New Delhi in December is a foggy, difficult place to travel. I found an auto driver who was willing to take me, but halfway we found that the road had been barricaded by a cadre of frustrated- and tired-looking policemen, who were getting aggressive with a man who was demanding to either be let through or arrested. The auto driver told me we were close to the destination and drove off.
I went up to the gate and asked the policemen if I could go through. They told me that I'd have to find an auto or a bus and go all the way around the city. The police, fearing the sporadic violence that had already occurred on previous days of the protest, had closed down most of central Delhi.
I found another auto and took a tour of Delhi that on any other day might have been considered scenic. We arrived at last at Jantar Mantar, where I followed an agitated group of three or four students to the scene of the protests. It was just starting to get dark. Past a set of police barricades, the street had been cordoned off. Like any protest, the atmosphere was a mix of activism and fairground. Street vendors were out in force, peddling tea and sweet-potato-chaat. Clusters of protestors spoke into TV cameras, which loomed so thoroughly over the scene that they lent it an aura of theatre. On earlier days, protestors had set government cars on fire. Police had responded with water cannons and tear gas. But the atmosphere last night was calm, peaceful and uncrowded. As with many public gatherings in Delhi, there were far more men than women. Many of them carried signs with slogans like "Rape isn't cool." As it got dark, people lit candles and prepared to march.
The organizers - a group of students - led the crowd on a quiet 20-minute shuffle to Parliament street and back. At one point, they asked all women to come to the front of the group. This common measure - separating men and women to prevent harassment - struck me as especially poignant at an anti-harassment protest.
To outside observers, it may seem surprising that this particular rape case - despite its gruesome and horrendous nature - has drawn so much fury and emotion. It's true that the circumstances were particularly atrocious, but as many people have said, women are assaulted in Delhi all the time and nobody seems to care. When I talked on the phone with relatives in Mumbai and DC, many said things like 'The atmosphere in Delhi is bad right now,' as if the constant assault on the rights and persons of women is limited to a particular city in India.
Friends with young daughters talked openly about leaving the country. The word "castration" came up a lot.
One of the girls marching with me mentioned that at a previous protest, at India Gate, people had started talking about cases of rape within their own friends and family circle. Much like the anti-corruption protests that swept India a while ago, this case has opened a gate on a conversation that people need to have. In India, "rape" remains a dirty word, a mark of shame. Meanwhile, rape is endemic, and not just of college-going girls in the nation's capital. The role of women as silent, suffering, nurturing - so long enshrined in Indian culture and accepted unquestioningly - has to evolve, albeit painfully.
And while it might be easy to dismiss these yearnings - after all, who is pro-rape? pro-corruption? - to do so would be to dismiss the courage it always takes to defy convention and tradition. Politicians loot, women accept. These are realities of Indian life, and to question them is to provoke deep censure, to ask questions that make people deeply uncomfortable, and to defy the Indian obsession with the appearance of peace (even if that peace is superficial and preserving its appearance comes at a cost.)
Personally, I have an uncomfortable relationship with the notion of protest. I've been to several, with good intentions. Societies - particularly those in the developing world - seem to require these moments of collective emotional catharsis. There is a similar theory, maybe, about forest fires. If protest in the United States has become highly stylized and ineffective, protest in India does seem to create more of an impression. Certainly, the protests this week will have some effect - but what? Will they do much more than create a talking point for the next election cycle? I believe - like many do - that some of the reforms being requested are absolutely essential for India's future. But I don't know to what extent protests can achieve and sustain such reforms.
When I was in college, I went to several "Take Back the Night" marches. Every year, the announcement of this annual rally provoked a series of articles in the newspaper making fun of the principle. "Who wants the night? You can have it," was the general theme. People were uncomfortable, then as now, there as here, with sexual crimes. With their completeness, their gravity and their difficulty. What I remember, more than any substantive reform (although those were necessary) was putting my arm around a friend of mine who had just told the story of being raped by two men she met at a bar, a story she'd never told anybody. I remember accepting, unhappily, that these things don't happen to other people - they happen to us. That last is a realization I prefer to keep at bay. I think we all do.
Occasionally, events occur that shock people out of their studied apathy and safe indifference. Being shocked is necessary and good, and allows people to have conversations about themselves and the society they live in that perhaps they ordinarily wouldn't know how to start. Ideally, we can reach a point where a girl does not have to be tortured and murdered for us to recognize that people have a right to live in safety, to be treated with dignity by the police, and to have claims processed efficiently in court.
The trouble with ideals, as was pointed out in a recent essay I read, is that they are like flashlights, "they both illuminate a way forward and leave in greater darkness those holding the light or following behind." The Delhi rape case has illuminated, horribly, how far we are from the world we would like to live in, what a vast and seemingly un-crossable distance lies between us and the ideal society. That acknowledgment is good, but it is not, by itself, enough.
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