The news from India is a sickening echo. A brutal gang rape, the details of which are so vile they defy easy summarisation, has once again ripped open a wound that many believed had begun to heal. The victim, a young woman, has survived, but the psychic trauma inflicted upon a nation is another matter. It is 2012 all over again. The Delhi gang rape, the death of Jyoti Singh, the protests, the global outrage. We have been here before. The British consulate, to its credit, has updated its travel guidance. But what does a travel advisory mean in a country where the state itself seems unable to guarantee the safety of half its population?
Let us not mince words. This is not a random spasm of violence. It is a symptom of a deeper rot, a failure of civilisation that the Victorian moralist would recognise immediately. We have discussed at length the intellectual decadence of the West, but the East is not immune. India, for all its economic growth and technological prowess, remains a society where patriarchy is not merely a tradition but a religion. The gang rape is its sacrament. The victim is the sacrificial offering. And the state, for all its laws and police forces, is the indifferent priest.
Compare this to the Fall of Rome, if you will. The late Empire was obsessed with spectacle, with bread and circuses, while the barbarians massed at the gates. India today is obsessed with economic growth, with its place on the world stage, while the barbarism of its own making rapes and kills in the shadows. The 2012 case prompted a judicial overhaul, new laws, fast-track courts. And yet, here we are. The number of reported rapes in India has actually increased. The conviction rate remains abysmal. The victim-blaming culture, the police indifference, the family shame: all of this remains firmly in place.
What, then, is to be done? The British consulate’s updated guidance is a bandage on a haemorrhage. It tells British nationals to be vigilant, to avoid travelling alone at night. It is the same advice given to women in every country, from London to New York. It is advice that places the burden of safety on the potential victim, not on the potential perpetrator. It is the advice of a society that has given up on the idea of collective responsibility. We are all Rome now, watching the barbarians at the gate and hoping they do not choose our villa.
But there is a deeper issue here, one that the liberal intellectual class does not want to confront. It is the question of national identity. India is a nation of a billion people, a democracy, a rising power. But what does it mean to be Indian? Is it to be a citizen of a modern state, or a subject of ancient prejudices? The gang rape is not an aberration; it is a reflection of a society that has not yet decided what it wants to be. The West went through its own convulsions, its own struggles for women’s rights, but it had the advantage of a Reformation, an Enlightenment, a series of revolutions that reshaped the social contract. India has had no such upheaval. It has had a legal system imposed from above, but the hearts and minds below remain unchanged.
I do not pretend to have a solution. I am a columnist, not a prophet. But I can see the pattern. And the pattern is this: until India confronts its own savagery, its own deep-seated misogyny, it will continue to produce such horrors. The 2012 case was supposed to be a watershed. It was not. It was a moment of catharsis that led to nothing but more laws. The gang rape is the ghost at the feast of India’s economic miracle. And the British consulate can update its guidance all it likes. It will not change a thing.
