NEW DELHI, 10 October 2006 — Late at night, a posse of young Indian women walk down a dark city street wearing spaghetti-strap tops and body-hugging outfits, defying the stares of onlookers in a country where a woman is raped every 29 minutes.
Around two dozen women took part in the demonstration to highlight the dangers for women walking on Indian streets by heeding organizers instructions to wear “something they always wanted to (wear) but could not” during their late night protest.
“If I was not in a group, God only knows what would have happened,” Amrita Nandy Joshi, a 31-year-old Oxford graduate said as the group made its way down a dimly-lit New Delhi road after 10 p.m., a walk normally done only with a male escort, if at all.
“We call this direct public intervention against street sexual harassment,” said Jasmeen Patheja, a gutsy 26-year-old photographer working in the southern IT hub of Bangalore who brought the novel protest to the capital.
“I was fed up with being teased every day. One day I reached a threshold and decided to take action,” she said.
Patheja formed Blank Noise, a movement that rallies for safer streets for Indian women.
Since setting up Blank Noise about three years ago, Patheja has organized “night actions” in four other cities, inviting women through her blog (www.blanknoiseproject.blogspot.com) to meet at a designated place at night and then set out on a walk.
Along the route, they spray messages on the road that describe the abuse that many young Indian women encounter daily in the hope that they will be read the next morning by pedestrians and create awareness.
According to the latest official figures, a woman is raped every half-hour in India. Last year, there were more than 18,000 rapes in the country, and these are only the reported cases.
Activists suspect the number is much higher as many women don’t report attacks to police, fearing harassment or social stigma.
“The actual figure (for rapes last year) would be around 30,000. The situation is even worse in the rural and semi-urban areas where police refuse to lodge cases,” said Aparna Bhat, a lawyer running a government ‘Rape Crisis’ program.
New Delhi is one of India’s most dangerous cities for women, according to the figures. Most of the women taking part in the protest said they had repeatedly been at the receiving end of what the Indian media often refers to as “Eve-teasing,” a term the women protesters say fails to describe the trauma suffered by the women victims.
Patheja knows her short night walk is merely symbolic due to poor policing in India’s main cities and chauvinistic attitudes that run deep through conservative Indian society and which, some say, are reinforced by popular culture. But she is unfazed.
“Slowly things will change,” she said. “I remember when we started off in 2003, there was this street railing which had become a sort of a ‘lech point’ where men would hang out and make lewd comments at women passing by.
“One day we took over the railing. A bunch of us girls just took over the railing and stood there for hours, chatting and having fun,” she said referring to one of the first Blank Noise protests in Bangalore.
The southern city is home to thousands of young women away from home for the first time to work in its booming technology industries.
“Why can’t a woman just stand against a street railing and look at people? Why does she have to be on the phone or show she is waiting for someone? Why can’t she simply be on the street?” Patheja is collecting clothes worn by women on occasions when they were harassed.
As the walk ended, some of the girls were ferried home in taxis, while others set out with male friends or family members.
