<div>When lakhs of urban Delhi elites took to the streets on the weekend before Christmas 2012 demanding security for women to a standard that any civilized society would take for granted and were then water cannoned for their protest, you had to ask yourself if we inhabited a land of tribal warfare and anarchy. When female protesters were in turn molested by lumpen bazaar riff raff at that same demonstration, you had to ask yourself if you were an observer of a surreal political theatre. When those same protesters were accused of killing a cop who died it appears because he was physically not fit to engage in high adrenalin duties, you had to ask what one could expect from a sovereign who self-servingly converted tragedy to farce. Running like an unspoken thread through all this is this question which urban elites refuse to frame, leave alone answer: We know that the call to revolution is heeded by illiterate underclasses and steered to fruition by educated <br />urban elites: when urban elites behave like illiterate underclasses, who will lead India to the dawn of a new era of liberal freedom and true democracy?<br /><br />More’s the pity because this same question has been blowing in the wind for the last eighteen months and we are no closer to an answer. Fifteen months back, when lakhs took to the streets to demand the promulgation of a Lokpal law led by a team of ostensibly well-meant political novices, I said in <a href="http://www.businessworld.in/en/storypage/-/bw/melas-with-missions/339660.0/page/0"><strong><em>Melas with Missions</em></strong></a>, <br /><br />“<em>Perhaps, when it all comes down to dust, you will concluded that while we Indians have always loved our melas, we have now progressed to organising melas which have an ostensible mission even though in the long run, its only so much redundant drama, symbolism and emotional purgation.” </em><br /><br />What was the ruckus on Rajpath but a Bob Geldof typehead bangers ball with the ostensible mission to save Indian women instead of Ethiopian stomachs? As a lawyer of 33 years vintage, I am appalled of the extent to which our urban educated elites extoll the employment of illegal means to achieve the promulgation of just laws. I am equally appalled at the extent to which we ask for the promulgation of patently illegal laws to achieve legally laudable ends. We hang jihaad indoctrinated youth with lacerated minds so that we may protect our plural democracy. We want to castrate rapists to usher in a peaceable society. How do you achieve good by doing bad? Violating men who violate women only begets a nation of the violated, especially when we know that crimes against women are not ‘law and order’ problems? Or don’t we know it? Let me explain.<br /><br />First and foremost, the terrifying violation of a young girl in a bus while trying to get a ride home on a dark winter Delhi evening is a horrific and unforgivable crime perpetrated by damaged minds. This is no ‘sex crime’ by more or less ‘normal’ males with a bad attitude to women who are going to get reformed by closer policing and the promulgation of even more laws carrying even harsher penalties. We don’t live in a medieval central Asian khanate with bazaar’s overrun by legless, armless, castrated beggars without noses and ears in some Zia-ul-Huq type martial law regime turned nightmare. We have all seen enough satellite TV to know that no society is able to prevent such crimes anywhere in the world, especially through the promulgation of law alone and without addressing their underlying causes. <br /><br />Second, we need to recognize that violence against women on the street is only an extension of violence against women in our homes. You can't fix one without fixing the other. In a world where rich brothers are doing their sisters out of a share of the ancestral home, where boys are educated better and fed better and clothed better than girls, where parents turn their backs on their own daughters after they are ‘married off’ leaving girls with no choice but to terminate their lives under the incessant pressure of dowry demands, to expect society generally not to carry this terrifying contempt of women from the home to the street is perverse. <br /><br />Third, there are far too many credible studies of the socio-economic basis for crimes for us to assume that tighter laws mean a more civilized society. We know that disempowered members of any gender inevitably pray upon those weaker than them. The inherent violence of and extreme inequities in our society encourage many men to do terrible things to weaker women. Class conflict, powerlessness and extreme frustration run like a sub-stream through our society with consequences that we need to ponder with an honest heart. We urban elites who sit on top of the ‘power’ heap are part of the problem, for our own predation on the weak is equally culpable, regardless of gender.<br /><br />Allow me an aside here. Our attitude to such crime is also highly class contextualised. When the victim of these disempowered men is ‘one of us’, we take to the streets and talk about hanging and castration. When one of us does something to one of ‘their’ women, then it’s a blackmailing maid making a fast buck because the guy was alone at home. And when ‘one of them’ does something to one of ‘their’ women, then who gives a pig’s poke?<br /><br />Four, superior policing never hurts but in contemporary India, better policing is impossible when so few policemen are expected to make themselves available to so many members of the political classes who need so many policeman to protect them from so few of us who may harbour violent intentions towards them! For educated Indians to target too few overworked underpaid policemen for crimes that lie deep in the Indian psyche is disgusting and distressing.<br /><br />Five, agitation politics is the very antithesis of the role that urban educated elites should be playing in our society. We are expected to be thought leaders, steering our country to go to a better, more civilized place. We know that between our lumpen polity and our opportunist political classes (of which I am very sure I wish to specifically include Kejriwal and Ramdev), every genuine protest runs the very real risk of getting hijacked. Educated urban elites need to become leaders, not case studies of anger management gone berserk. We need to have a clear sense of what is wrong, what the fix is and what we need to do to implement the fix.<br /><br />But then you may ask: what am I doing discussing violent street crime in the legal column of a business magazine? I am doing it because this issue is more important than anything else that this column can conceivably say about India today. When half the population of this country is treated as children of a lesser God and live under clear and present threat of eminent violence without warning for no reason except their gender, for me to sit around pontificating about corporate governance and equal protection of business laws and better regulation is to avoid thinking about India’s biggest developmental challenge. Yeah, sure, you may say, but what do you want business to do about any of this? What is a corporate manager supposed to do about street crime or dowry deaths? Everything, says I.<br /><br />If we want a society in which business can flourish – and bear in mind that we are always only a couple of Bharatbandhs away from operating losses - we have to work towards a stable relatively peaceful society where civilized norms are valued and street violence – whether led by criminals or by very angry protesters – is condemned. At the heart of the current protest is a social problem: the problem of the empowerment of women. You cannot legislate out of a social problem by increasing the punishment, police it out of existence or combat it through harsh violent legal or administrative measures. You can and should legislate out of a social problem through affirmative action and gender specific empowerment. It has been shown time and again, in society after society, regardless of culture or geography, that the quickest and most efficient way to address a multitude of developmental challenges including notably the inherent instability of the third world is to empower its women. Many political thinkers in India recognize this, which is why we have reserved seats for women in local self-government bodies and are trying to replicate it at the national legislative level.For the average corporate guy, this has two implications. <br /><br />First, we are all duty bound in the corporate world to do whatever it takes to empower women in the corporate environment so that they are the equal of men in their ability to deliver value to their companies. We simply cannot have women as victims of their biology. If this means appropriate working conditions, so be it. It also means that if affirmative action is necessary, we need to adopt it. If that means sufficient representation on boards, as head of departments or whatever, so be it. I am not on the topic of this but nor that. When the destination is clear, the route is frequently pretty obvious. What doesn’t work for me is to have hyper ventilating hotshots breast beating about rape while simultaneously condemning equal opportunity laws that give women half a shot at the hotshot’s spot.<br /><br />Second, we can’t have empowered women at work who go home to transform magically into second rate citizens. We cannot conceive of a man who treats women as equal at work but treats women at home as unequal. Male attitudes must be consistent, across work and home environments, across class distinctions of master and servant, and across economic classes of rich and poor. I am unconvinced that either corporate India or educated westernized urban elites see the inherent contradictions in our attitudes which aggregate the violence of our society which we then rage against. Women’s empowerment begins by specifying the working hours of the live-in maid at home.<br /><br />At the end of the day, we need to ask ourselves a basic question: do we want a new India or are we double speaking demagogues paying lip service to one set of values while living by another? Do we want to protect our women by empowering them or do we want others not to ravish them just so long we are able to mistreat them? In the ultimately analysis, do we want to drive change in India through a very clear vision of the society we want to create or are we drug crazed headbangers in heavy metal concerts in search of catharsis when clearly the sickness is within?<br /><br />(<em>The author is managing partner of the Gurgaon-based corporate law firm N South. He is the author of “Winning Legal Wars” and “Bullshit Quotient: Decoding India’s corporate, social and legal Fine Print”. He can be contacted at rcd@nsouthlaw.com</em>).<br /><br /><br /><br /> </div>
