Whether or not martial arts will actually work to reduce rape in India, it is an epidemic perpetuated by their traditional culture. At the very least, these token efforts are a start to raise awareness there.

'Boys Will Be Boys'
In India's largest state, a misogynistic family-run political dynasty wants to pretend a rape epidemic doesn't exist.
BY Ankita Rao , Vivekananda Nemana
AUGUST 13, 2014



On the morning of May 27, villagers in the Badaun district in India's Uttar Pradesh state found two teenage girls, raped and murdered, hanging from a mango tree. The girls had disappeared the night before, never returning after wandering into the fields near their home to go to the bathroom. The attack came days before a series of brutal assaults across the state: Four men gang-raped a 17-year-old girl, and another group of men beat the mother of a different rape victim after she refused to withdraw an official complaint. On May 30, reporters confronted chief minister Akhilesh Yadav in the state capital of Lucknow about the recent wave of sexual violence.

But the 41-year-old leader of India's most populous and arguably most lawless state was unrepentant. "Aren't you safe?" Yadav shot back, standing amid a gaggle of microphones, his aides smirking behind him. "You're not facing any danger, are you?"

The remarks were consistent with what has become a disturbing party line. Yadav is one of the leading politicians in the Samajwadi Party ("Socialist Party"), a left-leaning group that has built a reputation as one of the most anti-women parties in the country. In April, Yadav's father, party head and former Uttar Pradesh chief minister Mulayam Singh Yadav, opposed capital punishment for rape, citing that "boys will be boys ... they make mistakes." Just days later, Abu Azmi, the head of the party's Maharashtra state branch, argued that if men were hanged for rape, then women should be hanged for having premarital sex. In July, Mulayam sparked controversy again by claiming that out of all Indian states, Uttar Pradesh had the most people but the fewest rapes -- a blatant lie. (Reached through a party spokesperson, Yadav and his father declined to comment.)

A combination of uneven development, a flawed judiciary, and systemic police corruption have made Uttar Pradesh among the most difficult places to be a woman in India. The state -- with a population of roughly 200 million, enough to make it the fifth-largest country in the world -- reported over 32,500 incidents of gender-based crime in 2013, ranking second only to the admittedly less populated Andhra Pradesh. Of those, 3,000 were rapes -- more than a 50 percent rise from the year before, according to the Ministry of State for Home Affairs, which oversees the national police service. Yet these numbers don't tell the whole story; rape carries significant stigma in India, and can often lead to abuse directed towards the victim, causing sexual assault to go widely underreported.

The scale of gender-based violence in Uttar Pradesh is likely much worse than the already disturbing figures suggest. That is not the way the party sees it, however. "This whole thing about violence against women -- this is propaganda," Rajendra Chaudhary, a Samajwadi Party cabinet minister and spokesman, told Foreign Policy. "These incidents are unfortunate and we're trying to fix them, but this is a social problem. We can't say that this is happening because of government."

Meanwhile, the Samajwadi Party has resisted efforts to reform rape laws, refused to reserve a portion of seats in its parliament for women, and opposed increased penalties for sexual crimes after the now-infamous 2012 Delhi gang rape, where a young woman was brutally -- and fatally -- assaulted on a bus in the capital. In Uttar Pradesh "violence against women," said activist Kavita Krishnan, who runs the All India Progressive Women's Association, a women's rights organization, "seems to be a feature of governance."

While the state's leaders have long presided over an inept administration that enables widespread sexual violence, the younger Yadav was supposed to be different. Australia-educated, well-spoken, and charismatic, Yadav ran as a reformer who could fix Uttar Pradesh's corrupt and sclerotic bureaucracy -- and, in turn, upend the state institutions that had abetted impunity for criminal perpetrators. But two years later, he has done little to distinguish himself from the party's old guard; sexual assault remains pervasive in his state. It's a product of a systemic rape culture, according to Krishnan, that very much still "flows from the top."
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