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Violence against women is a massive issue in India, but so little of the discussion after these horrific crimes seems oriented towards the the most obvious problem: lack of police and a broken justice system.
Uttar Pradesh has an HDI on par with Syria& #39;s (!!!), and India is one of the least policed countries on earth. India& #39;s police are also governed by the IPC (Indian Penal Code), which was drafted by the British in the mid 19th century. There are cultural factors at play here as well
, and those need to be discussed and dealt with, but what I don& #39;t understand is the Indian tendency to focus exclusively on these higher order issues when the basics of law and order are woefully absent and have been since independence. This isn& #39;t rocket science.
If you want to mitigate violence against women, start by training and modernizing a robust police force and fixing the legal system. Once you get the basics right, you move on to the more complex tasks like reforming toxic cultural attitudes etc.
This is a tendency that Aurobindo noticed as far back as 1906: "...yet when disappointment and failure come, we choose to attribute them to some radical defect in the national character."
