The friendship that survived the division of a nation

• 4 August 2017
 

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Image captionAgha Ahmed Raza, Amar Kapur and Rishad Haider grew up in Lahore, Pakistan

Seventy years ago, in August 1947, British colonial rule in India came to an end. The country was divided into two independent states - Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. Using letters and diaries sourced from the world's first Partition Museum which opens in Amritsar on 17 August, Soutik Biswas pieces together the extraordinary story of four friends who were separated by the traumatic event and reunited 30 years later.

"Our country has been broken; the great, sound pulsating heart of India has been broken," a young man in Lahore, Pakistan, wrote to his best friend in Delhi, the capital of India, in the summer of 1949.

Writing in elegant cursive and turquoise blue ink, Asaf Khwaja had poured his heart out to Amar Kapur. Barely two years had passed since they had been separated by the bloody partition which split the subcontinent into the new independent nations of India and Pakistan.

"We in Lahore, your friends and former playmates, those who were in school with you and in college and whose first 25 years of life, are inseparably linked with those of yours assure you with the utmost sincerity that distance has not made the slightest difference in our love and affection for you; that we remember you, and remembered you often, with the same brotherly feeling that for so long characterised our relations," wrote Asaf, who had just joined the Pakistan Times newspaper as a journalist.

"We have spent good times, Amar, grand times, together."

Amar Kapur, Asaf Khwaja, Agha Raza and Rishad Haider were like a brotherhood of friends.

They lived within a three-mile radius, visited each other's homes, shared street snacks on the way home from convent school, studied in the same college and played soft ball cricket with twigs for stumps. From innocent boyhood to callow youth, they had shared the good times.

Then, in the tumultuous summer of 1947, hard times arrived with a vengeance.

Amar's separation had hurt the most. He was the only Hindu in the group, and his friends called him Punditji, which means a Hindu priest.

Three weeks after the partition in August 1947, Amar and his family abandoned their sprawling family home and 57-year-old printing business in Lahore, and joined the millions of refugees that crossed the border in what was one of the greatest migrations in human history.

Two years later, in Delhi, they were still trying to salvage their lives from the detritus of partition.

Image copyrightCOURTESY OMAR KHWAJA

Image captionAsaf Khwaja worked as a journalist with Pakistan Times

Image copyrightPARTITION MUSEUM

Image caption..and kept in touch with Amar Kapur through letters

Back in their severed homeland, Asaf, Agha and Rishad had entered adulthood and were starting to earn a living.

Asaf's mordant wit was on magnificent display as he shared the news about their friends.

"Agha and Rishad have entered into business - the swindlers. They are running an agency for Burmah Shell Company and minting a good bit of money. I wish you could see [Agha] Ahmad. He is (sic) grown so fat and bald that you would find it hard to recognise him - signs of prosperity!" Asaf wrote.

Asaf was a pragmatic idealist. He loved cricket, poetry and the mountains and developed a love for contract bridge in his later life. He would sometimes spend his summers with his grandfather on a houseboat on Kashmir's Dal Lake or visit the unspoilt mountains of Swat. He was also hopeful about a brighter future for both nations.

"Much suffering has been caused and much bitterness engendered," he wrote to Amar. "But what is done cannot be undone. All we can do now is to make amends for our past mistakes and work wholeheartedly for the restoration of peace and goodwill among the divided sections of the people."

But Amar was less buoyant. Riots had broken out in Lahore - a Muslim-majority city where businesses were dominated by non-Muslims - in the months before partition. Under the smoke-filled skies, Hindus and Muslims had turned on each other, burnt down properties, and looted shops and homes.

His father had forbidden the children and women in the house to step outside. When his family finally left Lahore in September in a convoy of cars, led by his father's grey Opel, he hid a .38 calibre revolver in the door lining.

"It was madness, complete madness," Amar Kapur, now 94, told me recently.

He kept a diary after migrating to Delhi following the blood-drenched summer of 1947 via the border city of Amritsar, where the family spent three months on the veranda of a house. In Delhi, the Kapurs then lived without electricity for three years in three rooms in a disputed house.

Image copyrightMANSI THAPLIYAL

Image captionAmar Kapur left his Lahore home and came to Delhi a month after partition

"On 3 June 1947 it was decided that India would be partitioned and Pakistan would come into being. On that day was India doomed," Amar wrote in his diary. He wrote that violence hadn't stopped since the announcement.

"Religion, which should be a strictly private affair and the concern of the individual, was being used to cover up beastly acts of murder and other inhuman acts," he wrote.

Asaf, in Lahore, believed none of this would affect their friendship. "We have common memories and common experiences that bind us so closely together that no adventitious circumstances can wrench us apart," he wrote in one of his letters.

But separated by distance, experience and time, the four friends did get separated. For three decades, they completely lost touch. Keeping friendships alive in rival, hostile nations was difficult, not least because it was hard to get visas to visit each other's countries. They also lost each other's addresses.

A simple twist of fate brought the four together again, however.

In the summer of 1980, an uncle of Agha Raza visited Delhi to attend a conference. Before he left, Agha had asked him to try trace Amar and his whereabouts. He told him that his family owned a printing press business in Delhi which bore the Kapur family name.

Agha had been the maverick of the quartet. He had worked for an oil company, joined the Pakistani navy as an officer and then worked for the labour department. In his thirties, he retired to the countryside to look after his family farm, some 120km (74 miles) from Lahore. His friends called him the agriculturist.

Now, he was on the hunt for his long-lost friend.

In Delhi his uncle, a former diplomat, looked up the telephone directory and began calling all the Amar Kapurs. He got lucky with the fourth call, and returned to Pakistan with Amar's address and phone number. Soon the friends reconnected, speaking on the phone and writing to each other.

They shared notes about themselves and their families - all of them were now married with children - and work. There was lot of catching up to do.

Image copyrightMANSI THAPLIYAL

Image captionAmar Kapur has many memories of his old friends

Image copyrightMANSI THAPLIYAL

Image captionAgha Raza and his wife visited Amar Kapur in Delhi after partition

Image copyrightMANSI THAPLIYAL

Image caption...and wrote frequently to Amar Kapur

Rishad Haider had become one of Pakistan's most successful banking professionals. Agha was looking after his farm. Asaf continued to work with the Pakistan Times, and chaired Pakistan's National Press Trust until he quit after a run-in with military leader Gen Zia ul-Haq.

Amar was ensconced in the family's thriving new printing business in Delhi and Agra.

They spoke of their joys and sorrows: the marriages of their children, the death of relatives. When Amar lost his family home in a posh Delhi neighbourhood due to a dispute with his brother, Agha wrote to him:

"I was shocked and greatly distressed to hear about the sale of your house. I felt as if my own house had been sold. How very unfortunate that it had to come to this. But who knows. It might turn out to be good for you and the rest of the family."

In January 1982, Amar returned to Pakistan to attend the wedding of Agha's son, Qasim. Since getting a visa required submitting the wedding card well in advance as proof, Agha got a special card made months in advance and sent it to his friend in Delhi.

Since Amar only had a visa to visit Lahore, the others came to visit him from Karachi and Islamabad, where they were working. Over the next decade the Kapurs visited Pakistan three times, once availing of an easier visa given out to Indians to watch a rare cricket Test against their arch rivals.

In Lahore, family members remember night-long conversations and days-long marathon contract bridge games when Amar came visiting.

"They were like blood brothers, like a family. I found it interesting that all the four men were dynamic, successful individuals. But when they met they kind of merged into each other and became completely childlike. The intensity of friendship was something," Cyma Haider, daughter of Rishad Haider, told me.

Amar would often pick up the phone and invite Agha to visit him in Delhi. One day, he wrote to him, saying he hoped to visit him soon.

"Your repeated invitations to visit you all are so full of love and kindness that I feel very guilty in not having been able to make it so far. But sooner or later, Inshallah, we will and I hope in the not too distant future."

Image copyrightPARTITION MUSEUM

Image captionAmar Kapur maintained a diary in the days after the partition

Image copyrightPARTITION MUSEUM

Image caption...where he wrote that India was "doomed" after the traumatic separation

As winter approached in 1988, Agha promised Amar that he would see him in Delhi in the new year. But in December, he collapsed in his home and died of a heart attack, aged 67.

Rishad was the next to depart, in 1993, also aged 67. Feeling rather unwell, he was admitted to hospital a few days before his death, telling his family, "I think my time has come."

In June 1996, an unusually despondent Asaf wrote to Amar:

"How saddening is to lose lifelong friends. It is as if a part of you dies. Both Agha Ahmed and Rishad have left a void in my life, a void that can never be filled. I have myself been keeping indifferent health for some time now, and it may not be long before I join my departed friends in their eternal abode."

"My only wish is that I should die as they died - suddenly and without lingering pain."

Asaf wrote about "leading a lonely life, with both our children away in the US". He said they did meet on short visits to each other's countries every two to three years, but these "short visits only sharpen the sense of loneliness".

"Sometimes I feel that life has become meaningless."

Image copyrightMANSI THAPLIYAL

Image captionAmar Kapur took this picture of his wife Minna before they got married in 1955

Asaf contemplated a future where their children would continue the friendships forged by their parents.

"If you and I cannot meet, let our children get together if they can and carry on a friendship which their fathers have been able to retain only flimsily due to a tragic quirk of history," Asaf wrote.

A month later, on 29 July, Asaf Khwaja woke up in the morning, showered, had his breakfast and began reading the morning papers when he suffered a heart attack and died. He was 71.

At 94, Amar Kapur is the only survivor of the brotherhood. He sold off his business some 20 years ago and continues to lead a busy life with his wife, Minna, in his two-storey home that he built in 1986 in Faridabad on the outskirts of Delhi.

He is remarkably agile for his age, and lives with his pencil drawings, paintings, photographs and a boxful of memories. He is rather stoic about his past, taking more pride in his wife's work with the Rotary Club, than anything else.

I ask whether he misses his old friends.

"I miss them," he says. "I loved them and I love them even more now."

"They are the only real friends I ever had."

Pictures by Mansi Thapliyal. Archive pictures provided by family members. Interviews conducted in Delhi, and by phone to Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad and California.

Horrors of India's brothels documented

Guddi, 22, says she is 'trapped' in Mumbai's red light district

British photojournalist Hazel Thompson has spent the last decade documenting the lives of girls trafficked into India's thriving sex industry. She spoke to Atish Patel about her experiences.

Guddi was only 11 years old when her family was persuaded by a neighbour to send her to the city of Mumbai hundreds of miles away from her poverty-stricken village in the eastern state of West Bengal.

They promised her a well-paid job as a housemaid to help feed her family.

Instead, she ended up at one of Asia's largest red light districts to become a sex worker.

Trafficked by her neighbour, she arrived at a brothel. She was raped by a customer and spent the next three months in hospital.
'Harrowing'
Guddi's sad and harrowing story is similar to many of the estimated 20,000 sex workers in Kamathipura, established over 150 years ago during colonial rule as one of Mumbai's "comfort zones" for British soldiers.

"They raped her to break her," said Ms Thompson.

 

• Hazel Thompson is an award winning British photojournalist
• She has worked in over 40 countries
• She has made a short film called Riva & Albert, a story of friendship and love beyond generations

Ms Thompson's journey into Kamathipura started in 2002 when she travelled there to photograph children born into the sex trade. The result is her new, interactive ebook, Taken.

Mumbai's oldest and largest red light district is a maze of around 14 dingy, cramped lanes overlooked by gleaming, new skyscrapers - symbols of India's recent economic prosperity that has lifted millions out of poverty.

But in Kamathipura, time seems to have stood still.

Throughout the 1800s, the British military established and maintained brothels for its troops to use across India.

The girls, many in their early teens from poor, rural Indian families, were recruited and paid directly by the military, which also set their prices.

By 1864, there were eight neighbourhoods in Mumbai which were home to more than 500 prostitutes. Almost 60 years later, there were only two, with Kamathipura being the largest.

"The system is continuing to be fed to this day," Ms Thompson said.

To protect the women from violent customers, police introduced bars to the windows and doors of brothels in the 1890s.

These "cages" still exist today and some women continue to work and live in the same brothels constructed by the British.

"Nothing has changed for 120 years. Nothing," Ms Thompson claimed.

Today the women charge up to 500 rupees ($8; £5) for sex and girls aged between 12 and 16 can earn up to 2,000 rupees($32; £20), she added.

Virgins in Kamathipura are auctioned to the highest bidder.
'Modern day slavery'
The 35-year-old photographer was able to gain access to this secret world after reaching out to Bombay Teen Challenge, a charity consisting of former sex workers and pimps who for more than 20 years have been rescuing and rehabilitating women working in Kamathipura.

Entering the brothels initially under the guise of an aid worker, she shot images discreetly from the back of vehicles, the roofs of buildings and under her scarf.

Ms Thompson's ebook uses texts, images and videos on life in brothels

 

"The way I worked was I would go in and come out. I would spend a few days and attention would build up so I would leave," she said.

She felt constantly on edge every time she went into the district, reaching a tipping point in 2010 when she was manhandled by a gangster while she interacted with a prostitute.

"Along the journey there were many times I wanted to give up," she added.

Ms Thompson's ebook, which uses texts, images and videos to get a sense of what life is like in Kamathipura, also includes stories from women who managed to escape from a situation she describes as "modern-day slavery".

Lata, for example, was tricked and trafficked by her boyfriend at the age of 16, when she was drugged and taken to Mumbai from the southern state of Karnataka.

But years later, with the help of Bombay Teen Challenge, she was reunited with her family and now lives in a rehabilitation home run by the charity.

"In the 11 years I've been there, I've never met one woman who has chosen to be there. Every woman I've met has been trafficked or born there," Ms Thompson said.

"These girls who have been trafficked can't return to their families because of the stigma and [yet it is] often [they who] are responsible for them being in Kamathipura," she added.

The British photojournalist is also launching a campaign with the UK-based Jubilee Charity calling for India and other countries to criminalise the purchase of sex.

In April, the Indian government amended the law to broaden the types of crimes considered to be a trafficking offence and established harsher sentences for traffickers.

But enforcement of anti-trafficking laws remains a problem, as does official complicity, according to the US State Department's Trafficking in Persons Report 2013.

"Countries like Sweden and Norway have made the purchase of sexual services illegal and it has had a profound impact on demand, causing trafficking to also decrease significantly," Ms Thompson said.

"This change is desperately needed for Mumbai and all of India."

Acid victims' photo shoot draws attention in India

 

In this Aug. 4, 2014 photo provided by Rahul Saharan, Indian acid attack victim Laxmi, 22, poses during a fashion photo shoot in New Delhi, India.            

By Associated Press

 

NEW DELHI — A fashion photo shoot featuring five victims of acid attacks is drawing wide attention in India. While the country keeps no official statistics on acid attacks, there are regular reports in the media of attackers targeting victims to disfigure or blind them, often because of spurned sexual advances.

The 41 photos show 22-year-old Rupa and four friends laughing and striking playful poses while wearing some of her fashion designs.
"I told them to be natural. I didn't do any makeup or editing. I told them, you look beautiful and you have to be the way you are," said the photographer, Rahul Saharan, who volunteers with the Stop Acid Attacks charity and is working on a documentary about acid victims. "They are very confident, so it was not too hard for me."
The photos have been shared widely since being posted Aug. 8 on the Facebook page run by the group, and have also been picked up by TV stations and newspapers.
The joy and confidence the five women display defy the horrific stories they tell.

In this Aug. 4, 2014 photo provided by Rahul Saharan, Indian acid attack victims Rupa, left, and Ritu pose during a fashion photo shoot in New Delhi, India.

 

 

Rupa's face was doused with acid when she was 15 years old by a stepmother unwilling to pay her marriage expenses. The wedding was called off. The photo shoot has brought in funding that will enable her dream of opening a boutique to come true.
Laxmi, now 22, was also 15 when she was attacked by her brother's 32-year-old friend after she refused his marriage proposal. Earlier this year, U.S. first lady Michelle Obama presented her with the International Women of Courage Award for campaigning against such attacks.
Ritu, 22, was attacked by her cousin during a property dispute. Sisters Sonam, 22, and Chanchal, 17, were asleep when acid was poured over them by a group of men who had been harassing them in their village in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh.
In all five cases, the girls' attackers were convicted, though such crimes in India often go unpunished.
Some 1,500 acid attacks are reported worldwide every year, according to the London-based group Acid Survivors Trust International, though it says the actual number is likely higher. India passed a law last year severely limiting sales of acid, but Stop Acid Attacks said it has since counted at least 200 attacks.

AP Photo: Rahul Saharan

In this Aug. 4, 2014 photo provided by Rahul Saharan, Indian acid attack victim Ritu poses during a fashion photo shoot in New Delhi, India.

 

India's Cradle Baby aims to end female infanticide

       

A baby girl lies in a cradle inside the Life Line Trust orphanage in Salem, India.

4 hr ago By Nita Bhalla of Reuters

 

 

India's "Cradle Baby" project allows parents to give unwanted baby girls to the state, saving them from death in a region where daughters are a burden and their murder common.

SALEM, India — Unwanted infant girls in the sterile, sparsely furnished nursery rooms of the Life Line Trust orphanage in Tamil Nadu state, southern India, are considered the lucky ones.
They are India's "Cradle Babies" — products of a government project that permits parents to give unwanted baby girls anonymously to the state, saving them from possible death in a region where daughters are seen as a burden and where their murder is a common reality.

"Often babies are found in ditches and garbage pits. Some are alive, others are dead," said A. Devaki, a government child protection officer in the Salem district, one of the worst-afflicted areas.
"Just last week, we found a newborn baby girl barely breathing in a dustbin at the local bus stand."
She added that a lack of education, the low status of girls and widespread poverty were the main factors why girl babies were killed or dumped with little chance of survival.
"One girl is OK, but a second or third will likely end up being killed. That's why we introduced the Cradle Baby Scheme."
But while the project has been praised for potentially saving the lives of thousands of Indian girls, human rights activists have criticized it, accusing authorities of encouraging the abandonment of girls and promoting the low status of women in this largely patriarchal society.

CRADLE BABIES
Started in 1992, the project runs in dusty towns and mud-and-brick villages across Tamil Nadu. It allows parents to leave unwanted baby girls in dozens of empty cradles in hospitals, welfare centers and government offices.
At the beginning, parents would secretly leave their babies in the cribs. These days, they are more open and simply hand infants to welfare officers.
The children are then sent to registered orphanages like the Life Line Trust where they are put up for adoption.
"Words can't explain how much joy this little girl gives us," said R. Umamangeshwari, 42, sitting next to her husband, a businessman in the textile industry, with their newly adopted 1-year-old daughter, Janani.

After 10 years of trying for a child, the couple approached the orphanage and within a year, after government welfare officers carried out checks, they were deemed suitable adoptive parents and given custody of Janani.
Since the Cradle Baby program began, poverty-stricken parents and single mothers have handed-in more than 3,700 children, mostly girls. More than 3,600 of them have been adopted by childless, middle class couples in Tamil Nadu, officials said.
Palaniamma, 40, recalled how her mother took away her newborn daughter and put her in the scheme 11 years ago. Days later, she convinced her family to get her daughter back.
"I am glad I refused to give her up," Palaniamma said outside her mud-and-thatch home in Krishnapuram village. "Whatever difficulties I'll face, I thought, it's better to bring up my own child than desert her."
Activists and officials say financial pressures associated with dowries are so great that parents have been aborting female fetuses for decades after discovering their gender through ultrasound examinations, despite the practice being illegal.
A 2011 study in The Lancet medical journal found up to 12 million Indian girls had been aborted in the past three decades.

MILK LACED WITH POISON
Other parents kill girls or fail to save them from preventable diseases, leading to alarmingly skewed child gender ratios. There were 919 girls to every 1,000 boys in 2011 compared with 976 in 1961, says the Census of India.
In Salem, communities like the Vanniyar people practice infanticide more than feticide, often because they cannot afford ultrasound tests, which are growing in popularity in parts of India, to illegally determine the unborn child's sex.
There are no official figures on how many girls have been killed across the state, but government officials and activists say at least one or two cases of babies being abandoned or found dead are reported every month.

In June, local media reported the arrest of a father of four girls in the district of Dharmapuri. He was suspected of killing his 22-day-old daughter by feeding her poisoned milk, then burying her corpse in a ditch.
Officials say the Cradle Baby program has been a success, improving gender ratios where the project is active.
Rights activists say the improved ratio is largely a result of greater awareness and advocacy work, and better family planning, rather than because of the project.
They say the program has failed to tackle the root causes of female infanticide by promoting the abandonment of girls and allowing parents to shift responsibility to the state. As a result, they say, killing of baby girls continues.
"The government is legitimizing the dumping of girls," said M. Shankar of the Development Education and Environment Protection Society, a Dharmapuri-based charity that works on gender rights issues.
Additional reporting by Anupama Chandrasekaran

India: Dark is beautiful in 'historic' advert

  By News from Elsewhere... ...as found by BBC Monitoring

Advertising can reinforce unrealistic ideals of beauty and other stereotypes. But a new batch of adverts on Indian television seeks to challenge those stereotypes, says Upasana Bhat.

A dark-skinned woman with a young daughter prepares for her second wedding. A single mother practises long-distance running with her son. An upper-class professional with a malfunctioning phone is helped by a housewife. An elderly man competes against boys in an online game.

These are some of the adverts now screening on Indian TV that reflect changing times on the subcontinent.

To depict the remarriage of a woman with a darker complexion can be regarded as ground-breaking in a country where fair skin is considered beautiful, owing to the deep-rooted caste system. Adverts more typically feature Bollywood stars promoting skin-whitening creams.

And second marriages are relatively uncommon in India, particularly for women, although attitudes are changing slowly.

The Pioneer newspaper praises ads such as Tanishq jewellery's remarriage commercial for "breaking the mould and pushing progressive social values" as well as "redefining traditional representations" of women.

Author Swapan Seth describes 2013 as "unarguably Indian advertising's finest year" in the First Post. "Great brands do not belong to companies and consumers. They belong to society. They are the tears of the troubled. They are the smiles of the satisfied. They show the broken. And the mended. For that really is what life is all about. They are meticulously planted fillings in the cavities of every culture. And they have a duty to perform. They must be the bugles that announce the change."

But can adverts nudge along social change? Yes, says Piyush Pandey, creative director of the ad agency Ogilvy & Mather India. Market leaders such as Tanishq "must take little chances of taking the society forward".

"I don't think we should be at all critical about this ad. Then we will stay in the past," he tells the Economic Times. And actress Nandita Das, who supports the Dark is Beautiful campaign, tells the Times she hopes the remarriage ad "might motivate others to follow suit".

Social activist Ranjana Kumari doesn't think adverts bring about social change, but tells the Hindu Business Line that it's "good when they focus on the progressive portrayal of women rather than resort to cliches and stereotypes".

As for the mother-and-son-running advert, Seth says it takes "the trials and tribulation of single parenting and made a triumph out of it". He also regards the remarriage advert as "purely historic".

India abuse: 'I reported my acid attack husband'

By Rupa Jha BBC News, Delhi

Almost one year on from the brutal rape of a young female student in Delhi, there are signs that more Indian women are finding the courage to report sexual violence. But many still live in fear, either of strangers - or of the man closest to them.

Reshma has five daughters and is pregnant for the sixth time - against her wishes. Her voice trembles constantly as she tells her harrowing story.
"I kept quiet for many years," she says.
"My husband treated me very badly because I had only given him daughters. Getting beaten up mercilessly became a routine for me. He wanted a son.
"When I got pregnant for the sixth time, he insisted I should get an abortion if it's another girl child. I refused and we had a big row.
"He threw acid on me, aiming at my vagina and abdomen."
Reshma breaks down as she recalls the attack. She has recently undergone an operation to try to repair some of the damage. Her baby is still alive, but she is extremely frail.

It took her four days to get medical help after the attack and that was only after her father arrived. She now lives with her poor parents in Kanpur, 500km (300 miles) outside Delhi.

They were aware of the terrible life that their daughter had with her husband, but were initially too afraid to think of police action against their own son-in-law.
Eventually, Reshma says, they stood by her.
The acid attack was the culmination of 15 years of violence at the hands of her husband. As she recovered, 35-year-old Reshma decided she did not want to be another female footnote in the death columns of the newspapers.
She registered a police case against her husband on five different grounds of cruelty. Now he is in prison awaiting trial. He denies all the charges.
Changing society The vicious assault on a young medical student on a Delhi bus last December sparked outrage across India and provoked national soul-searching about the extent of gender-based violence.
It also appears to have paved the way for more women to go to the police.
According to government statistics, 1,036 rapes were reported in Delhi in the year so far up to 15 August. That compares with 433 reports during the same period in 2012.
The same seems to hold true for areas outside the capital: in the small state of Jharkand, in eastern India, the number of reported rape cases rose from 460 in the first half of 2012 to 818 in the first half of 2013.
Despite this, as in many other countries, the conviction rate for rape remains low. According to the National Crime Record Bureau it stood at 24.1% in 2012, lower than the previous year.
Police say they are trying to improve the situation, including putting 400 more police vans on the streets of the capital. There has also been a push to recruit female police officers.
Avatar Sing Rawat, a Delhi police officer, says the force is also being trained in dealing with female victims. "The police are better sensitised now," he argues.
Ranjana Kumari, a well-known women's rights activist, says India has seen "structural changes" since the Delhi rape, but that streets can still be dangerous for women.

People across India called for the death sentence for the men convicted in the Delhi rape case
 

"Women are continuing to live their lives, coming out, working despite all the dangers.
But the most frustrating thing is that the state has still not been able to fix the accountability clearly when a crime is committed against women," she says.
"Political parties have made women's safety part of their political manifesto. When I travel to smaller cities I realise more conversations are happening around women's safety, but we need to make the system more accountable."
Walking around Delhi as night falls, it is clear that the streets are still empty of women.
Surabhi, a 25-year-old professional woman who travels to work by bus, says she does not think anything has changed since the outcry over the rape case.
"I don't want to change my lifestyle because of sexual attacks but, yes, I am scared - and I always carry a pepper spray in my bag.
"Men are very aggressive and they find excuses to touch you or feel you."
In Kanpur, Reshma is determined to see through her difficult decision to speak out.
"I don't want him to get out of prison. He made my life hell. I am very happy I took this stand," she says.
"I know speaking up will save many young girls in future. We are women and we also have a right to live life with dignity. I will take care of my daughters and myself."
She uses her scarf to wipe away tears. "Death comes only once. So why should we die every day at someone else's hands?"

Violence against women: The facts

India:

• Rape within marriage is not considered a crime in India if the wife is over 15
• Up to eight million female foetuses are thought have been aborted in India in the decade to 2011
• In India, 22 women were killed each day in dowry-related murders in 2007

Sources: 2011 Census, National Crime Records Bureau, Amnesty International
Global:

• More than one-third of all murders of women around the world are committed by a current or former partner
• As many as 1 in 4 women experience physical and/or sexual violence during pregnancy
• Violence by an intimate partner is the most common type of abuse, affecting 30% of women

Sources: World Health Organization, Women's Aid

Rape - It's Your Fault.

 

An Indian Satire.

 

Badar Azim: Does the Queen's ex-footman live in a slum?

By Rahul Tandon BBC News, Calcutta

Recently, like many other journalists in Calcutta, I was trying to find the Queen's former footman, Badar Azim, who returned to India when his UK visa expired. British papers had written about his journey to Buckingham Palace from the "slums of Calcutta"... but this did not go down well with his family.

When I and a few other journalists knocked on the door of the house where Badar lived, his uncle opened it.

Among the throng were a few of us who worked for British-based media organisations. He stared at us while he asked why foreign newspapers wrote lies about his nephew.

And he finished by saying: "They think that all of we Indians live in slums." Some of the local journalists nodded their heads in agreement.

Outside Badar's house I met a friend of mine who works for a local news agency. She had a big smile on her face as she said, "You slumming it today?"

Before I could reply, she added: "How do you define what a slum is... I mean how do you guys know which area is a slum and which area isn't?"

It was a good question. Answering with more confidence than I really felt I said: "You don't seem to know yourself - so to avoid any arguments about this why don't we Google it."

Badar Azim played a public role, helping to announce the recent Royal birth

 

Before she could respond, I was typing away on my phone. Within seconds I had a definition from that most trusted of sources - the Oxford English Dictionary. I read it aloud: "A squalid and overcrowded urban area inhabited by very poor people."

We all then looked up at the building that Badar lived in. He and his two brothers, his mum and dad, and maybe a few more relatives, lived on the top floor. From the outside the structure looked shabby and the building which must once have been white was now a dirty grey colour. There were open sewers outside it and the area was full of people - many of them children, who probably should have been at school.

There was silence for what seemed like a minute or more. Then one of Badar's neighbours, Ghulam Mohammed, who had been listening to the conversation announced: "This cannot be a slum - because decent people live here."

He then told me he had a proper job in an office - so how could he live in a slum?

"I have a television and a motorbike, sir. Do slum-dwellers have these sorts of things?" he asked.

Local residents do not always see their surroundings as slums

 

This is not the first time that people in India have been upset with the use of the "S" word. Danny Boyle's film Slumdog Millionaire may have won a host of Oscars but there were protests about its title across the world's largest democracy.

I remember walking around one of Mumbai's largest so-called slums and seeing posters that said "I am not a slumdog but the future of India."

In a way, this anger has grown as India's economy has grown. India's new middle class wants the world to look at their success, not the poverty that still exists in many parts of this country - something which, at times, they seem to ignore.

A friend of mine recently told me, "The problem with you foreigners is that you still think we are a land of snake-charmers and beggars."

When I pointed out that it was the United Nations, not journalists, who said that 50% of Mumbai's population live in slums, he just shrugged his shoulders and said, "They are foreigners as well."

Recently I had to visit one of the poorest parts of Calcutta when an 11-year-old girl was burned to death after resisting attempts to rape her. Locals took me to the field where she had died.

We walked through large puddles of sewage water and past lots of small houses that looked like they were about to collapse and were crowded with families.

There were no toilets - people had to get their water from a dirty-looking well, and what little electricity there was would come and go. At one stage I asked one of the locals who had tried to save the girl whether it bothered him that people call this area a baasti, a slum.

"Only the rich have time for such debates," he replied. "Nobody would want want to live here but we have no choice - whether you call it a slum or not makes no difference to us as it is not going to change our lives."