In Modi’s India, scandal still embarrasses, but rape has become common | Sexual assault

As court documents linked to the late financier Jeffrey Epstein continue to emerge, the scandal has become an international embarrassment, exposing how quickly powerful men can turn into reputational liabilities. That uneasiness reached New Delhi, where Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates was expected to deliver the keynote address at the AI ​​Impact Summit but ended up not attending amid criticism and apparent unease in the Modi government over his previous meetings with Epstein. The spectacle was revealing. Public moral outrage moves quickly when scandal threatens reputations and diplomatic optics. Yet that sensitivity to association sits uneasily alongside a domestic reality in which sexual violence against women unfolds with brutal regularity, drawing neither comparable embarrassment nor consequences. The contrast is grotesque. A political culture capable of signaling discomfort in the direction of a global scandal remains remarkably unperturbed by the everyday brutality women face at home.

Under the Modi administration, the news cycle shrinks with reports of gang-rapes like factory output — steady, relentless and mind-numbing in repetition. The octopuses have become so common that they are reported like the weather. Heat wave deaths. Flash flood. Five-year-old kidnapped, raped, murdered. And like the weather, only God is responsible. Not the rapist. Not the court. Not the police. Certainly not the prime minister.

Between the time this piece was commissioned and published, a five-year-old was gang-raped in Meerut, a 26-year-old was gang-raped in Faridabad, and a 17-year-old was gang-raped in Odisha. A 42-year-old was gang-raped in Delhi’s suburbs. A 12-year-old girl was kidnapped and gang-raped in Bikaner. There were more gang-rapes in Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and Kanpur. I could give you statistics, but numbers could never convey the larger, all-encompassing horror of living with predators. The threat of sexual violence is as constant as gravity. The cases were gross – guts pulled out, sticks inserted, tongues cut out, acid thrown, beheading, strangulation and burning. When I look at government data on rape – an average of 86 women are raped every day – it feels as gray as stumbling upon a mass grave in Excel sheets.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Home Minister Amit Shah, seemingly obsessed with restoring law and order at any cost, seem completely unconcerned that India is the gang-rape capital of the world watching them.

The most alarming case of this was when convicted rapist and Bharatiya Janata Party politician Kuldeep Singh Sengar, convicted of raping a minor in 2017 and a native of Makhi village in Unnao district of Uttar Pradesh, was granted bail by a Supreme Court, making possible his political involvement and reintegration. A Supreme Court granted him bail in December. Fortunately, it was upheld by the Supreme Court, but only after outraged women gathered in Delhi to protest. Sengar raped a teenager, who was also gang-raped by his associates. Her father was killed in police custody. A case was registered only after she threatened to burn herself in front of the chief minister’s residence. Her tragic story shows how Indian men, like the Modi administration, remain remarkably unabashed about the state of affairs.

Unfortunately, this is not an aberration; it is the system that speaks in its native language.

Public memory matters because each new case unfolds against the remnants of what we were told would change everything. In 2012, three days after the incident, on my way from the airport, I read about the “Nirbhaya” gang-rape. I deliberately avoided the news until she ended up at Safdarjung Hospital, and my editor needed a health update from me. After learning all the details of what men did to this young woman, I thought the world would stand still. A threshold has been crossed. Something told me the world would start anew. There were protests, and everywhere people would know her name, and something like this would never happen again.

All my naivety was drowned out in a chorus of “Not All Men” as the gang-rape was turned into something viral to hang a hashtag on. The refrain did not so much defend innocence as redirect attention away from accountability and back to masculine comfort.

It is impossible for me to hear about such cases and not think: What if it was me? My body. That bar. Those men. The suffering and mutilation of women’s bodies is so reliable that there is now a market to help alleviate our fear. Security programs. Pepper spray and portable panic alarms. Every time I write about this topic, I sit with the absolute inadequacy of the written word in the face of men who film the rapes, brag about them and are nevertheless rehabilitated.

It would not be out of place to mention this unprecedented moment, but it is beyond that. It is existential. Whether it’s the United States or India, women watch the same choreography of power protecting itself, as men of consequence close ranks and wait out the storm. The similarity lies not in scale or context, but in the customary spectacle of institutions that silence powerful men while survivors fight alone. For a while, both countries – said to be the largest and oldest democracies – have been on a path of self-destruction, with men leading the way. Under Modi as well as Trump, rape has become an extension of politics. Women are no longer violated by men alone, but also by courts, hospitals and newsrooms. This is the age of monsters. Of course, it did not start with Epstein, Gates or Sengar, but they are its symbols.

While the middle class was buying into the dream of upward mobility, career ability and two bedrooms in a gated suburb, we let thugs cultivate a wholesale misogynistic empire that runs on hatred of women. I don’t know what to do with the anger I feel. What do you do when you are constantly told that your body, your people, your gender are disposable? I don’t know.

What I do know is that the teenager who survived Sengar is still fighting for justice. I know that the survivors of Epstein’s sex-trafficking network are also fighting for justice. These women fight with heart and soul and sweat and muscle. I know that I have no right to be discouraged while they stand tall and look every inch the hero that they are. I also know that no one fights like that if you don’t love your sisters.

At this dark hour, it feels important to place on record that while the Modi administration is theatrically recoiling from the shadow of the Epstein scandal on the summit stage, the satire is writing itself. A government that cannot or will not protect its women should be far more ashamed of what is ordinary than of what is scandalous.

The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial position.