Holi Harassment, No More: Has The Pandemic Given Women A Fresh Start To Reclaim Streets?

Holi for women was the same old story, pre-pandemic. The festival was appallingly incomplete without at least a few handful headlines about a woman being harassed here, a woman being groped there, someone being assaulted or misbehaved with. Being out on the streets anyway is an everyday nightmare for women but more so, when the atmosphere is festive. What is there for women to celebrate?

But in the post-pandemic era, one is compelled to wonder if there is an opportunity for some restitution for women with regard to public safety. With COVID-19-induced lockdowns pushing people indoors and keeping the streets relatively clear over the past couple of years, has a simulation been created where women can move freely outdoors?

Data shows that street crime has gone down to some degree between 2019 and 2020. As per numbers presented by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), reported incidents of gender-based violence witnessed a dip of 8.3 percent in 2020. Rape cases were at 32,033 in 2019, before the virus hit India, and came down to 28,046 cases in 2020.

That is unfortunately no reason to cheer. This dip in crime has been vastly linked to the restriction on outdoor movement. A lot of crime, meanwhile, was transpiring indoors in the form of increased cases of domestic violence or intimate partner violence.

Suggested Reading: Dear Society, Stop Asking Men To ‘Man Up’ When They’re Vulnerable

Most women in India have at least one bitter memory from Holi, a festival that gives creeps the license to inconspicuously mingle in colourful celebratory crowds and take advantage of the situation. Why has 'bura na maano Holi hai' been a free pass for men to misbehave with women for years? 

An old report from 1996 prepared after research by the Gender Study Group, Delhi University noted that cases of assault and harassment spiked up around the festival of colours. Reportedly, 60.5 percent women on campus at DU reported facing such violence. Some cases from recent years that became national news have been particularly disturbing.

In 2018, a female student at a prestigious South Delhi college alleged that a semen-filled balloon was thrown at her around the time of Holi. Though forensic research later ruled out semen as the liquid, the incident led to widespread outrage against harassment of women on Holi. It was a momentous case, and the fact that people actually did believe that semen could be thrown at a girl - even if the claim was untrue - was a clear indication of the state we know our society is in today.

Suggested Reading: Do Women Tend To Put The Burden Of Friendship On Marriage In Absence Of Sisterhood?

But the roads are ours too. Why must we be kept away from them on one of the most colourful, fun days on India's holiday calendar? What entitles men to push us indoors and coerce us to live in fear? Who is taking accountability for the upheaval that India needs in the area of women's safety?

Are our law and order authorities doing enough to ensure that streets are safe for us to walk and make merry on, and not just on Holi?

Perhaps the pandemic can redeem itself a bit, after multiple rounds of brutality, by giving the women of India a propitious moment in time to reclaim what's theirs: free public movement. The dip in outdoor gender crimes can be positively seized by our systems to pull harassment even further down and keep it that way. We've had enough of feeling unsafe in our own homeland.

Women, it's our time to come out and play. Let's paint the town red! Happy Holi.

Views expressed are the author's own.