Women And Men Deserve Equal Blame For What Happened In Bengaluru This New Year

The coverage and response to the sexual assaults in Bengaluru are almost as appalling as the crime itself. When Bengaluru got together to celebrate the new year, no one could have anticipated the mass assault on women that took place on Brigade Road. The separate incident in Kamanhalli was even more shocking, considering it took place in a residential bylane in what was considered a reasonably safe neighbourhood.

All these incidents deserve to be condemned in the strongest possible terms.

There are no excuses for rape or sexual assault. But the focus of the analysis post-facto has largely been on how parents need to educate their boys that they are not entitled to a woman¡¯s body, or that women need to be respected, instead of teaching women to fear and avoid wearing ¡°short dresses¡±.

These emotional outbursts do little to prevent a second or third occurrence of what we saw during the new year. Through the binary lens of rights activists and journalists on both sides of the gender divide, the argument is focused on making this a problem of the opposite gender. As editors and commentators, we have a responsibility to be diffused of our primary emotions and look at the problem from the multitude of angles that it possesses.

Education and the sexes

Yes, education is a problem. And it¡¯s not restricted to the education of boys. The education of women is equally broken. When you teach girls to fear boys and maintain invisible boundaries, you alienate the opposite sex and disturb the natural curiosity to learn more about each other. When you separate boys and girls into gender-based lines at school assembly, you install the thought that boys and girls are not equal and that each has their own place separate from the other.

Reuters/representational image

When you send your daughter to a ¡°women only¡± college, you rob her of the opportunity to mingle and gain confidence in corresponding with the opposite sex. We need to educate both genders at the same table and our education needs to be equal and take into consideration natural curiosities of both genders to explore the other. When you deny these curiosities, or try to curtail them, you allow them to mutate into crime, misandry, and misogyny later in life.

In the real world, there are no gender specific footpaths or gender-specific work areas. We have to mingle with one another to run an economy, earn a paycheck, to manage the household and to educate the next generation of Indians. Why do we then separate genders in our analysis of both the problem and the solution?

BCCL

Bangalore as a city is not unique to this problem, but it makes a great example.

As one of the fastest growing cities in India, it is host to Indians from all walks and backgrounds. It embraces all cultures, no matter how diametrically opposed they are. It is a city with over 40% of India¡¯s startups and a hotbed of aspiring entrepreneurs, and most notably women, who flock here to practice independence from their families and support systems back home. And for the most part, Bangalore has done a decent job of balancing different cultures and aspirations, though there¡¯s still much to be desired. There are areas of friction and there will continue to be. This friction is a function of not just gender biases, but of class inequality, language barriers, political polarisation, et all.

I am angry as a Bengalurean that the city¡¯s name is being dragged through the mud because of the inability of the governing class to fix deep-rooted gender biases. I am even more angry that rather than uniting all communities and genders, these acts of violence and the reportage thereafter are doing more to divide us even further. As a Bengalurean who¡¯s taken up multiple causes in the city, I remember a stark contrast from my childhood, of a city where the people were unusually friendly and helpful.

AFP

You didn¡¯t need Google Maps then, because there was always a resident willing to turn tour guide for a brief moment to help you on your way. It was where communities lived in harmony and women¡¯s security was rarely on the top ten topics of discussion at the dinner table. Having been abroad for 20 years, I remember coming to Bengaluru often during the summer and feeling completely at home. Never needing to feel like the culture I was used to was an aberration (something of a luxury in those days). In the late 90s and early 2000s going out meant going to Cubbon Park, Lalbagh or Gandhi Bazaar.

Today, going out means pub hopping or meeting at Forum/Mantri/Orion mall. While the parks are classless places where communities meet and mingle, the malls are not. They are clearly class specific and purveyors of unattainable aspirations (read: fantasies) for the average Indian.

That¡¯s a problem. What happened on New Year at Brigade Road was a rude reminder that by burying our heads in our pubs and malls, we¡¯ve ignored the need for greater integration of gender and class and that living in gated communities was as much a physical separation as it was a mental separation. I yearn for the Bangalore of the 90s where communities came together to resolve common problems rather than pick sides and appropriate blame.

Reuters/representational image

Bengaluru, today, is a social experiment and a test. It¡¯s a test of how well our education system equips us to integrate with different cultures and genders. It¡¯s also a test of our collective parenting. Both have failed momentarily. The larger failure here is that of governance and our political leadership. And the comments of Karnataka's Home Minister in the aftermath of this debacle doesn¡¯t inspire any confidence that things will change anytime soon. We should question whether aged relics of times bygone should even be eligible to contest an election where the average age of the electorate is half the age of all the main candidate.

Bangalore was once fondly referred to as the Garden City of India and a ¡°Pensioner's Paradise¡±. Thanks to failed governance, today it is the garbage city of India (in more ways than one), and a pensioner¡¯s worst nightmare.

Varun Hemachandran is an activist and entrepreneur from Bengaluru working towards the environmental sustainability of our cities. His community treemapping drive across India is helping governments and communities better understand and manage their green cover. He is also a commentator on issues concerning child rights, women, and politics.