Column

A young Brazilian journalist-friend, who works in Hong Kong and is planning a holiday in Rajasthan during the Easter break, is suddenly having the heebie jeebies about travelling to India.

“It’s all these news reports about rapes that I’ve been reading,” she said. “It’s left me wondering: is it safe for me, a single woman, to travel in India?”

Not to put too fine a point about it, what she was really asking me was: “Is there a serious risk of my being raped in India?” As much as one may resent the oversimplification of the complex Indian reality, it’s easy to see that it’s a legitimate concern for women tourists, accentuated by the suspected rape-murder of 15-year-old Scarlett Keeling in Goa earlier this month.

That case, which was shamefully sought to be covered up initially, has predictably given rise to a string of news reports in the international media about the “spate of rape cases in Indian’s tourist hot spots”.

Citing several foreign women tourists who had been raped or otherwise sexually molested or harassed — in Mumbai, Goa, Kerala, Rajasthan and New Delhi in recent months — the reports are just the kind of negative publicity that make a mockery of the Incredible India! television ad campaigns of the Tourism Ministry.

“Adverse publicity through such cases can irretrievably damage the Brand India image, assiduously built up over years of tourism success,” says a tourism consultant who advises governments across South East Asia.

As I’ve said before, if there’s one area where Indian civil society pales in comparison with China, it is in the safety and security that ordinary, working women experience. It’s perfectly safe (and common) for women, even single women, to go bicycling or for late-night walkabouts in most parts of China without experiencing any of the “eve-teasing” or molestation or other forms of crude sexual harassment so common in Indian cities and towns. And, if anything, foreign women are even more safe.

For, as writer Vikram Seth writes in From Heaven Lake, the status of a ‘foreign guest’ in China is an interesting if unnatural one. “Officialdom treats the foreigner as one would a valuable panda given to fits of mischief. On no account must any harm come to the animal.”

As much as I know that my Brazilian friend will most likely come to no harm in India — and will probably begin a life-long love affair with the country if she travels right — I’m not sure I have it in me to actively encourage her to pack her bags for Incredible India!