App-based cab services banned, Delhi Police and Uber playing the blame game, the laxity of government regulations again under the spotlight and discussions anew on an unsafe capital. And almost lost in all the babble is the central issue of betrayal — of the rape survivor who stepped into an Uber cab believing that it was the safest option for her to go home and of the lakhs of women who find themselves penalised with one more avenue of public transport now tainted with fear.
The system has let them down, pulled away the blanket of trust in the one form of transport deemed safer. In a city — and indeed country — of shrinking public spaces for women, radio taxis were deemed to be the secure option to buses, trains and auto-rickshaws. One in which there was no anonymity but tech-backed accountability with GPS systems and drivers whose phone numbers and names were known not just to the customer but to the company too.
But that track went horribly wrong that Friday night when a 26-year-old called an Uber cab after an outing with friends, comfortable in the belief that she would reach home safely. She nodded off at some point in the journey from Vasant Vihar in south Delhi to Inderlok in north Delhi and allegedly woke up to find the driver next to her. He raped her, threatened her with murder and dropped her off home.
If only she had known that Shiv Kumar Yadav had already been arrested for rape and had served seven months jail time. In 2011, he was the man arrested for raping a dancer in Gurgaon, but was reportedly freed after a compromise was reached between the two. That case, too, had made headlines, but Yadav still managed to slip between the cracks and re-emerge three years later to commit the savage crime again.
Much like an onion, this incident is wrapped in layers of callousness, with each layer unravelling, revealing a new truth. Uber, a San Francisco-based company, which operates like a cab aggregator rather than a full fledged taxi operator, reportedly does no checks of its own but relies on documents provided by the driver. The vehicles have no GPS, only the mobiles given to the drivers have one that can be switched off when the phone is. Adroitly deflecting blame, its CEO said in a statement that it would work with the government “to establish clear background checks currently absent in their commercial transportation licensing programmes”.
The questions are many. Why was this not done earlier? How did the government, ever ready to lay out the red carpet for foreign players, allow such a company to operate in India? Won’t a ban close options for commuters? How did the driver Yadav get away with forgery? What were Delhi police and the transport department doing? How can parts of a teeming city still stay off the radar?
Delhi’s latest rape survivor had ticked off all the essentials. It wasn’t the dead of the night, just 9.30 pm; it wasn’t a public bus but a ‘safe’ taxi; she wasn’t going to the boondocks, just her home in a peopled part of the city. She is the everyday Delhi woman. And her story became the focus of outrage even before we started taking stock of the Capital’s rape record on the second anniversary of the December 16 rape and murder.
It’s another December and clearly nothing has changed for Delhi’s women. With one more trust factor violated, it has, in fact, just gotten worse.