By Chhaya Nene

Protests follow a rape in India.  Then there is another rape. Followed by more protests.  What cultural factors are at the root of the country’s violent misogyny? Which politicians stoke the flames? Do any political leaders offer a way out of the nightmare?

Women’s rights groups, governmental figures and news media, both domestic and international, all point to a lack of security for Indian women as the main reason for the problem rape, but on January 29, American and British outlets reported that Asha Mirje, a Nationalist Congress Party leader and member of the Maharashtra Women’s Commission, claimed women themselves are to blame for rapes in India.

The statements from Mirje—who is female–came during a conference of the Congress party’s women workers.  Referring to the fatal 2012 gang-rape of a 23-year-old physiotherapy student and the Shakti Mills gang-rape case, Mirje cited the womens’ “clothing and behavior” was provocative, specifically the fact that the 23-year-old chose to attend a late night movie and the other young woman decided to visit the Shakti Mills shopping complex during evening hours.

BBC News and The Global Post both focused on the “blame the victims” element of the story. The BBC further provided a brief on the high numbers of rapes that occur in India as well as criticism from a representative of BJP, the center-right party that opposes Congress, and from the All India Democratic Women’s Association.

Both Western outlets fail to mention the anti-rape demonstrations that several of India’s prominent women have joined. Further, both articles completely neglect to probe questions of religion, culture and India’s history of gender disparity and how all of this contributes to broader constellation of attitudes that Mirje represents. Helping readers understand how these religious and cultural influences map onto the policies of Congress and BJP would also be a valuable service—especially leading into India’s national elections in March.

Several days after initial articles reporting Mirje’s statements were posted, the Huffington Post released an updated version of the same Reuters copy Global Post covered.  This time the story delved deeper into the relationship between politics and violence against women in India, specifically when it pointed out that “Public anger over the poor state of women’s safety in Delhi was one reason that the ruling Congress Party was wiped out in local elections in the city last month.” The article even went as far as to note that members of her own party distanced themselves from Mirje, yet once again the story neglects to discuss religion’s role in both politics and violence.

Mainstream Indian media outlets covered the story no better. Who is Mirje and what is her religious background? What does Mirje’s Congress party believe about the role of women? How does caste come into play? Did caste or religion contribute to the rapes of these young women?

Independent media however focused on different angles of the story.  One Delhi-based journalist focused on Mirje’s profession as both a gynecologist and member of the Maharashtra’s Women’s Commission, an organization the journalist says was designed to voice women’s concerns and issues. The article further explores the cultural reasons that led to Mirje’s statements but like other coverage, it lacks a discussion of the significance of religion.

Religion shapes all aspects of life in India. And in a country where Hinduism is dominant–a religion that reveres female deities–Indians, as well as the foreign and domestic press, seem to have forgotten what it means to revere women.

By Brianna Sacks

The 2012 fatal gang rape of a 23-year-old woman in New Delhi shook India, and the world. More specifically, the event pushed rape and crimes against women to the forefront of India’s news media coverage.

Since that brutal attack, rape cases now daily appear in a slew of newspapers, and despite national outrage and demands for intensifying security measures for women, rape seems rampant and uncontrolled. The Hindustan Times observed that reported rape cases have jumped 125 percent since the December assault.

On Jan. 23, 2014, the story of another horrific gang rape captured the attention of Indian and international news media. Village elders from the small, rural town of Subalpur, in West Bengal, ordered gang rape as punishment for a 20-year-old who accepted a marriage proposal from a man who lived in a different community— and, most importantly, was an adherent of another religious tradition.

On Friday, India’s Supreme Court ordered an investigation into the incident.

The New York Times covered the story, interweaving how in some parts of tribal India, marriage to outside villagers is considered an “objectionable situation,” as one villager put it, since “marriages to outsiders will dilute communal land claims, among other concerns.”

The article gives many details about councils, but it leaves a crucial aspect of the community-supported gang rape completely untouched—religion.

Other western sources like the Washington Post, the L.A. Times, and Aljazeera America went a small step farther, reporting that the village council ordered the woman to “be enjoyed” by men of the town (13 total) because she fell in love with a man from a different religion, a Muslim. These stories use a narrow lens to tell this woman’s story because the notion that these troubling societal beliefs about women stem from generations of religion and cultural intersection that have now become enmeshed in Indian every day life.

But from Indian media? Nothing. The majority of Indian news sites say the woman accepted a proposal from a man of a “different ethnic group,” or fell in love with a man “outside her community.” Some mention that the man is Muslim, but reporting on how Hinduism — the religious affiliation of the woman and the dominant cultural force in the nation — might figure into the story is completely absent.

Bottom line, Indian media are not covering the role of religion as a key factor shaping the context in which this gang rape took place.

Specifically, no mainstream outlet—from the Times of India and India Today to India Express–explains how the local tribe’s religious beliefs might inform its strict cultural customs. Or how those beliefs govern interreligious relations.

The fact that most Western and Indian news outlets are reluctant even to scratch the surface of religion’s influence on the cultures in which rape in countenanced shows just how integral religion is to Indian societies. Religion is interwoven into all aspects of daily life. It dictates the decisions of rural community councils like the one in Subalpur, and plays a crucial role in how women are perceived and treated.

Why is violence against women tolerated in religious communities that revere female deities? Are there religious voices condemning these rapes from within Hindu communities? How do caste, class, and geography relate to religious attitudes toward intermarriage? These are important and arguably obvious questions that most mainstream news media have yet to ask.

by Melissah Yang

Devyani Khobragade, a deputy consul charged with committing visa fraud and providing false statements to allow Sangeeta Richard, her nanny, to enter the U.S., returned to India on January 10 after a diplomatic standoff threatened relations between the two countries. The incident dominated headlines in India and played out on global media outlets, including The New York Times and The Times’ blog, India Ink. 

The Times’ coverage of Khobragade’s return to Mumbai reveals how different editorial decisions can create distinct narratives for the same event. Whereas the NYT piece focuses on relations between the world’s two largest democracies, India Ink launches a PR campaign for Khobragade, who is cast as a victim of American oppression. But neither story addresses how caste relations and religion underlie this political showdown.

The NYT piece makes no reference to India’s caste system, the roots of which can be traced back to millennia-old Hindu texts. Instead, the story only alludes to a “middle- and upper-class social structure,” which allows for even modest-income families to employ servants at low cost. Households with a monthly income of $1,850 U.S. dollars typically have at least one live-in servant, the Economist reported. The National Coalition of South Asian Organisations (NCSO) said Richard worked at least 100 hours per week for around $1.42 per hour. Though low pay for servants is common in Indian society, it’s reasonable to wonder why Khobragade, an advocate for underprivileged women’s rights, wouldn’t treat her employees better, given the blanket discrimination her Khobragade’s caste has historically suffered.

India Ink briefly points to Khobragade’s Dalit status to explain why some Indians might hesitate to take her side. Though Khobragade’s father says his daughter “was not currently considering joining politics,” her Dalit background could help launch a political career, perhaps with the Republican Party of India (RPI). The party was founded by B. R. Ambedkhar, the pioneer of India’s current Constitution, which banned caste-based discrimination and created quotas that allowed for Dalits, including Khobragade, to become employed in professions, such as foreign-service, from which they were previously excluded. Thus the incident — a Dalit’s rise to the prominent position that Khobragade held — could have prompted a journalistic exploration into how caste politics have changed or how they have simply become muddied, given Khobragade’s apparent exploitation of a servant.

Because Richard is a Christian, she is no longer bound to the caste system, though some Indians might continue to see her as what her and her family’s caste once was. The article could have traced her Christian background and seen whether her and her family’s conversion from Hinduism was motivated by an eagerness to escape these social confines.

The conversation also could have focused more closely on relations between religions in India (Khobragade is Hindu; Richard is a Christian). Historically, the relationship between Hindus and Christians has been peaceful. But there have sparks of religious conflict in recent years, such as the anti-Christian violence that ravaged Orissa in 2008, leaving over 140 churches burned and displacing tens of thousands of Christians. And considering that roughly 80 percent of India’s population is Hindu, while Christians account for 2.3 percent, why Khobragade chose to bring a Christian nanny for her children is worth looking into.

The NYT and India Ink paint Khobragade in such dramatically different lights — the latter sympathetic, the former critical. But neither takes into consideration the significance of religion in India’s everyday life, which definitely figures into a “she said, she said” situation pitting two women from similar low-caste backgrounds, but different religions, against each other.

President Goodluck Jonathan of Nigeria and Gen. Abdel Fattah Sisi of Egypt are playing fast and loose with the unsettled rules of democracy in two of Africa’s most populous and volatile countries. Dismay colors the narrative in most news media coverage of these stories, but reportage that probes the deeper, interrelated causes of instability in both countries is often missing from the mainstream mix.

Jonathan, a Christian, will likely run for a second four-year term next year even though he succeeded Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, a Muslim, after Yar’Adua died in office in 2010—a move that will test the limits of an unwritten pact in Nigerian politics that requires Christians and Muslims to alternate control of the country’s executive branch. That broader political context frames Jonathan’s signature on a new law banning same-sex relationships, which plays to his evangelical base in the south and shifts national policy closer to the conservative interpretations of sharia law that shape civic culture in some of the most unstable parts of the north.

As Egyptians head to the polls today to vote in a referendum on the country’s latest constitution, Sisi and his military backers are touting the new document’s guarantee of freedoms that deposed Islamist President Mohamed Morsi and his supporters in the Muslim Brotherhood did not vow to uphold.

But in the six months since Morsi’s ouster, Sisi’s government has jailed thousands of Morsi’s supporters without charge and silenced journalists sympathetic to the Brotherhood’s protests against disenfranchisement—a situation that casts serious doubt on the notion that Sisi and his junta will relax their grip on power or show greater willingness to tolerate dissent.

How are religion, economics, politics and military power intersecting in Egypt during the current plebiscite? Khaled Fahmy, chairman of the history department at the American University of Cairo, has written a superb summary of Egypt’s array of challenges, including the problem of youth unemployment, which is arguably the key factor in the country’s long-term prospects for stability.

Nigeria is facing an even larger demographic “youth bubble,” along with ethnic and religious crises that are exacerbated by conflicting provisions in the country’s current constitution. Unlike Uganda, where the influence of conservative American evangelicals is closely related to the passage of antigay legislation, Nigeria’s antipathy toward its LGBT citizens is largely homegrown—a byproduct of complex, deeply polarizing problems that have hardened religious sentiments, both Muslim and Christian, and that the Jonathan administration has generally ignored.

Because of its proximity to Israel and status as the most populous Arab country, Egypt’s travails have received far more mainstream analysis than Nigeria’s. But both states powerfully influence events well beyond their borders—a consideration that should encourage reporters to continue digging deeper.