DANGERS COME WITH FREEDOM FOR INDIAN WOMEN

[Conservative village elders may be searching for a way to slow that process — hence sporadic attempts, in some places, to keep blue jeans and mobile phones, those telltale signs of modernity, away from young women. The influence of village elders is diluted, however, when young people move into cities, and that is what much of India is doing. The whole country is changing at once.]

By Ellen Barry

NEW DELHI — Often, after I have finished thrashing through a notebook to find quotations on some episode in the news, I put it on the shelf with a sneaking feeling that a different story is still there in its pages — something harder to put my finger on, but probably more important.

So it is with violence against women in India. This is the theme sucking up all the oxygen this year, as we approach the anniversary of a gang rape on a bus in New Delhi. As a newcomer to India, I covered the death sentences handed down to four defendants in that crime (“Phansi do! Phansi do!” — which translates as “Hang them! Hang them!” — was the first full phrase I learned in Hindi). This week, I pieced together the disparate perspectives on another gang rape, this one in Mumbai.

It is a dark picture, I know.

But often when I return from a reporting trip, my overriding impression is of something completely different. Talking to Indian women on roadsides and in courtyards, in cities and in villages, I am struck by how swiftly they are expanding their freedoms.

Conservative village elders may be searching for a way to slow that process — hence sporadic attempts, in some places, to keep blue jeans and mobile phones, those telltale signs of modernity, away from young women. The influence of village elders is diluted, however, when young people move into cities, and that is what much of India is doing. The whole country is changing at once.

“It’s changing so rapidly that it’s not even generational anymore, it’s changing within a generation,” is the way a colleague put it to me in a recent conversation.

We were taking a breath, exhausted by a long conversation about violence and the more prosaic problem of how women can reach home safely after the end of the workday. I had already put away my notebook. But this, of course, was the flip side of the same conversation. New dangers are arising because women are expanding their perimeter.

Signs of this are everywhere.

One story, unused, from my notebook: Rajkala Kanwar married into her husband’s family, from the conservative Jat caste in the farming state of Haryana, understanding that she would occupy a subservient position. She, like her mother before her, would spend her youth under the authority of her mother-in-law, who would ensure that the younger woman never left the house without permission or failed to cover her head with the sheer scarf, or purdah, designed to spare older men the “disrespect” of seeing her face.

“We lived in fear,” said Ms. Kanwar, 60, remembering. Her husband, Ram, 70, nodded: “All this cruelty toward women,” he said, “was by women.”

That power dynamic has changed. Ms. Kanwar smiled at the notion that she could maintain such a stranglehold over her sons’ wives — they simply have too much leverage. If she tried to impose the same kind of restrictions, she said, her daughters-in-law would move to the city, taking her sons and grandchildren with them. So Ms. Kanwar, a practical woman, decided to remove purdah as a requirement for her daughters-in-law, and to stop wearing it herself. And, just like that, an old stricture was gone.

“It was difficult,” she said. “My mother, my grandmother, they used to do it. My mother-in-law and her mother-in-law, they were doing it.”

A generation ago, women in much of rural India spent their lives behind closed doors. Economic changes mean that women are flowing into India’s public spaces, even in small cities and towns.

My colleague Hari Kumar, a reporter in India for 20 years, recalls a time when, outside the large cities, the women one saw outside the home were mostly schoolteachers. But the economic overhauls of the early 1990s set off a major expansion of India’s service sector, jobs like health, communication and education, banking and information technology. As the sector expanded to around 60 percent of India’s gross domestic product from 40 percent, millions of Indian women began earning their own money — and spending it. Girls are routinely outperforming boys at the state board examinations that serve as the gateway to prestigious universities.

Of course, that information is of limited use to the woman who needs a safe way home at the end of a workday. We live in the short term; it will always command more surface area on the pages of newspapers. But there is a thrill in realizing that, somewhere beyond the fits and starts and backfires that make up our news cycle, there is a great engine that has begun to turn.

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@ The New York Times

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INDIAN OFFICIALS SAY OUTLAWED MILITANT GROUP IS BEHIND PATNA BLASTS

[The police believe that the attackers worked in three teams of six to eight people each, and were trying to “create panic and spread terror, followed by a stampede,” said Manu Maharaj, the district police chief in Patna, the capital of Bihar. Party officials decided to proceed with the rally despite the blasts.]

By Hari Kumar

NEW DELHI — Investigators believe that Indian Mujahedeen, an outlawed Islamic group, was behind a series of explosions on Sunday that killed at least six people and disrupted a huge political rally in Patna, a senior official said Monday.

The police said the two suspects they have in custody had said under interrogation that the blasts were planned by Mohammed Tehseen Akhtar, a figure in the group, according to S. N. Pradhan, a police official in the eastern state of Jharkhand who is familiar with the investigation.

Investigators say the four suspects they have identified — the two now in custody, one who died of wounds sustained in the bombings and one who is still at large — came from the same village in Jharkhand, south of Bihar State.

The seven explosions, in scattered locations, were timed to go off just as a large crowd was assembling to hear an address by the Hindu nationalist leader Narendra Modi of the Bharatiya Janata Party. Mr. Modi hopes to be prime minister if his party prevails in elections next spring.

The police believe that the attackers worked in three teams of six to eight people each, and were trying to “create panic and spread terror, followed by a stampede,” said Manu Maharaj, the district police chief in Patna, the capital of Bihar. Party officials decided to proceed with the rally despite the blasts.

In addition to the deaths, 83 people were wounded, the authorities said.

Bharatiya Janata Party officials said there were serious lapses in security before the rally despite the presence of 1,700 private security guards. Arun Jaitley, a party leader, told reporters in Delhi that many attendees were not frisked when they arrived at the rally. Mr. Jaitley also said that officials in Bihar had received intelligence about a threat to the rally, something the state’s leaders have denied.

The home minister in the national government, Sushil Kumar Shinde, told reporters that Mr. Modi was given the maximum level of state security provided to political figures.

Mr. Akhtar, who is suspected of being the planner of the Patna attack and of earlier bombings in New Delhi and Maharashtra State, is one of India’s most wanted men. He is believed to be a close aide to Yasin Bhatkal, one of the founders of Indian Mujahedeen, believed to be responsible for a number of deadly bombings in India’s major cities.

Ellen Barry contributed reporting.

@ The New York Times