Teen jumped from bus and died, Barkha Dutt. How safe do you think Indian women are?

Since Barkha Dutt came out in India's support over the issue of gender discrimination at a New York event last week, reams of newsprint and bites have been devoted in her appreciation. Friends and colleagues have shown near unanimous agreement with her views, asserting that the narrative in the West, bolstered by the release of the documentary India's Daughter, would have us wrongly imagine that every man in India is a rapist and that every woman is a victim.

The documentary, about Nirbhaya's rape and murder, was also shown at the event, known as the "Women in the World" summit and organised in New York from April 22 to 24. Leslee Udwin, the maker of India's Daughter, was the other member of the panel which was moderated by Norah O'Donnell of CBS News. Dutt lost her cool with Norah when the latter said that she had visited India in the past but was unaware of the depth of danger women in India face.

Dutt's visceral reaction may have followed from the screening of the documentary, a film that has fiercely divided opinion back home too. The backlash has followed two distinct strands: one, which takes after the government, considers the documentary defamatory towards India and for that reason, worth banning. It is to Dutt's credit that she called this out for the utter crap that it is. The other issue is with the documentary itself, which has a number of editorial flaws (I have articulated this view here).

It is perhaps with this background that we can attempt to understand Dutt's vigorous defence of India before a foreign audience. But even so, Dutt's case was rather weak. She quoted statistics by Nobel laureate Amartya Sen to say that sexual violence incidents are higher in the US and UK than they are in India. As Rega Jha wrote on Buzzfeed, these statistics reflect the absence of marital rape on the Indian statute, an issue that is currently being discussed after the home ministry refused to include marital rape under the purview of rape. Besides, to rely on statistics is futile when reporting rape continues to be an act of courage in this country.

Worse, some of Dutt's arguments ended up sounding tone-deaf. She spoke about how India has maternity leave when the US does not have (I am not sure Dutt got this factoid right. To my knowledge, giants of Silicon Valley have egalitarian employee practices.) She spoke about how the US has these massive debates on abortion that India does not have. I was particularly surprised at Dutt making that last point. India is not on the social and political point of the spectrum to discuss abortion as an issue. This is a country where girls are killed both in the womb and after being born due to family pressure to produce a male child, so where is the question of the woman exercising her reproductive choice? Yes, certain women, a tiny percentage for sure, do enjoy maternity benefits, but that is just the shiny tip of a creaking public health system where women continue to suffer grave risks during both pregnancy and childbirth, if not later. Remember the 11 women who died during a sterilisation drive in Chattisgarh last year due to the abysmal facilities at the government-organised health camp?

I am not suggesting that women born into privileged backgrounds do not face risks but it would be simplistic if we equated those risks with the more pernicious menace that less privileged women face. India is a society deeply riven by class and caste, and everyone - men and women - gets trained, subliminally if not forthrightly, to respect those boundaries. Indira Gandhi becoming prime minister was not gender triumphing, as Dutt suggested at the talk. It was class and nepotism working its magic over a willing Indian electorate. (That Gandhi ultimately triumphed as a leader is a separate issue.)

So when Dutt says that she finds the narrative of subjugation being built around Indian women tiresome, we must ask which women she is referring to. On a day a Dalit girl in Punjab died after jumping out of a moving bus with her mother to escape the clutches of molesters, the question of whether there is a climate of safety for women doesn't even arise. There is no such climate.

Yes, not all Indian men rape, and not all Indian women are victims. But a defence of India on the issue of its poor record on sexual violence should not fail to look into how pervasive sexual violence is and how difficult to pin down. In Moga, a girl and her mother were molested on a bus, and the girl died. Two-and-a-half years ago a bus was the scene of another horrific crime in Delhi. These were girls who had done nothing to deserve the violence directed at them. They were only using public transport. Yet, in doing such a regular, everyday task they exposed themselves to the most brutish dangers imaginable. If this immediacy, this unexpectedness of risk to life and limb does not constitute a "narrative of women suppression" I don't know what does.