The western media sticks to a certain script when it comes to talking about the condition of women in Bharat. All crimes against women are attributed to the country’s supposed “patriarchal culture” or the social mores and customs regulating the lives of women in Bharat. Since the majority of Bharatiyas are Hindus, the regressive customs and traditions of Hindu Dharma are at the root of Bharat’s patriarchal culture, according to the western media. Thus, you would see that the majority of women-centric stories that the western media covers in Bharat are framed through the simplistic binary of Bharatiya vs western, traditional vs modern, regressive versus progressive, etc.
In most of these stories, Bharatiya women are portrayed as oppressed and within the confines of the family structure. Thus, every women’s issue from lack of freedom to sexual violence is portrayed as a product of the “oppressive Bharatiya family structure”. It is only when the hapless village women of Bharat come in contact with some good Samaritan kind of western NGO, learn English, and become self-empowered by the definition of the west, they are considered as arrived.
In other words, only when Bharatiya women flout the norms of society and adopt a combative mode, they are considered progressive. This kind of simplistic paradigm is ill-equipped to evaluate the lives and choices of women from any country. These stories portray as black and white scenario as if women of Bharat are living their lives in strict black and white compartments of traditional versus modern, as if so-called traditional women of Bharat have no agency of their own and no power of choice in their day-to-day lives. The tone of coverage is condescending and presumptuous, to say the least.
The most alarming is the western media’s coverage of sexual crimes against women in Bharat. It seems to be obsessed with amplifying every case of rape that happens in Bharat to portray Bharat as the “rape capital of the world”, as it were. With the intensity with which western media covers news of sexual violence against women in Bharat, a layperson would very well assume that Bharat is the only country in the world where sexual crimes against women take place. We are the world’s most populous nation, having overtaken even China.
Thus, it’s obvious that if one goes solely by numbers, the statistics regarding sexual crimes against women would seem huge. I mean you can’t compare the scenario of crimes against women in let’s say a country like the UK and Bharat by simply comparing the numbers. That would be ridiculous. But that’s what the global media does. It throws simplistic statistics showing the absolute number of sexual crimes against women reported in a particular time period to prove that Bharat is extremely unsafe for women.
Let’s look at a news report done by German broadcaster Deutsche Welle in 2019 titled “What is behind India’s rape problem?” The kind of language used in the blurb of the article itself proves the point I am trying to make. “A number of rape cases in India in the past few months have put a spotlight on the issue of gender-based attacks in the country. Experts say deep-seated patriarchy has created a “second-class” status for women in India”. Rapes happen all over the world. But how many news reports and articles have you come across which say that rapes in western countries are happening because of the patriarchal culture over there and the second-class status of women in western society. I bet none. This kind of language is solely reserved for talking about crimes against women in countries like Bharat which are not westernized and thus, somewhat of a lesser being. This is precisely the kind of bias I am talking about.
The DW article further talks about the Nirbhaya gang rape case and then gives some statistics to prove that crimes against women in Bharat have been witnessing a sharp rise. “According to the latest government figures, Indian police registered 33,658 cases of rape in 2017. Experts say that a woman is raped in India every 16 minutes”, says the article. This is what I was talking about. The figure of 33,000 is negligible if calculated in terms of the percentage of the total population of Bharat.
Then, the article makes a sensational claim of a woman in Bharat being raped every 16 minutes attributing the supposed fact to experts. Who are these experts? Why doesn’t the article quote them? I have worked in international media for a long time and can say from experience that it’s a tactic to make sensational and unsubstantiated claims attributing those to “experts”. Please don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that all is hunky dory and Bharat doesn’t have any issues regarding sexual crimes against women. Sexual violence against women is a serious issue and we need to deal with it. Sexual violence against women in Bharat needs to be highlighted by Bharatiya media, by all means. so that more awareness is generated, and more women come out in the open to report such crimes.
What I am critiquing here is the western media propaganda regarding sexual crimes against women in Bharat. It creates the perception that there is something intrinsic to Bharatiya culture that makes Bharat more prone to sexual violence against women. This kind of irrational stereotyping is dangerous, motivated, and uncalled for. The whole world is grappling with the structures of patriarchy. Bharat isn’t any more patriarchal than other countries. All western countries too have a problem with patriarchy. Therefore, making sloppy connections between patriarchy and Bharatiya culture and attributing sexual violence against women in Bharat to Bharatiya culture smacks of vicious propaganda.
A report published by The Business Standard in 2020 gives statistics on countries with the highest rape incidents. According to this report, ten countries with the highest rape rates are South Africa, Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Bermuda, Sweden, Suriname, Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Grenada. The report mentions Bharat in the list of countries with a high rate of rape along with Bangladesh, Pakistan, China, Japan, USA, and Russia. As per the report’s findings, Bharat has a rape rate of 1.80 percent, as of 2020.
Compared to this, the US has a rape rate of 27.3 percent. Sweden, which is placed 6th on the list of 10 countries with the highest rape incidents, has a rape rate of 63.50 percent, as per the report. Yet, how many stories have you seen covering sexual violence against women in countries like Sweden and the US? It’s incredible that Bharat with a rape rate of less than 2 percent (according to this report) routinely hits the national headlines for its “rape problem” and countries like the US and Sweden never get interrogated and criticized for their “rape problem”. In fact, one hardly comes across an international media story reporting a rape incident from a western country.
This gives the typical lay media consumer the impression that sexual violence against women takes place only in non-western countries like Bharat. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. There have been alarming and shocking cases of sexual violence in countries across the world, western or non-western. Bharat, on the contrary, has a very low percentage of sexual crimes against women (that go reported) in the context of its total population, and yet the western media projects Bharat as the rape capital of the world.
Rape is a heinous crime. It is painful for the survivor and also painful for people who come to know about these rape incidents. Obviously, if the media keeps on amplifying the same visuals repeatedly and keeps on highlighting specific rape incidents happening in different parts of Bharat, the viewer and the reader will conclude that Bharat has a serious rape problem. But that can be misleading but most of these media reports play on the emotions of the viewers and do not offer any scientific analysis. On what basis do these reports claim that Bharat has any more serious rape problem than western countries? How many times do these reports cite scientific studies to compare rape statistics from various countries? Rarely.
Mostly, these international media reports use the human-interest story format to create a sensational build-up of a couple of rape incidents happening in Bharat to create the impression that Bharat is the rape capital of the world. Anybody hearing the news of any rape incident is obviously going to condemn it. Nobody would justify rape. The international media takes advantage of precisely this human trait in sensationalizing rape incidents in Bharat and demonizing Bharatiya culture by claiming that there is something intrinsically wrong with Bharatiya culture that makes the country more prone to sexual violence against women.
Maria Wirth, a writer based in Bharat who writes extensively on issues related to Hindu Dharma and has also written a book titled “Thank You India” has shared an insightful article critiquing the western media’s biased coverage of rapes in India she wrote on her website, through her X handle.
Though the article was written way back in 2014, it captures the western media’s obsession with projecting Bharat as the rape capital of the world aptly.
The article is titled “Why this focus on ‘rapes in India’ by world media?” Maria Wirth starts talking about her experiences in Germany, her country of birth and recounts how on her last visit to Germany in December 2013, she was baffled by the fact that the most popular TV show in Germany ended with news on a gang rape in Bharat. She further adds that it was a 15-minute broadcast with just five topics and the story of gang rape in Bharat was one of the five topics covered. “Even my sister wondered how a gang rape in India made it to the main news in Germany. That same day in a conservative estimate, over a thousand rapes would have been committed all over the world. In the USA some 200, in South Africa some 170.
In the western cities, the statistics show a high percentage, much higher than in India. Many of these rapes would have been gang rapes. In many cases, the girl or woman would have been killed. Behind each of these statistical figures are painful heartrending stories. If we knew what is happening at this very moment on this earth – how much pain humans inflict on other humans and on animals – we could not bear it. With so much crime happening everywhere, why is India being singled out and shamed with “another gang rape” when it actually has only a fraction of the crimes other countries have in relative numbers?”, she says.
I think one couldn’t have put it better, the misuse of its power by the media to create a distorted perception of reality by amplifying specific incidents from one country across the globe and prying on the emotional vulnerabilities of its audience. She is referring to the December 2012 Nirbhaya gang rape incident which received unprecedented coverage from the international media. She then argues that ever since 2012, news on Bharat has focussed on the “rape culture of India”. She further talks about how these international media reports subtly blame Hindu culture for the rape scenario in Bharat, despite the fact that unlike Abrahamic religions. Hindus do not have any history of brutalizing women. Maria With says that it’s a systematic campaign by the global media “to paint India blacker than it is”.
Just look at the recent incident involving the gang rape of a Spanish vlogger in Jharkhand. The international media is full of reports denouncing Bharat as being unsafe for women tourists and again blaming Bharatiya culture for sexual crimes against women. The victim has even said that she has no complaints against the people of Bharat and she has safely traveled around 20,000 kms across the country. And she is right. One can see foreign women tourists traveling all across Bharat by themselves and they also receive a lot of respect and help from the local population. But the western media nitpicks any incident of sexual violence against a foreign woman and amplifies it to create the perception that the whole of Bharat is unsafe for women.
Sadly, the Bharatiya media does nothing to challenge this perception. Until the mainstream Bharatiya media develops its own paradigm for news coverage and analysis and stops regurgitating the “western viewpoint”, this distortion will continue.
