THERE IS a sudden spurt in crimes committed against white female tourists in India. The reasons for the crimes can be traced to Indian men’s obsession with fair complexion and their erroneous notion that white women have no morals.

In the latest diabolic saga of crimes against white female tourists in India, an Israeli woman tourist, on her way to Kanyakumari from Thiruvananthapuram, was allegedly harassed by the conductor of the Kerala State Road Transport Corporation bus by which she was travelling on the night of March 5, 2008. The 25-year-old woman, in her complaint, has said that the conductor started making passes at her right from the start of the journey. As the bus became almost empty when it was on its last lap from Nagercoil, the bus conductor became bolder and sat near the woman and started making obscene gestures and vulgar comments. Acting on the complaint, the police have arrested the bus conductor.

Not long ago, a 15-year-old British teenager, Scarlett Keeling, was found dead on a beach in Goa. Though Scarlett’s semi-clad and battered body was found on the beach under suspicious circumstances, the police tried to hush up the matter claiming that it could be a case of death by drowning. It was only after her mother took up the case with the authorities, saying that her daughter could have been murdered, a fresh probe and a second post-mortem were ordered.

These two incidents – the latest in the spate of crimes in which touring white women have been targeted by local men – strengthen the generally held view that crime against white women has been markedly on the rise in India in recent years.

The reasons for the rising crime rate against white women can be traced to Indian men’s obsession with white skin. "fair-complexioned" is easily the most widely used word in almost all the matrimonial ads seeking brides for prospective Indian grooms. Indian men may be divided by caste, creed, language and culture. But if there is something that is common to a majority of these men, it has to be their deeply shared predilection for ’fair’ complexioned women.

Why do Indian men consider white or lighter skin more attractive? Perhaps, due to colonial history and western influence, these men associate white complexion with power, wealth and sophistication and the dark skin with the lower strata of society, slavery and labour. These men cannot bleach their skin and become as fair as their western counterparts; so they try to boost their ego by going for a lighter skinned woman – a trophy wife. The Indian movies too reinforce this belief. The hero could be a dark-skinned son-of-the-soil; however, the heroine has to be fair and beautiful.

 

This deeply ingrained predisposition in the Indian male psyche towards fair complexion could be one of the reasons for the increase in the number of crimes against white female tourists in India. It also explains why the African female visitors to India do not encounter the problems that their white counterparts face.

Also, it is not a mere coincidence that the rise in crimes against white women concurs with the rise in the Internet accessibility in India. The Internet has made western pornography accessible to all sorts of Indian males – rich and poor, educated and uneducated, adults and school-going children – living in almost every nook and corner of the country. Porn websites and sleazy English movies, which normally feature white women, may have unwittingly served to reinforce the wrong impression among a section of men in this part of the world that western (read: white) women are liberal and decadent and hence ’easily available’.

Since these prejudices and wrong notions are deep-rooted and prevalent among a section of Indian men, the state and central tourism departments have to correctly brief the tourists in general and the female tourists in particular as to how to conduct themselves while in India. The tourists should be instructed to provide in advance the particulars about their inland travelling plans, place and duration of their stay, and other such details to the authorities concerned. They should be told not to trust strangers and preferably travel with a companion. It is incumbent upon the state and central governments to provide the necessary security to female tourists and take every step to prevent a few perverted Indian men from tarnishing the image of this hoary nation that believes in the adage ‘Atithi Devo Bhava’.