India’s Rape Problem, and How Men See It - “A Fault of the Times”
“By force, it never happens,” Dharampal Singh Yadav declared of rape. He was standing with a gaggle of men at a barber stall outside the Sarojini Nagar market. Most of the men agreed… .
These presumptions and ways of talking about women can be found up and down Delhi’s class ladder. Consider the recent case of Tarun Tejpal, a muckraking crusader and newspaper editor who resigned after being accused of sexually assaulting a female subordinate. What the woman detailed in leaked correspondence as the forcible removal of her underwear and physical penetration was described by Mr. Tejpal as “drunken banter” — banter, like tango, being a thing that takes two.
To talk of rape with so many of Delhi’s men is to discover a chasm between the world of their minds, flush with medieval ideas of womankind, and the world of the modernizing megacity in which they find themselves. In fact, many men — including those at the barber stall that day — attribute the rape problem to vertiginous social change that has created new temptations at a faster rate than the new habits to cope with them.
The barber put it simply: Rape isn’t a man’s fault. “It’s the fault of the times,” he said.