Against the backdrop of a rising tide of lumpens and louts running amok in Uttar Pradesh, a growing number of hitherto subdued women students in the states higher education campuses are determined to assert their constitutional rights of equality, freedom of movement and protection of personhood -Dilip Thakore & Puja Awasthi A toxic malaise has silently pervaded the Hindi heartland state of Uttar Pradesh — India’s most populous (215 million) and politically influential state represented by 80 members in the 545-strong lower — and all important — house of Parliament in New Delhi. Across this sprawling (243,286 sq. km) state, an increasing number of women are being subjected to gender crimes of groping, molestation, abduction, kidnapping and rape, with impunity. According to data of the National Crime Records Bureau (2015), 35,527 crimes against women were registered in 1,528 police stations across UP. Among them, 7,885 — 20 per day — for intent to outrage women’s modesty (molestation); 10,135 for abduction and kidnapping; 3,025 — eight per day — for rape; 462 — more than one — daily for gang rape; and 91 — more than one per week — for custodial rape (by police personnel). Against this, the conviction rate is a mere 25 percent. Given the well-known reluctance of India’s — and especially UP’s — infamously corrupt police force to register crime complaints (it reflects badly on their record and the condition of the law and order machinery), it can be safely presumed that the actual number of crimes against hapless women citizens of the state is ten times the number registered. Unfortunately by accident or design, Uttar Pradesh is also the country’s most educationally backward state, ranked #34 on the Education Development Index (EDI) 2012-13 of the Delhi-based NUEPA (National University of Educational Planning and Adminstration). Therefore, its very easy for the states lazy and inept policemen to intimidate poor, illiterate citizens to desist from filing gender crimes complaints for fear of being ensnarled in legal paperwork and/or suffering loss of social reputation. The tragedy of Uttar Pradesh — and 21st century India — is that the rising crime wave is no longer a rural phenomenon. Under the country’s Soviet-style grandiose but essentially hollow five-year plans imposed upon the nation by the Congress party which ruled post-independence India (and Uttar Pradesh) for over half a century, rural development (education and health) and the agriculture sector were shockingly neglected. This prompted the continuous migration of poor and illiterate villagers into the nations urban habitats dominated by the urban middle class. With rough-and-ready migrants from rural hinterlands having flooded the cities, they have brought with them their culture of subjugation of women and casual gender crimes which have overwhelmed urban middle class India. And increasingly under the malignant influence of Bollywood and popular cinema in which stalking, harassment, machismo and patriarchy is the dominant leitmotiv, gender crimes have become a national pandemic. The patriarchal society which has struck deep roots in India’s most populous state has only one antidote: a…
