Don't say a word: US state department needs to pipe down about Badaun

By Lakshmi Chaudhry and Piyasree Dasgupta ‘Tenacious problems of a fast-changing but a troubled country’, says The Independent, in a solemn meditation about India in the aftermath of the Badaun gang-rape and murder case.  You can actually picture the paper shaking its head disapprovingly like a neighbourhood aunty at a pride march. However, curiously enough, minus its subhead ‘India rape case’, the said headline could be about any other country in the world. Which country isn’t ‘fast-changing’? Which is a country isn’t ’troubled’? Sexual violence in India invariably draws its share of such pontificating in the West. As with the Delhi gang-rape, everyone from op-ed writers to the UN General Secretary has been quick to offer their two paisa. “Like so many in India, we were horrified to learn of these violent sexual assaults and murders. Our thoughts are with the victims families during this difficult time,” State Department Deputy Spokesperson Marie Harf said on Tuesday. [caption id=“attachment_1557685” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Marie Harf from the US state department[/caption] So far, so good. Now any decent human being would be shocked at the Badaun killings, and there is nothing wrong in expressing shock and sympathy, irrespective of one’s nationality. But while it is entirely appropriate to express solidarity with another country during a great national tragedy, Harf couldn’t help but go further and imply sexual violence was a unique blight afflicting India and Indians: “As we have said, changing laws and changing attitudes is hard work… We applaud the many individuals, government officials, and civil society groups in India that are working to protect the survivors, to prevent gender-based violence, to help it try to change what is really hard to change.” There is an inevitable slide from concern to stereotyping. In an article titled ‘ Is India the Rape Capital of the World', Sally Kohn tries to put the the West’s abrasive criticism of India’s alleged ‘rape culture’ in perspective. She writes, “Every 20 minutes in India, a woman is raped. And yet India only ranks third for the number of rapes reported each year. What country ranks first?  The United States. In India, a country of over 1.2 billion people, 24,206 rapes were reported in 2011.  The same year in the United States, a nation of 300 million, 83,425 rapes were reported. In the United States,  every 6.2 minutes a woman is raped.” That said, there is no point in entering into the futile and unhelpful ‘which country is a bigger rapist’ debate’ since numbers can be marshalled in favour of whichever side you happen to be. Want to talk about Badaun, what about that psycho in UC Santa Barbara? This kind of hideous one upmanship sidelines actual victims, turning them into statistics. And no good can come from that. But it is important to ask why the West feels this compelled to comment on incidents of sexual violence in India. Indians feel no such need to hold forth on the social ills of other countries, as Tunku Varadarajan noted on Twitter, “‘Horrified at Violence Against Women in India: US’ {Expect foreign chanceries to express horror at US school shootings}” Or perhaps at American misogyny after the UC Santa Barbara shootings, or on race relations in the wake of the Treyvon Matrin verdict. There is a compulsive need to comment, advise, and worst of all, essentialise – where specific incidents become excuses for broad scale generalisations about Indian men, women, society. For example, the Libby Purves rant in The Times following the Delhi gangrape. Purves that waxed eloquent about the ‘murderous hyena-like male contempt’ for women, declaring that the west is now ’looking eastwards in disgust’. In 2012, a Guardian article tried to decode, again very self-importantly, ‘Why India is so bad for women’, which paints the entire nation as a war zone populated by predatory Indian men.  She writes, “Every Indian woman the Guardian spoke to for this article agreed that harassment was part of their everyday lives. Mahanta revealed that she always carries chilli powder in her handbag if she ever has to take public transport and needed to throw it in the face of anyone with wandering hands.” If you read the piece, you’d think that Indian men know no other use of their hands than groping women. It is difficult to imagine any such op-ed in an Indian newspaper about Treyvon or, say, pedophiles in the BBC. If this were not insult enough, there is the injury inflicted by native apologists like former Ambassador to the U.S. Lalit Mansingh who told the Hindu, “The [US] statement puts the NDA government on notice, and an international spotlight on how they handle such incidents given [Prime Minister] Mr. [Narendra] Modi’s own campaign promises on the safety of women.” To be fair, the State Department has shown no such inclination, but it speaks volumes that Mansingh thinks it is entirely appropriate that the US government should put the leader of a sovereign nation on “notice” for social ills within his country. Why complain about the Americans when the likes of the ironically and appropriately named Mr Mansingh are here to legitimise their presumption