Why Bengaluru isn’t so cool

The idea that the city enjoys the reputation of being safe for women is a well-nourished urban myth

translated into social and civic freedom in the least.

It is more useful to think about what has changed in the small town that became a metropolis in the span of a few decades. How have the multitudes who flocked to the city partaken in democratic life to pose a threat to, or be threatened by, those very spaces of new-found freedom?

Bengaluru is host to one of the most spectacular public events every March-april, a civic festival like no other. Lakhs of people descend from the peri-urban areas of Bengaluru to participate in the Karaga festival. The narrow by-ways and cul-de- sacs of the 16th century city are filled with crowds tracing the same sacred geography that the embodiment of “Draupadi” will course through on “her’’ journey after “her” emergence from the Dharmanarayanaswamy temple. For some time now, the crowds are largely male, young and bursting with both reverence and playfulness. Women and children usually flank this moving river of people, content to watch from doorways and balconies, but when they do decide to join the coursing, do not come out unscathed. Yet we have not heard public discussion of “molestation” from this event.

Mahatma Gandhi Road and its half-kilometre surroundings are a completely different matter. Here too, given the city’s divided pasts, males of the “other city” have come, for several decades, to indulge in their secret pleasures. This could range from the harmless coffee at Koshy’s, with its accompanying chance of viewing women who also drink coffee, perhaps alone, to a swig of stronger stuff in an area bristling with bars. On New Year’s eve, for several generations, the MG Road whereabouts have been the destination of preference for young males, putting some distance between themselves and oppressive family conditions.

The scale of such festivities has changed, with deeply ambiguous consequences for both men and women. Democracy, and a completely altered economy, require large C R Sasikumar

numbers of young women and men to be on the streets at all hours of day and night. But while a female presence must be purposive, preferably collective and invisibilised (an accompanying child is like the Potterian cloak in such situations), no such restraints are placed on loitering men. Of late, women too have begun to break free of their claustrophobic prohibitions, joining public festivities in larger and larger numbers. This is, in part, a reflection of their earning capacity (which the bars and restaurants in central Bengaluru certainly encourage) and the growing democratisation of public life. For these pleasures, they have paid the price, too often without media or police taking cognisance of the same.

For the first time, the omnipresent camera has come into its own, recording the molestation, the pawing, the sheer ugliness of a testosterone-driven mob, and drawing national attention. It should interest us that the women who were subjected to such harassment were reluctant to come out to file FIRS, or complain to those who may well take the opportunity to let fly some sexist/racist abuses of choice. By this reluctance, the women are not being evasive: They are making the plea for a new kind of civility to emerge, one neither mandated by familial constraints, nor legislative fiat.

The most amiable crowds that I have ever seen in India are during Durga Puja in Kolkata, where millions of men and women course the streets through that week, patiently wait in lines to view the pandals erected on tiny spaces on busy roads. One rarely hears of molestation or abuse on those days. This is not the result of a feminist revolution, or even a left-inspired one, but a consequence of a city made safe by terms of fictive “kinship” that ensure women a familial relationship, in the best sense of that term. We could learn from such older forms of civility while crafting new ones. Now can we stop speaking about women’s clothing and habits?

The writer teaches history at the Centre for Historical Studies, JNU AS INDIA’S RELATIONS with China continue to head south, Delhi will find it difficult to sustain a core belief about its engagement with Beijing. India has long insisted that Delhi has shared global interests with Beijing and must build on them despite enduring differences on the bilateral level. Three multilateral developments during 2016 have shattered that persistent illusion.

The first was Beijing’s ferocious opposition to Delhi’s entry into the Nuclear Suppliers Group that regulates international nuclear commerce. The second was China’s unyielding determination to block Indian efforts to get the UN Security Council to designate Masood Azhar of the Jaish-emohammed a terrorist. In the third, China has dredged up a long forgotten UN Security Council resolution to declare India’s nuclear deterrent illegitimate; in the same breath, it warned that it will boost Pakistan’s atomic weapons programme.

The UNSC resolution 1172 was passed in June 1998 in the wake of Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests in May that year. The resolution called on India and Pakistan to sign the NPT and CTBT, freeze their strategic programmes and desist from developing and deploying nuclear weapons. Delhi might have thought much water had flown down New York’s East River since then, including the historic civil nuclear initiative between Delhi and Washington that ended the ban against international atomic energy cooperation with India, lent legitimacy to its nuclear weapons programme and began the integration of India into the global non-proliferation order.

China objected to the India-us civil nuclear initiative, claiming that it violated global non-proliferation norms; at the same time, it said any exception for India must be extended to Pakistan. When the world insisted that the nuclear accommodation was exclusively with India, Beijing violated its non-proliferation commitments to supply additional nuclear reactors to Pakistan. It now insists that either Delhi comes into the NSG with Pakistan or it stays outside the door.

What does this mean for India’s “shared global interests” with China? On the face of it, the proposition that nations with serious differences in one area must find ways to cooperate in others is a sensible one. India’s problem with China is that Delhi’s ideas of shared global interest in the multilateral domain have run into Beijing’s calculus on the regional balance of power in the Subcontinent. If India has let idealism shape