Online Dating Fuels New Danger for Gays in India

MUMBAI—A gay Indian maritime engineer says he was lured into a trap during a visit to Mumbai last year.

When the 33-year-old was with a man he met through an online dating service, two others burst into his hotel room. One whipped and punched him. They took his laptop, a gold chain, camera and his ATM card, which they used to empty his bank account, he says.

The men also made a threat: If he went to the police, the robbers said, they would press criminal charges against him for having sex with a man and tell his colleagues and family that he is gay.

“I was dead scared,” said Rohit, who asked that his surname not be used because he feared the consequences of being publicly identified as homosexual.

Since India’s Supreme Court recriminalized gay sex more than a year ago, homosexuals have increasingly become targets of robbery and extortion, gay men and activists say. The trend has been fueled by the rise of Internet dating, which has become an easy way for urban, middle-class gay men to meet, but also exposed them to online predators.

Such cases underline the deep disconnect between more liberal and cosmopolitan parts of urban India and conservative norms that condemn homosexuality and leave gay people vulnerable to discrimination and blackmail.

India, the world’s largest democracy, is one of more than a dozen Asian countries that outlaw what in India’s case is defined as sex “against the order of nature.”

In December 2013, India’s Supreme Court found the law, which dates to the British colonial era, wasn’t unconstitutional and could be changed or repealed only by Parliament, effectively overturning a 2009 lower-court ruling that made consensual gay sex legal.

Source: Online Dating Fuels New Danger for Gays in India – WSJ

Rape and India’s “Untouchable” Caste

crime scene of rape & murder of dalit girls

Members of the Dalit caste, which number 200 million, have long been mistreated in India. Yet the sheer brutality of the crime, which came roughly a year and a half after another chilling rape in Delhi, has cast a spotlight on sexual assaults against Dalits and the status of these “untouchables” in Indian society.

The statistics are harrowing: India’s National Crime Records Bureau has found that more than four Dalit women are raped every day across the country. Dalit Media Watch, a group that reports on crimes against India’s lowest caste, has reported that two Dalits are assaulted, murdered and have their homes torched every hour.

India’s caste system is officially banned, but discrimination lingers, especially for Dalits.

But the reality may be far worse than the statistics show: “The national figures are grossly under reported since many cases of rape of Dalit women are not even registered,” says Pratap Kumar, a Dalit rights activist in Lucknow, the capital of the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. “Conviction is a distant dream for many,”

India’s caste system is thousands of years old and based on birth, not color. Traditionally Dalits did menial jobs such as sweeping the street and cleaning toilets and sewers. Though discrimination based on caste was officially banned in 1950, when India adopted its constitution, it continues today, especially against Dalits.

For years, it remained so prevalent that in 1989, the government passed a law banning what was once common treatment for these “untouchables”: Parading them naked through the streets, forcing them to eat feces, taking away their land, poisoning their water, interfering with their right to vote and burning down their homes. Since then, the violence has only gotten worse, analysts say, largely as Dalits have begun to move up the economic ladder, thanks in part to government programs designed to help them.

The scene of the crime. India’s National Crime Records Bureau says that more than four Dalit women are raped every day across the country.

Two years ago, seven men from a dominant caste raped a teenage Dalit girl for three hours in Hisar district of Haryana state in northern India. The perpetrators then filmed the incident with their mobile phones. Nine days later, the girl’s father committed suicide after he discovered what had happened to his daughter. Police only arrested the suspected rapists after mass protests rocked the district.

“Some people say that caste does not matter in India,” says Vrinda Grover, a lawyer and human rights activist in New Delhi. “[But] look at the routine sexual violence experienced by Dalit girls and women. We all should be ashamed.”

via Rape and India’s “Untouchable” Caste | Vocativ.