We’re all tourists

Fifteen-Year-Old Scarlett Keeling’s rape and murder in Goa has brought out the basest instincts in the media, both Indian and British, combining a lurid appetite for every last detail with an equally off-putting sanctimony. Of course, what you take away from the crime depends on where you are coming from. The teenager’s death has become a Rorschach test for all our secret anxieties, whether it is about Indians bristling at the British belittling of our law and order, maternal irresponsibility, Goa’s sleazy drug culture, police callousness or political accountability, the paranoia about unbridled “native” sexuality, the dissolute morals of white women or about the victimhood of all women.

Some opinion polls place the blame, bizarrely enough, on “tourist misbehaviour” for ruining the haven that Goa would otherwise be. This is just an inversion of Raj Thackeray’s logic — blaming the outsider for all that is rotten in our systems. Certainly, the case has raised key questions about law and order in Goa, and also the drug-dealing and crime going unchecked on its beaches. But to vaguely blame “seedy hippies” for fostering this lawless zone is to evade more pressing questions about our own policing failures.

The safety of tourists who visit India is vital, but it is inextricably linked with the state of our internal security, and cannot be tackled in isolation. The recent suggestion of getting ex-servicemen to act as tourist wardens also misidentifies the problem as one that only tourists face — as though the default option of danger and crime is good enough for the rest of us. All women, Indian or not, face the same threats in our public spaces. To frame it in terms of the outsider is futile — whether we are assigning blame or taking corrective measures. Our law and order situation is abysmal, and we need to fix it for ourselves.