Dark side of travelling in India
Travelling in India as a solo woman traveller is far less glamorous than it's made out to be. The inspiring blog posts and the beautiful Instagram feed come with a shameful price — street harassment, misleading travel guides, molestation, duping and even rape. Shameful because unfortunately it's not just the local travellers who face a host of sexual crimes; even international tourists, here to experience the "warmth" and "culture" this country should be offering, are assaulted, confined, kidnapped and raped.
The repercussions of the alleged rape of a Japanese student by travel guides in Gaya go beyond the "dent" (as termed by our tourism minister Mahesh Sharma) it made in our image as a tourist-friendly country. Not only does it undermine the international outcry over the fatal gangrape of a paramedical student in December 2012 and highlight our flimsy response to sexual crimes despite the new laws and increased social awareness, it deters the growth of tourism in a country which is visited by millions of foreign tourists per year. Nearly seven million foreign tourists arrived in the country in 2013 according to government data. We recorded Rs 1,07,671 crore of Foreign Exchange Earnings from tourism in 2013 alone.
How is it that rape laws and security for foreign tourists in the country are still not taken seriously? How do you get away with thinking that you've done your job of promoting tourism as long as there are Incredible India advertisements wooing travellers? And by what measure do we, as general public, only choose to highlight individual incidents and get indignant about rape cases taking place in big metros?
And this does not even fall within the realm of "victim-blaming" that many of us love to indulge in. The Japanese student wasn't taking a stroll in the empty streets of Gaya in the middle of the night, she didn't accept a drink laced with drugs at a nightclub, heck, she did not even hire a cab and doze off. She came here to learn about the rural life of the country. What a welcome.
As a solo woman traveller in the country, you obviously weigh the pros and cons. You pack full-length clothes and something to cover your head along with your Lonely Planet guides. You make sure there is a pepper spray and a knife as handy as the sunscreen. You stay away from a group of men drunk in a nightclub and keep your money bag strapped to your body. But how many walls as a traveller are you expected to put up around yourself? Are you to be blamed if your traveller's curiosity takes you inside a beautiful, old monument and you find yourself at the mercy of sex-hungry lunatics looking for easy targets? Should you be scrutinised beyond the general curiosity that foreign tourists are subjected to in this country if you wear a bikini on a beach?
Clearly, the Atithi Devo Bhava slogan is doing us no good.