/Reuters
A New Delhi bus stop. A gang rape on a bus that led to a woman’s
death has stirred outrage.
|
NEW DELHI —
Not long after telling the police that she had been raped, a woman from South
Delhi looked out her apartment window and saw the man who had attacked her
laughing with an officer who had given him a ride back from the police station.
“That officer then came
over and asked me why I wanted to file a complaint,” the 30-year-old mother of
two said in a recent interview. “He said I would be ridiculed unless I agreed
to settle things without an investigation.”
After months of
intimidation from her rapist and indifference from the police, she got a
politically powerful acquaintance to intervene, and her rapist was finally
arrested. A court case is under way.
A far more prominent
case, the brutal gang rape on a bus in New Delhi last month, and the later death
of the victim, has led to an anguished re-examination in India of
many of the nation’s age-old attitudes toward violence against women. But even
as India grapples with the polarizing issue, a powerful force stands in the way
of any fundamental change: a police force that is corrupt, easily susceptible
to political interference, heavily male and woefully understaffed.
“If you’re a woman in
distress, the last thing you want to do is go to the police,” said Vrinda
Grover, a human rights lawyer based in New Delhi.
In many rape cases, the
police spend more time seeking reconciliation between the attacker and the
victim than investigating the facts. Over all, experts say, the police are
poorly organized to deal with serious crimes, particularly those against women.
Pay is poor and
opportunities for advancement are rare, leaving many police officers dependent
on bribes to support their families. People without money or political
connections are often ignored.
In the latest official
move to deter further such attacks, the Delhi police announced late last week
that constables would be stationed nightly at 300 bus stops around the city.
The problem with this plan is that many women say the presence of police
officers makes them feel less safe, not more.
The treatment of women
by the police is such a concern that laws now forbid officers to arrest or even
bring women in for questioning during nighttime hours. In case after case, the
police have used their powers to deliver abused women into the hands of their
abusers.
Police reforms have been
proposed for decades, but few have been put in place, because many of them
involve making officers less susceptible to political meddling — something
politicians have little incentive to seek.
Of all the problems
affecting the police, many women’s advocates point to cultural tradition as the
most intractable.
Even as India has
undergone an economic upheaval that has brought millions of women out of the
home and into urban workplaces, a profound attachment to female sexual virtue
remains deeply embedded in the Indian psyche. The foundational texts of Indian
culture — the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, ancient Sanskrit epics — both
revolve around the communal outrage that results from insults to a good woman’s
modesty.
“A woman’s body as the
site of cultural purity is the predominant theme in the epics,” said Ashutosh
Varshney, a professor of international studies at Brown University. “And
dishonoring a woman is equal to dishonoring a family and even a culture.”
As a result, the police
and village elders often see their first duty after a rape as protecting a
woman’s modesty and a family’s honor, instead of giving her justice.
On Dec. 26, an
18-year-old Punjabi woman committed suicide after police officers refused for
five weeks to arrest the men who were suspected of gang raping her and instead
pressed her to marry one of the men. So many Indian women end up marrying their
rapists that the police often squander the first hours and days after a woman
reports a rape seeking just such a resolution, said Ravi Kant,
president of Shakti Vahini, a nonprofit advocacy group.
“That first crucial day
is almost always lost,” he said.
Delays are endemic and
courts are backlogged. Of the more than 600 rapes reported in New Delhi last
year — far below the actual number of such attacks, experts say — only one
person has been convicted so far. In a vicious circle, police ineffectiveness
leads many women to consent to marriage, but such marriages, sometimes reached
after the police have gone to the effort to pursue a case, discourage adequate
police investigations.
Suman Nalwa, a deputy
commissioner in Delhi’s police force, said that changing the mind-set of the
constables, many of them from small villages outside of New Delhi, “is a tough
process. You cannot do it at the snap of a finger.”
At the same time, Indian
police officers are few and poorly paid, and that makes them easily susceptible
to corruption. India has just 1,585,117 officers to protect 1.2 billion people,
or about 130 officers per 100,000 people, the second lowest among 50 countries
ranked by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Only Uganda fared
worse; many nations have more than twice India’s ratio of police officers to
population.
More than 80 percent of
India’s police officers are constables who cannot investigate crimes or issue
fines; most are assigned to paramilitary forces that do little traditional
police work. Just 5 percent of police officers are women, though the government
recently announced it would hire more female officers in Delhi.
“That the Indian police
are performing poorly is beyond doubt,” said Arvind Verma, a professor of
criminal justice at Indiana University, an expert on the Indian police and a
consultant to the government. “The common experience is that the personnel are
rude, indifferent, abusive, threatening and extortionist.”
An impermeable police
hierarchy is another problem. Top leaders are taken from the Indian Police
Service, an elite core of bureaucrats who never serve in front-line positions.
It is all but impossible for a beat cop to rise to the top, making for a wide
disconnect between police officers and their leaders.
Salaries are abysmal,
about $100 per month for constables. Police stations often lack toilets and
heat. Many low-level officers pay recruitment bribes of a year’s salary to get
their jobs, so demanding payments on everything from routine traffic violations
to major crimes becomes a way of life. Such behavior saps public trust,
worsening security.
“It is an unfortunate
reality that police are not trusted in this country,” said Nirmal K. Singh, a
former joint director of the Central Bureau of Investigation.
Another important reason
for that lack of trust is frequent political interference. Officers have few
civil service protections, and politicians can transfer or punish police
leaders at will.
Conspiracies between the
police and politicians are common.
Hundreds of people have
been killed in police shootings with political overtones, and blatantly
political arrests occur frequently. Two women living near Mumbai were arrested
recently for a Facebook post that politely questioned the deference given a
deceased political leader. A professor in Kolkata was arrested after forwarding
a political cartoon by e-mail, and a farmer in West Bengal was arrested after
he asked a tough question of the state’s chief minister at a political rally.
For the woman in South
Delhi who said the police had refused to take her rape complaint seriously,
politicization of the police means justice is available only to the well
connected.
When her rapist
threatened her 12-year-old daughter, she turned to her brother to call a
high-ranking politician. Belatedly, the police sprang into action.
Asked about the case, a
police supervisor said he would check on details, but had not responded further
by Tuesday.
“During that whole time,
I lived in fear of my husband being killed or my kids being kidnapped, because
I knew the police wouldn’t help if that happened,” the woman said. “I have no
faith in the police. If you have money or connections, you can get justice. If
you don’t, forget it.”
Reporting was contributed by Niharika Mandhana,
Malavika Vyawahare and Jim Yardley in New Delhi.
