It's one side of the purdah/cloister culture.
Indians aren't prudes by any means. But the rules for sexuality in their culture (in the sense that there's a single culture in India, which obviously there isn't: India is probably more internally diverse than Europe) are simply different. It isn't on the same two dimensional plotline that Western sexual mores are on, so in the super-general sense some things are perfectly acceptable in Indian culture that are completely against Western mores and some things are completely taboo that are totally normal in Western culture. Because of this, some Indians who come to North America will think things are really crazy here, while some of the things they would consider perfectly acceptable are totally crazy to many of us.
The purdah culture means that many Indian men simply aren't around non-relative females very much. This leads to both a lower rape incidence (if you're not around something, you can't do it) but a higher incidence when the opportunity presents itself. There's the story of a ferry in India sinking, and an American (?) woman trying to teach everyone around her how to turn their pants into improvised lifejackets. While they were drowning, the men around her were trying to rape her, because that's the only time they were around a woman with her pants off.
Alone with a woman = rape in many societies. Not because the men are necessarily evil (though they are by our cultural biases), but because if you're alone with a non-relative female you're probably going to get punished as a rapist anyway. So you might as well get it stuck in while you've got the chance.
For people from a culture like that, coming to the West, even a mildly flirty man will seem very, very rapey, especially in public.
Specific to this case, I don't know that many of us here on this board have the cultural background to fully understand it. Yes, we can all agree (and India agrees with us) that this was horrible, but how India reacts to it isn't something that we can really understand. India is all kinds of screwed up, culturally and sociologically speaking, because it's dozens of major and hundreds of minor (simply speaking from the size POV) cultures that have been mashed up and had a patina of English rules thrown on top of them for a couple of hundred years. I think we can all agree that the Native American/First Nations/Aboriginal cultures around the world have been adversely affected by English/American rule. The same thing happened in India, other than the native population not getting mostly wiped out. India had greater depth on their bench (both in numbers and in age and breadth of the history): that's the only real difference between India and America/Canada/Australia.
Indians aren't prudes by any means. But the rules for sexuality in their culture (in the sense that there's a single culture in India, which obviously there isn't: India is probably more internally diverse than Europe) are simply different. It isn't on the same two dimensional plotline that Western sexual mores are on, so in the super-general sense some things are perfectly acceptable in Indian culture that are completely against Western mores and some things are completely taboo that are totally normal in Western culture. Because of this, some Indians who come to North America will think things are really crazy here, while some of the things they would consider perfectly acceptable are totally crazy to many of us.
The purdah culture means that many Indian men simply aren't around non-relative females very much. This leads to both a lower rape incidence (if you're not around something, you can't do it) but a higher incidence when the opportunity presents itself. There's the story of a ferry in India sinking, and an American (?) woman trying to teach everyone around her how to turn their pants into improvised lifejackets. While they were drowning, the men around her were trying to rape her, because that's the only time they were around a woman with her pants off.
Alone with a woman = rape in many societies. Not because the men are necessarily evil (though they are by our cultural biases), but because if you're alone with a non-relative female you're probably going to get punished as a rapist anyway. So you might as well get it stuck in while you've got the chance.
For people from a culture like that, coming to the West, even a mildly flirty man will seem very, very rapey, especially in public.
Specific to this case, I don't know that many of us here on this board have the cultural background to fully understand it. Yes, we can all agree (and India agrees with us) that this was horrible, but how India reacts to it isn't something that we can really understand. India is all kinds of screwed up, culturally and sociologically speaking, because it's dozens of major and hundreds of minor (simply speaking from the size POV) cultures that have been mashed up and had a patina of English rules thrown on top of them for a couple of hundred years. I think we can all agree that the Native American/First Nations/Aboriginal cultures around the world have been adversely affected by English/American rule. The same thing happened in India, other than the native population not getting mostly wiped out. India had greater depth on their bench (both in numbers and in age and breadth of the history): that's the only real difference between India and America/Canada/Australia.
