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's (!!!), and India is one of the least policed countries on earth. India'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'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'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."

It's situations like this where I really worry about the Indian intellectual class's susceptibility to American political memes. Defunding the Indian police is NOT the solution,, I assure you...