RSS supremo Mohanrao Bhagwat criticized the ‘western’ lifestyle of people in urban areas and said, without empirical evidence to back such a claim, that rape is prevalent mainly in cities where Indians are deeply influenced by western values and not by rural India. Various women’s NGOs and even police records suggest rapes in rural areas largely go unreported. Bhagwat said, “Such crimes hardly take place in ‘Bharat’, but they occur frequently in ‘India’.
“You go to villages and forests of the country and there will be no such incidents of gang rape or sex crimes. They are prevalent in some urban belts. Besides new legislations, Indian ethos and attitude towards women should be revisited in the context of ancient Indian values,” Bhagwat said.
The RSS, he said, was for stringent laws against rape and would welcome capital punishment for rapists.
Women’s groups have criticised RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat’s view on rape in ‘India’ and ‘Bharat’ for being regressive. Data, however, shows that Bhagwat also got his facts wrong.
While the National Crime Records Bureau does not split registered cases of sexual assault by rural and urban areas, Mrinal Satish, an associate professor of law at Delhi’s National Law University, used court data to find that 75% of rape cases that led to convictions over the last 25 years were from rural India.
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