se who try their best to brush against women while walking past them on roads. Or even in those men who deliberately, sometimes even forcibly, enter ladies compartments in local trains to ogle and tease. But why go that far? Lone women drivers are routinely honked at and often chased and scared to death by jeering male drivers. In Delhi, rarely, if ever, will you find women travelling alone after 8 pm. The mantra here is, just about anything can happen to women. And anywhere. Former Delhi Police commissioner V N Singh once called it a problem of north Indian attitude. People here are crude and love to flaunt their masculinity, he believed. A rapidly expanding clan of the nouveau riche have actually made many of them believe money can get them anything, he felt. Little wonder, the Capital reported 553 rapes in 1997, 441 in 1998 and 399 in 1999. That apart, 975 women were kidnapped or abducted, another 587 molested and 1,281 sexually harassed last year. And these are just those who mustered the required courage to report the incidents. How strongly this attitude runs in their veins is evident from the experience of scores of women officers in Delhi Police manning the police control room. Each day, about hundred men - with no apparent fear of law - call up the emergency number 100 and only have obscenities to report. Last year, a MTNL employee used his Rohini exchange number to call women police constables at least 75 times in a single night. The police could track him down and booked him. But they can't be that lucky with men who commit crimes within the boundaries of their homes. Though the number of cases of cruelty by husbands or in-laws jumped from 771 in 1998 to 971 in 1999, the exact magnitude of this problem can only be guessed at. The police, sometimes rightly, say their effectiveness is limited in such crimes. Even in police, women officers complain they are discriminated against. That they never get good field postings and are p...
