Many British Hindus objected to the description of
the Pakistani rapists as “Asian” (the term used in Britain for
those from the Indian subcontinent), saying that no Hindu would ever be involved in such atrocities. Yet, looking at their home country, we see a different story.
As with the
Serbs and Croats, it is primarily religion which separates the Indians and Pakistanis. Both countries were historically considered part of ‘India’. When the British withdrew, their empire in India was
partitioned along religious lines, with the
Hindu part retaining the name “India” and the Muslim part taking the name “Pakistan.”
A
high profile gang rape in India brought attention to what is frequently described as an “
epidemic” in the country. Western tourists have also been victimized in recent attacks. The attackers do not just come from the underclass—one of the attackers is described By the Daily Mail as a “businessman.” [
Two Western women raped in India: Irish charity worker, 21, `drugged and assaulted` and U.S. hitchhiker, 30, gang-raped in resort town in separate attacks, By Becky Evans, June 4, 2013]
As usual, a large volume of academic work is devoted to blaming the prevalence of rape in India on the British imperialists who first observed and reported on it. For example, an article in the
Cambridge Journal of Asian Studies blames
“colonial indifference” and “contemporary trends in England” for the widespread nature and lax treatment of “intraracial (Indian-on-Indian) rape.” [
The Rule of Colonial Indifference: Rape on Trial in Early Colonial India, 1805–57, By Elizabeth Kolsky, November 2010,] But the historical record indicates that the British simply allowed the Indians to develop their own criminal justice system
based on their own customs.
The one exception: the British were
reluctant to submit
themselvesto the Indian
criminal justice system, largely because of its treatment of women. A 1883 “
Petition of Englishwomen in India” against a proposal to subject them to the Indian criminal justice system
described the position of women in Indian society as “entirely different from that held by their European sisters”, and warned of a “terrible risk of injustice to which European women would thus be subjected” as the attitudes of Indian men were “so deeply ingrained in their minds that no amount of education and no residence in Europe can wholly disabuse them of it,” these attitudes being “the low estimate
in which the natives of India hold the female sex.”
The petition also warned that Indian women would suffer if the criminal justice system were turned over to natives instead of British colonials.
There were also many
reports of rape of British women
by Indiansduring the rebellion of 1857. While dismissed by modern apologists as exaggerations, nearly a century later there were many similar reports of
horrific violence against women in the fighting between Hindus and Muslims following the withdrawal of the British. In the 1971 Bangladeshi War of Independence, hundreds of thousands of women were raped. There were
reports of women being tied to trees and gang raped, breasts hacked off, dumped in mass graves, being held in Pakistani rape camps.
I decided to check if any other former British colonies have this rape epidemic found in India and Pakistan—for example Hong Kong. A Google search of “
rape in Hong Kong” turns up “
Indian arrested in Hong Kong on rape charges” [
The Hindu, June 6, 2013]as the top result, followed by almost 3 pages of articles on the same incident. A Google search of “
gang rape in Hong Kong” turns up a story about a woman
raped in Hong Kong by three men from Nepal, a
small country on the north end of the Indian subcontinent.
There is increasing
mainstream and
academic acceptance that behavior is at least to some degree determined by genes and heredity. We see the same behavior coming from element of both Indian and Pakistani society, despite the religious separation between the two groups who share a common ancestry.
Of course, in a sense it doesn’t matter. Whether it’s nature or nurture, immigrants bring their
own deep-rooted practices with them. Something to keep in mind in the ongoing immigration debate.
