Written by Sasha Gopalakrishnan
Anjali Singh was commuting home from work with a female friend on a two-wheeler in the early hours of January 1, when her vehicle was hit and she was callously dragged from Outer Delhi to Rohini by a group of men in their twenties who were reportedly aware that someone was stuck under their vehicle. The violence of her death stands out for its brutality, yet it is sadly representative of so much more when it comes to the comfort of women in the public spaces of this city.
There’s a story to be told about the safety of women in Delhi that spans generations, cuts across class, caste and religious boundaries, and seeps into the very fabric of our society. It’s not simply a story about explicit violence or shocking hit-and-runs. It’s about the tension that sits in your muscles when you’re driving home at night and you see a car with a young male driver following you. It’s about that creeping feeling at the back of your neck when it’s dark outside and you think that the men smoking near the paan shop might be watching you. It’s about the hyperawareness that shrouds you like a second skin when you cross deserted stretches of road after dark, when you’re in a cab after 9 pm by yourself, when you’re walking home projecting a confidence you don’t feel, in the hope of appearing unapproachable.
Constantly worrying about how I’m going to get home at night if I’m working late, thinking twice about what I’m going to wear and where I’m going to be every time I step out in the evening, ensuring that somebody knows my whereabouts at all times — these are the realities that Delhi women normalise for themselves on a daily basis, an unsaid addendum to our experiences as we attempt to be mobile and independent amidst the violence of normal times.
Delhi recorded over 39 cases of crimes against women every day in 2021, as per data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) released earlier this year. What these (severely underreported) statistics don’t tell us, however, is that living under the perpetual threat of violence becomes a psychological and bodily experience for many of us, an automatic deterrent to our mobility and sense of freedom even in the corners of this city most familiar to us, a daily reminder that our public spaces are owned by men. A case like Anjali Singh’s may not even make it to the category of crimes against women, yet it shows us how the kinds of violence we live in fear of, both sexual and non-sexual, are largely a product of male entitlement.
This entitlement is inseparable from the masculinisation of public space. The outdoor world becomes a domain that belongs to men and women are made to feel like they are trespassing. Men tend to feel a comfort in public spaces to meander, to stroll, to hang around tea shops, to loiter at street corners. To drive drunk at night, taking rounds of the city, even after they’ve hit a scooter with two women passengers on it. For women, we move through public space as quickly as possible, seeing it as a transit route between point A and point B — a route that produces immense anxiety for us the second we’re journeying through it at night, alone, a certain gaze feeling omnipresent wherever we go.
This differential experience of public space in Delhi, the daily ways in which men get to navigate the city and leave it actively less accessible to women, and the constant threats that are simply part and parcel of being a woman in Delhi — that’s the bitter and pervasive reality that Anjali Singh’s death speaks to, and it is one that we repeatedly fail to address.
The writer is pursuing her Master’s degree in Sociology at Columbia University. She has worked in social sustainability, journalism, and research
