Uber
taxi incident displays India’s social and institutional flaws
When the international Uber taxi hire firm opened
in India last year, it was seen as a potentially efficient and easily
accessible alternative to creaky unreliable rivals’ cabs. That image was
shattered late last Friday evening when an Uber driver allegedly raped a young
woman in Delhi.
The affair demonstrates how little has changed
since rapes hit the international headlines two years ago, when a young woman
died after being gang-raped in a bus. Death is now the ultimate penalty for
those convicted, but that has not deterred young men. There is a stream of rape
reports in the newspapers virtually every day.
The incident also showed how little respect there
is for laws and regulations, and how they are appallingly applied in a society
where institutional controls are frequently inefficient or even inoperative.
The 32-year old Uber
driver, according to media reports, has told police that he was arrested
on suspision of rape in 2011 and spent seven months in prison,
though was later acquitted. Yet Uber, whose operations were today banned in
Delhi, apparently did not do sufficient checks to discover this, and it has no
call center for emergencies.
Rapes are common in India
where sexually repressed young men often regard the act as an assertion of male
superiority. They happen in villages, where women at the bottom of the caste
system are regular targets, and they happen in cities where young men (probably
like the taxi driver) are envious and aroused by the burgeoning wealth and
social life around them that is beyond their reach – especially in an economy
that is not providing jobs.
The woman, in her mid-20s,
was returning home last Friday after spending the evening with friends in a Delhi
pub, according to media reports.
One of the friends drove
her part of the way, and she then called up an Uber taxi on her mobile phone
app to complete the journey from the friend’s home at about 10.30pm. She fell
asleep in the back of the car, and woke to find the driver fondling her. She
resisted, but has told the police the driver raped her, and dropped her at her
home at 1 am. She then called the police, despite his threats that she should
not do so.
The institutional failures
were demonstrated when the Delhi police did not have contact details for Uber.
To track the company down, a deputy commissioner of police downloaded an Uber
application onto his mobile early Saturday morning, ordered a cab, and then
told the driver to take him to the head office.
Operating in the virtual
world of the internet, Uber has no
telephone call center and has been running without full taxi
approvals. It has also had regulatory problems with India’s central bank. The
company’s website does have a support pagehttps://support.uber.com/hc/en-us,
but it is uninformative and cumbersome, and clearly useless in an emergency.
A company spokesman in
Singapore told The Indian Express that all drivers were personally
vetted and added, in answer to a question, “No call center, but they
(customers) can send in feedback/complaints on multiple channels, in-App after
the ride, email (reply to their receipt), through our website, or Twitter.”
2012 street protests
There were mass protests in
Delhi and across the country in December 2012 after the gang rape and battering
by four young men of a 23-year-old paramedical student, who died days later
from her internal injuries. Driven around Delhi in a curtained bus, she was
dumped with a male friend, virtually naked, on a dirt track beside a busy
highway to the city’s airport. This provoked a national outcry and intense
international and local media attention on widespread atrocities against women.
Public demands for the death
penalty were met last year with new laws that provided for the execution of
repeat offenders, and imprisonment for between 20 years and life before that.
The four men in the bus rape case were sentenced to death, but the risk of
severe penalties seems to have had little effect, and the police are frequently
unsympathetic.
Two weeks ago, a cab driver
was arrested in Delhi for sexually abusing a four-year old girl while ferrying
her to school. A few days earlier, there was a report that police tried to set
the husband of a rape victim afire when he refused to withdraw allegations
against men for raping his wife.
Rape is widely condemned
across India, but there are sections of society, including leading politicians,
who tend to see it as an expression of young manhood, often provoked by
provocatively dressed young women.
“Boys will be
boys… they commit mistakes,” Mulayam Singh Yadav, a veteran
politician and leader of the powerful Uttar Pradesh-based Samajwadi Party,
declared (in Hindi) during the general election campaign earlier this year.
Saying his party would try to change the death penalty laws if elected, he added,
“First girls develop friendship with boys. Then, when differences occur, they
level rape charges”.
Other politicians and rural
leaders have suggested that the young should be married without any minimum age
limit so that, as one put it, their “sexual desires find safe outlets.” Village
councils sometimes suggest a victim should marry the rapist because, they
argue, no other man in the locality will have her. Women are often blamed for
being provocative, or the intercourse is dubbed consensual – a line often taken
by the police.
The masses of demonstrators
who took to the streets two years ago expected tough government action and
improved policing. The last government responded quickly with the new laws, but
there has been little improvement in police habits. This is the sort problem
that Narendra Modi was elected prime minister to tackle, so pressure will now
build up for him to deal with the institutional failures, and generate the
economic growth that will improve employment opportunities for India’s frustrated
youth.
John Elliott is Asia Sentinel’s New Delhi correspondent. His blog, Riding the Elephant,
appears at the lower right corner of the AS face page. His book IMPLOSION:
India’s Tryst with Reality has just won the Asian Publishing
Convention’s non-fiction Gold Award 2014 for the "most outstanding project
in Best Insights into Asian Societies”
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