The mistreatment and abuse of women is a particular problem in Delhi and northern India. A stiflingly patriarchal social mindset, a brazen culture of political power, a general disdain for law, a largely insensitive police force, and a rising population of rootless, lawless migrants are only some of the reasons. There must be many others.

So if you are a woman – unless you are very rich and privileged – you are more likely to face indignity and humiliation here.

In this part of the world where I live and work, people blame rapes on pornography, the influence of foreign cultures, and women themselves – for wearing western dresses and going out with male friends. When another incident happens, the indignant headlines, excited TV talk shows, candlelight vigils, promises by authorities and platitudes by politicians return with familiar gusto.

But nothing really changes for Delhi's women. “It is as if there is a silent conspiracy in this city,” a woman friend says, “to keep the women scared.”

A friend who works in the media tells me about life as a Delhi woman. It is infinitely worse for those who are less privileged than her.

When she was living as a paying guest in an upscale south Delhi neighbourhood a few years ago, a drunk male cook barged into her room at night, yanked at her bedsheet and tried to attack her. The man fled after she screamed.

“My landlord, a perfectly respectable person on the outside, came up and said I must have been dreaming, that there could not have been an attack. His mother had heard my screams, so she believed me. I left the place, and they said they had sacked the cook. When I checked later, I found that the cook had returned,” she remembers.

After she joined salsa classes a few years later, her friends arrived to pick her up for a competition. They were waiting for a taxi when a policeman walked up and challenged the boys. “You are hanging out with a loose woman,” he grunted. “Give me your parents' numbers, we will tell them.”

When her friends protested, the policeman went up to the landlady and extracted a bribe. “He told her he would file cases against her saying she had rented her place to a suspicious woman without a proper rent agreement.”

One evening, some years ago, she was walking home from work when a young man sidled up to her and said something very obscene. She asked him to shut up and walked on.

The man ran after her and told her bluntly: “I will pour acid on your face next time you say that.” Then he vanished. “I came home and began crying. I was scared of going out for the next few days,” she says.

When my journalist friend travels alone in an auto on the city's mean streets, she keeps having real and imaginary conversations on the phone with friends and relatives. She doesn't take an auto if she finds the driver overfriendly. If she takes a taxi, she texts the registration number to a friend. She keeps phone numbers for a handful of “reliable” drivers whom she can count on to take her home.

Delhi's disdain for its women possibly mirrors the city itself, says a cynical friend and long-time resident.

A city largely, he says, made up of a deracinated generation of migrants, rich and poor, living in their own worlds in gated neighbourhoods and grimy slums which all make genuine collective action difficult. An ineffective police and a broken justice system make matters worse.

(Sriranjani is a student at the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai.)

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