A constant stream of news reports from across the country highlighting rape, abduction, kidnapping and other forms of sexual assault on women citizens is indicative of a dangerous contagion spreading through Indian society. If unchecked by a series of intelligent initiatives within the education, law, order and justice systems, it has the potential to force women out of the workforce, adversely affect foreign investment and tourism flows into the economy and in the long run, let loose the anarchy of vigilantism within the body politic. India’s emerging middle class is increasingly being targeted by unrestrained lumpen elements running wild in under-policed urban streets, and increasingly in rural habitations. According to latest (2014) data of the National Crime Records Bureau, 36,735 women citizens were rape victims countrywide (ten per day), 57,311 were kidnapped and abducted, and 82,235 suffered sexual assault. These figures can be safely multiplied by a factor of ten because notoriously corrupt police personnel nationwide are inclined to dismiss crimes against women as harmless playfulness. In April 2014, Mulayam Singh Yadav, leader of the ruling Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh — India’s most populous (215 million) and lawless state — dismissed mass molestation of women in the state as natural, stating “boys will be boys”. In a more recent case of molestation of women on New Year’s eve in the hi-tech city of Bangalore, the home minister of the Congress state government attributed it to the Western dress styles of victims and said “these things happen”. Although women’s organisations including the National Commission for Women and state human rights commissions have dutifully condemned these incidents and the rising crime wave against the fair sex, most fail to make the connection between education reform and the fundamental right of gender equality guaranteed by Article 14 of the Constitution of India. Unless textbooks from primary classes upwards are thoroughly vetted for gender bias and stereotyping women, and teachers are trained to practice gender equality in the classrooms of the country’s 1.40 million primary-secondary schools and 1.20 million government schools in particular, ugly crimes against women citizens won’t abate. Simultaneously unless police and judicial reforms prescribed by several high-powered commissions to improve rock-bottom police recruitment and forensics standards and to speed up the agonisingly slow wheels of the justice system are implemented, lumpen youth will continue to rule the public spaces of Indian society. Righteous indignation and ritual lamentation when atrocities are committed against women citizens are futile without intelligent solutions and resolute action. Nor is the disinclination of the country’s educated middle class to look for political alternatives instead of fatalistically voting for patriarchal political parties cut from the same coarse cloth, any help. Jallikattu stir poor schooling outcome The massive and sustained Jallikattu agitation in the southern seaboard state of Tamil Nadu (pop.78 million) is being projected as an assertion of Dravidian identity and Tamil pride. But beneath the surface, it is symptomatic of the steady erosion of the country’s education system across the spectrum from KG to Ph…
