Rape Capital: It’s the West, not India, that leads in sex crimes

The Western media has portrayed India as one of the most dangerous countries for women. But statistics point to the exact opposite – rape is rampant in the West and up to 10 times higher than in India. Here’s how the media creates fake narrative about India.

The New York Times just raised fake news to an entirely new level. On June 2, 2023, the American newspaper published a story titled “In India’s Gang Rape Culture, All Women Are Victims.”[1] For years, the NYT has ignored the West’s own endemic rape culture. It has ignored widely available data that shows India has one of the world’s lowest rape rates. It has latched on to sensational – and usually fake – news reports generated by India’s agenda-driven left-liberal media to label India as the world’s rape capital. Having tasted blood, the NYT is now trying to portray the country as the gang rape capital.

Writes the paper’s virulently Hinduphobic writer Vidya Krishnan: “Gang rape is used as a weapon, particularly against lower castes and Muslims… The fear, particularly of gang rape, never fully leaves us. We go out in groups, cover ourselves, carry pepper spray and GPS tracking devices, avoid public spaces after sunset, and remind ourselves to yell ‘fire,’ not ‘help’ if attacked. But we know that no amount of precaution will guarantee our safety.”

Sounding more like a sleazy magazine than a newspaper of record, the NYT continues: “There is no escaping India’s rape culture. Sexual terrorism is treated as the norm…. This culture contaminates public life — in movies and television, in bedrooms where female sexual consent is unknown, in the locker room talk from which young boys learn the language of rape. India’s favorite profanities are about having sex with women without their consent.”

Interestingly, the article is free and can be viewed by everyone across the world, whereas other articles on the website are behind a paywall. Clearly, the NYT wants maximum coverage for its hatchet job. The timing is also curious – exactly a year before India’s 2024 general elections. The timing dovetails with warnings by Hindu nationalists that the Western media will launch a coordinated disinformation campaign to derail Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s chances of winning a third successive term.

Indeed, in June 2018, exactly a year before the 2019 general elections, Britain’s Thomson Reuters Foundation released a report saying India was the most dangerous country in the world to be a woman because of the high risk of sexual violence. The report was based on “a survey of 550 experts on women’s issues”. If the results of the poll are to be believed, women are more unsafe in India than in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Iran, where women are flogged and stoned to death for ‘offenses’ such as blasphemy, going out without covering their head, or simply dancing in the streets.[2]

Data they won’t talk about

With a rape rate of 2.63 per 100,000 people, India is at the 94th position in a list of 144 countries, says the US-based think tank Wisevoter, founded by author and syndicated columnist Ben Kaplan.[3] Far worse than India and leading the list are France (39.59 per 100,000), the US (38 per 100,000), New Zealand (33.76 per 100,000), Australia (28.6 per 100,000), the UK (27 per 100,000) and Germany (12.09 per 100,000).

Even if you take a worst-case scenario and multiply India’s rape rate by three – to account for underreporting – it would still be way below that of the above countries whose media loves to label India as the rape capital of the world.

With India having introduced harsh anti-rape laws, there is also a high incidence of fake rape cases. There has been a spate of sensational cases where women framed men to extract money or out of vendetta. According to a police report, as many as 45 percent of the rape cases registered last year in Rajasthan (a Northwest state of India) were false.[4]

After the infamous 2012 gang rape of student Nirbhaya on a bus in Delhi, the number of rape cases reported to police in India rose sharply. The BBC reports one survey concluded that in Delhi in 2013-14, more than half of these reports were “false,” – fueling claims by male activists that women are alleging rape to extort money from men.[5] The British broadcaster is one of the leading anti-Indian media outfits in the world, so one can safely assume the accuracy of at least this news.

RAINN, or the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, America’s largest anti-sexual violence organization, says that most sexual assaults are not reported – only 310 out of every 1,000 sexual assaults are reported to the police. This means more than two out of three go unreported. Therefore, America’s rape rate of 38 per 100,000 could be much higher. Worse, most perpetrators will not go to jail or prison. Only 9 percent of rapists in America are prosecuted, and only 3 percent spend time in prison. An astonishing 97 percent of rapists just walk free.[6]

In contrast, the conviction rate for crimes against women in India is 32 percent.[7] This is in the backdrop of India having a population of 1.4 billion and a much smaller ratio of police to citizens. For its size, India has a tiny police force which points to a largely nonviolent society.

Reporting on sex crimes in Islamic nations is not cool

While India is misrepresented and blackballed, some countries get free passes simply because they don’t release data. The ten countries with the lowest rates of reported rape per 100,000 people are Oman, Bermuda, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Azerbaijan, Syria, Mozambique, Palestine, Tajikistan, and Nigeria. Oman has no reported rapes per 100,000 people in its population. Others, such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt, have similarly low statistics at 0.09 and 0.12 respective reported cases of rape per 100,000 inhabitants.

“It is important to keep in mind that these statistics are based on the number of reported cases of rape incidents, meaning that the fact that these countries have such low rates does not mean that rape incidents rarely happen in those countries, but rather that such incidents are not being reported,” says Wisevoter.[8]

One of the reasons rape reporting is low in Islamic countries is Sharia Law which requires the accuser to bring four witnesses to prove a crime against a man. Plus, Sharia states a man’s word is four times stronger than a woman’s. Such laws make it virtually impossible for a rape survivor to prove her allegation in a Sharia court.

Across Europe, incidents of rape, and in particular gang rape, have surged ever since the arrival of millions of immigrants from the Middle East and Africa. The alleged perpetrators are mostly Turks, Afghans, and Syrians.[9]

Germany recorded nearly two gang rapes per day in 2021, up 120 percent from 2018, with non-German citizens – despite composing less than 13 percent of the population – representing almost every second group rape suspect. The appalling figures revealed that 677 gang rapes were recorded in 2022, up from 300 in 2018, making for an average of 1.86 every day.[10]

Necla Kelek, a Turkish-born German feminist, author, and sociologist, has called on Germany to finally acknowledge the role mass migration has played in Germany’s ongoing – and continually worsening – rape problem.

However, facts and publicly available reports are brushed aside by the left-liberal media because it goes against their narrative that India is unsafe for women. Additionally, there is self-projection – the mental process by which people attribute to others what is wrong with their own self. For the reality is that in the West, there is a huge rape crisis.

Hypocrisy and Western media go hand-in-hand

The New York Times, which loves to portray Indian men as deviants and rapists, does the exact opposite regarding rape in America. On its home turf, it sides with rapists and tries to whitewash cases of sexual assault. On March 8, it published a story titled “Vicious Assault Shakes Texas Town.”[11] The assault it described was, indeed, heinous – an 11-year-old child was gang raped in an abandoned trailer house by as many as 18 men, with suspects ranging in age from middle school students to a 27-year-old.

The NYT’s reporter James C. McKinley reported the victim-blaming sentiments of members of the Texas community in which the rape occurred as truth. He insinuated the young woman had it coming: “They said she dressed older than her age, wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s. She would hang out with teenage boys at a playground, some said.”

The NYT also gave space to community members who are more concerned about the impact raping a child will have on the suspects than being raped will have on the young victim. McKinley quoted Sheila Harrison: “These boys have to live with this the rest of their lives.”

Shelby Knox, a feminist organizer, wrote: “1 in 4 American women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime. A culture that blames victims for being raped—for what they were wearing, where they were, and who they were with—rather than blaming the rapist, is a culture that tacitly condones rape.”[12]

Now let’s look at the Thompson Reuters Foundation report, which blacklisted India as the most dangerous country for women. The Foundation has several leading funders. Some are seemingly innocuous, such as Deutsche Bank and the Food and Agriculture Organization. Others like the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation; the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office; the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Overseas Development Institute are ostensibly aid outfits, but in reality, they are lobbying agencies that further the cause of Western countries. And lurking down the list is World Vision UK, which masquerades as a development aid agency but, in reality, is a fundamentalist church with a clear and unabashed aim – to destroy Hinduism by converting every Indian to Christianity.

Why they target India

It doesn’t take rocket science to understand why Reuters is targeting India. It may sound bizarre to Indians – who suffer from collective amnesia about colonial crimes – but the British ruling establishment indeed carries a deep hatred for India. A former editor who used to work for a British wire service told me: “The British political class and their henchmen and women in the media view India as the old enemy. They believe, ‘We ruled the world, and these Indians are the scum who took down our empire.’ The hatred they have for India is very strong. This is why their reporting from India is completely anti-India.”

Newspapers like the NYT feed from the same trough as Reuters. Most Western media outfits are part of the deep state that aims to maintain or extend Western hegemony. Some Western reporters work for the CIA and are embedded in various countries. Their job is intelligence gathering, and a reporting job gives them the cover and plausible deniability while sniffing around for any secrets which can be passed on to their handlers.

Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame, says journalists have been among the most productive means of intelligence gathering employed by the CIA. “Although the Agency has cut back sharply on the use of reporters since 1973 primarily as a result of pressure from the media, some journalist‑operatives are still posted abroad…. In the field, journalists were used to help recruit and handle foreigners as agents, to acquire and evaluate information, and to plant false information with officials of foreign governments.”[13]

Back in the day when the NYT wasn’t completely fake news, it published a report[14] in which it admitted one of its former correspondents in the Middle East, Kennett Love, was employed by the CIA for spreading propaganda during the joint US-UK coup that ousted Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953. If hiring journalists paid dividends in the past, why would the CIA and other Western agencies stop now?

Who feeds the Western media?

Rape happens worldwide, but only the Indian media is transfixed by it. TV channels are competing with each other to ferret out rape cases and flash them on prime time. Unlike other countries which have TV channels such as CBS, Al Jazeera, Russia Today, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Deutsche Welle, and the BBC, which broadcast well-produced programs that leave an impact, the Indian media’s output is shallow, shoddy, and pathetic.

So, if you are lazy – and incompetent – to deliver quality programming, how do you attract viewers? Rape seems like an excellent fit because shocked (and prurient) viewers tune in large numbers. It has the added bonus of smearing mud on Modi’s spectacular achievements on the economic front.

Plus, if the alleged rapist is Hindu and the victim is a Muslim child, it is the presstitute’s ultimate fantasy. They and their support cast get a pat on the back from their political masters, who will also throw some crumbs from the high table.

But while the Western media can be accused of bias, the people who first called India the rape capital of the world are not foreigners but Indians with vested interests. One such person is Rahul Gandhi, the dynast and former Member of Parliament from Wayanad, Kerala. Gandhi has often defamed India on international platforms to make the Modi government look bad. In 2019, he took a swipe at the Prime Minister: “Narendra Modi had talked of ‘Make in India,’ but today everywhere we see ‘Rape in India.'”[15] Clearly, for Gandhi, self-interest comes before the nation.

Again, Hinduphobic comedian Vir Das read from a handwritten note at his 2021 US show: “I come from an India where we worship women during the day and gang-rape them at night.”[16]

Such sensational statements are eagerly lapped by the Western media, which is always hungry for outrageous stories from India.

How rape news impacts India and Hindus

The steady trickle of bad news from India can have a negative impact. For instance, it can slow down the flow of investments, tourists, and students to India. European multinational companies – which generally have many woman executives and directors – may skip India as an investment destination and look at alternate markets such as Vietnam, the Philippines, and Indonesia.

The steep decline in the number of tourists to India may be attributed to the slanted Covid coverage by India’s left-liberal media, which claimed millions of Indians were dropping dead and showed macabre images of funeral pyres. However, even before that, tourism had been impacted by the negative image of India as a country where rape was common.

However, the most direct impact is on Hindus as a community. Both mainstream and social media are attempting to connect individual rape cases to the Hindu religion to tarnish the image of Hindus as America’s model minority. For instance, Hindu religious images are mocked by Abrahamics and communists with little understanding of their symbolism. In one shocking example, the Hindu God Shiva’s trident was represented as a condom and an ejaculating penis.[17]

While the news cycle may be short, the relentless attempts to blemish Hinduism create a toxic climate for the Hindu diaspora. Here are some views of India and Hindus by foreign women on a 2018 New York Times Facebook post on gang rape in India:[18]

Selina Connor: “So not on the list of awesome places to travel for women. The males sound like cavemen or complete boors. Is it in the water? Hard pass.”

Marcia Marie Naseem: “So many have converted to Hinduism because it supposedly is a religion of peace, but I’ve never seen that. Now, the world is finally seeing what goes on in this country. And there’s a lot more going on than gang rape. They’re (sic) whole way of life is so bad.”

Tina Cherilee: “There are no men in India, only animals, it seems. Who can’t seem to comprehend right from wrong??? Its (sic) beyond despicable. Real men don’t rape.”

In 2015, German professor Annette Beck-Sickinger, the head of the biochemistry department at Leipzig University, wrote to a male internship applicant from India that she does not accept “any Indian male students for internships” and “many female professors in Germany decided to no longer accept male Indian students.” She referenced India’s “rape problem” and the reports about rape and sexual violence in India that reach Germany “on a weekly basis” as the reasons for not accepting any Indian male applicants for internships.[19]

What the media is doing to Hindus today is what the Nazis did to Jews in the 1930s and ’40s. The negative imagery and articles about Hindus in the left-liberal media have a startling similarity to the depictions of Jews as enemies of civilization in Nazi Germany. Nazi propaganda, which sought to inspire hate and fear, portrayed the Jews as fat bankers, octopuses, child murderers, blood eaters, Jesus killers, vampires, devil worshippers, and warmongers. The culmination of such hatred was the Jewish Holocaust, in which six million Jews were murdered in Europe.[20]

Way out of fake news

Rape is not a trivial matter. It is one of the worst forms of violence, leaving survivors and their families scarred for life. However, for the media, it has become a handle to attack a leader they don’t like or a tool for boosting their television ratings. Since skewed reporting is having negative fallout on India, here’s what the Indian government can do:

Make fake news punishable. News is a commodity; the media makes money by packaging and selling it. The media must face the same consequences as any other industry for selling substandard product. Media groups that do intentional misreporting should be suspended for a week and banned from all government institutions like courts, police stations, and ministries for a month. This will impact their news-gathering abilities and hence their bottom line. Habitual offenders should face more substantial punishment, such as canceling their broadcasting license.

Lifetime ban: Habitual offenders like the BBC, NYT, and NPR must be permanently banned from India because their actions impact India’s image and, thereby, its citizens and economy. Such decisions will undoubtedly draw flak from the usual self-appointed protectors of “journalistic freedom” in the West. However, if one goes by the experience of China and Vietnam, the long-term effect of such measures will be minimal, if any.

Image is everything, and India should do all it can to protect it. A country where women warriors, rulers, and saints have enjoyed equal rights for millennia doesn’t deserve to be pigeonholed as a land of misogynists and savages.