New York City is a tough place. It is not a city for sensitive souls who recoil when either pushed around or yelled at. Driving in Manhattan tends to bring out the worst in drivers. Driving in a big and bustling place like this can not only encourage road rage, but unfortunately cause crashes for those who are not ensuring they keep safe behind the wheel. In a borough like this, drivers need to be confident in their ability to drive safely and know how to confront risks. Fortunately, steps are being taken to reduce risks on the road, with companies like Lytx installing top quality devices into fleet cars to keep both vehicles and drivers safe. This is the best site to learn what Lytx can do to prevent incidents. However, more needs to be done to keep drivers safe in personal vehicles and therefore protect others on the road. Equally, human behavior, including rage and anger on the road, can only be rectified by getting therapy of some sort. Although dashcams are often used in cars in New York (buy yours from blackboxmycar.com) you’ll still find you get insulted about your color, race, gender and your mother from other drivers or cab drivers. New York has a large number of cab drivers from the Indian subcontinent, Caribbean, Eastern
Europe and their interaction with each other and other
European-American drivers or pedestrians is often brutally frank, if you
get our drift. Thankfully there are laws in place to stop discrimination especially in the workplace and if you have been harassed in the workplace then you should contact a Sexual Harassment Attorney and ensure you get justice.
It’s hard enough navigating the congested streets of New York, but when you start heading out of our country’s largest city, you quickly find that there are still driving laws to keep in mind, even if you are glad to be free of the hustle and bustle of NYC. If you head down to Virginia, for example, you need to be aware of these notorious speed traps in Richmond, unless you wish to be pulled over be law enforcement there and handed a heafty fine.
1. Harassment of a New York Times reporter in Delhi
We immediately thought of our lovely if crass Manhattan as we read the article written by Pamposh Raina in the New York Times India Ink blog about her experience in Delhi. In her own words:
- “In February, I was driving my car through a busy street in Connaught Place when a taxi driver began honking his horn at me…The noise ended only after the taxi had pulled beside me at a red light. Then the driver angled his car to block mine.”
- “The man was enraged. He rolled down his window and angrily gestured that I do the same. I worried that he might ram into my car if I didn’t comply. But when I did, he shouted the foulest, most sexist insults I’ve ever heard. “Why are you holding the steering wheel? Go hold a penis!” he yelled at one point.”
Clearly this was horrible, especially to the sensitivities of an Indian woman. India is still a society where women expect to be treated with respect and not be subject to sexual insults in public. So we understand the feelings of Pamposh Raina.
Unfortunately, New York does not work that way. The disgusting C-word is used often and with contempt. Recently, a national CNN anchorwoman and a woman radio host talked on-air about how many times a day their viewers & listeners use the C-word to them in emails. But these two professional, educated, high income women understand that these disgusting insults come with the territory.
Apparently, Indian reporters of New York Times are not as hardened as journalist women in New York. As Ms. Raina wrote:
- “Finally, the light turned green, and the man sped off. I drove slowly, but I quickly called the “100” number for the police to seek help. I was terrified. The government recently passed a sweeping new law to protect women from harassment, but I can’t say I noticed any urgency when the police took up my complaint.”
- “My initial phone call did lead to some action. A police van showed up, and an officer took a handwritten complaint, in which I gave him the taxi driver’s license plate number. The officer promised he would follow up. But a few days later, I learned that police had found my harasser but applied the weakest possible charges. Ultimately, he was forced to pay a 100-rupee ($1.80) fine for misbehavior.”
How did Ms. Raina feel about the police response?
- “That didn’t seem right to me. Could a man get away with harassing and intimidating a woman, just by paying 100 rupees?”
- “Ram Babu Singh, the station house officer who filed my complaint with the local court, said that “based on your complaint, only sections relating to misbehavior were invoked as no other legal provisions were applicable.””
Frankly, we had the opposite reaction. A fine of Rs. 100 is huge for a taxi driver who probably makes Rs. 300-400 net on a given day. From this net income, he has to pay rent, buy food & daily necessities. And why this draconian fine? Because he screamed sexual insults at a woman driver without any physical contact?
2. How would New York City Police handle this situation?
We called the New York Police Department (NYPD) and spoke with a Detective in their Media group. We read out to him the description published by Ms. Raina in her NYT article. He immediately agreed that the taxi driver’s words were “harassment”.
So we asked him what would NYPD do in response to the same complaint in New York? His answer “nothing”. Stunned, we probed further. The Detective was clear – NYPD would make a note of the harassment in the record and close the case. That’s it. They would not seek out the driver and speak with him. The detective added it is up to the woman to file a civil complaint and/or get a court order for protection if she felt threatened.
In comparison, the Delhi police acted as if they were a beacon of both efficiency and responsiveness. They showed up, took down the information, found the guy and fined him without any real evidence against him except the words of Ms. Raina. She herself writes that “there were no video or audio recording” of the incident. So it was a case of “she said” & “he said”. In spite of the total lack of evidence, the police fined the driver an amount equal to about 1/3rd of his daily earnings.
Frankly, it seems to us that the taxi driver’s rights were violated by the Delhi police. Perhaps because the driver was a simple ordinary poor Delhi man and Ms. Raina is media, not just Indian media but a reporter with the globally dominant New York Times. Had this happened in New York, an aggressive lawyer would probably have sued the police, Ms. Raina and especially the New York Times for their employee’s reckless and deliberate damage inflicted on a poor, hardworking taxi driver. But that is New York. Delhi does not seem to have such lawyers or their judges are probably predisposed to rule for an “English-Educated” NYT reporter against a poor local uneducated guy.
Despite this and amazingly, at least to us, Ms. Raina felt ill treated by the police and wrote “I’m not exactly sure why the police didn’t pursue tougher charges”.
3. Tougher Charges that Delhi Police could have used
Ms. Raina was so eager to punish the taxi driver that she asked a lawyer, Rajiv Luthra, founder & managing partner of Luthra & Luthra, a Delhi law firm. Then Ms. Raina wrote another article in NYT-India Ink about the harsher penalties that could have been imposed on the taxi driver. We leave it to readers to read all the penalties available against the taxi driver. Below are a few quotes from Ms. Raina’s article:
- “The driver that harassed me, for example, could have been charged under section 509 of the Indian Penal Code, which reprimands people who “insult the modesty of a woman” through “word, gesture or act,” said Rajiv K. Luthra, founder and managing partner of the Delhi law firm Luthra & Luthra, in an e-mail. According to this section, an offender can be imprisoned up to a year, or be fined an amount decided by the court, and in some case it could be both.”
- “Subclause three and five of section 354A state that “making sexually colored remarks” and “any other unwelcome physical, verbal or nonverbal conduct of sexual nature” qualifies as sexual harassment, which could lead to imprisonment of up to one year, or a fine, or both. Section 354D makes stalking as an offense that can draw a prison term of up to three years, in a
ddition to a fine.” (emphasis ours).
These laws seem insane to us. A one-year prison term for an “insult the modesty of a woman” through a “word”. The word “modesty” of a woman seems utterly medieval and thoroughly ludicrous in Delhi, a city where women models publicly offer to strip for the Indian Cricket team. And New York Times employee Pamposh Raina sees nothing wrong in wishing such punishment on a poor taxi driver trying to make a living in Delhi.
Wait, why send him to prison for up to one year when Ms. Raina can claim “stalking” and send him to prison for up to three years. How could she claim the taxi driver “stalked” her? Look at the legal definition of “stalking” in Delhi? Ms. Raina educates her readers via Mr. Luthra’s email:
- “watches or spies on a person in a manner that results in a fear of violence or serious alarm or distress in the mind of such person, or interferes with the mental peace of such person, commits the offence of stalking”
Again this seems utterly insane to the point of being a human rights violation of the entire male population of Delhi. You are a stalker if your accuser claims you caused “distress” in her mind? Or if she claims you “interfered” with her “mental peace”? Think of yourself as the accused. How could you defend yourself? How could you disprove what distress she felt in her mind? How could you disapprove that her mental peace was interfered with?
Think of the common American insult “your Mama”. Well, if you said that to a woman in Delhi, her mother could claim that you caused “distress” in her mind and you “interfered” with her “mental peace”. And then she could send you to jail for up to three years for being a “stalker”, all because you said “your mama”. At least that is what the law reads, as quoted by Ms. Raina.
This is so insane and the stalking claim is so tenuous that it makes us wonder why Ms. Raina went to such lengths to think of punishing the taxi driver with a three-year jail term.
4. Sense of Entitlement? Or perhaps Racism?
When we read her two articles about her experience, we notice a tremendous sense of entitlement in Ms. Raina, a sense that Delhi owes her. Witness her words:
- “My car had represented a small zone of personal freedom for me. Before I bought it last year, I spent long hours commuting by subway from my home in suburban Gurgaon to my office in Connaught Place. Having a car was a risk: the auto loan was a financial burden, and my parents were nervous about my driving alone on the crazy streets of Delhi. But the car gave me liberty, if I was working late or out meeting friends, and saved me from the unnerving hassles of traveling in overcrowded Metro trains or haggling with auto-rickshaw drivers. It instilled a sense of security and a renewed feeling of independence..Yet now I realize that a woman is as vulnerable to driving her own car as she is riding public transport.” (emphasis ours).
Ms. Raina doesn’t seem to understand that Delhi is a teeming city of 18 million people, people with as much right to the city as she does. And the vast majority of Delhites are far poorer than her and work harder to support themselves and their families. They do not owe Ms. Raina anything. And when Ms. Raina steps out into the streets of Delhi, either in her car or on foot, she is on her own.
But she is not alone in her sense of entitlement from Delhi. As we wrote about another professional woman in Delhi, Ms. Raina seems firmly in that ,
- class of English-educated women who feel a tremendous sense of entitlement, the
entitlement of having a European/American life style in Delhi without
the exasperation of dealing with that poor Hindi-speaking India that is
meant to serve without getting in their way.
But the sheer intensity of Ms. Raina’s reaction points us to a more serious issue, an issue that is the unspoken reality in India, especially in Delhi. That is racism, pure and simple.
Racism of Delhi’s English-Educated Indian class against the ordinary, poor, non-English speaking, manual labor class. This EE-Indian class has actually become a caste in that children of this caste members become EE-Indians and marry other EE-Indians. Their professions are virtually barred to people from the non-EE caste which is treated as a lower or servant race for EE-Indians. These non-EE people are not expected to be uppity towards the EE-Indian caste, forget being insulting.
This contempt, this deep sense of “how dare he insult me like that” is what we see in the intensity of Ms. Raina’s anger against the taxi driver. We wonder whether Ms. Raina would have reacted with the same intense anger had a professional EE-Indian, a Doctor, a Lawyer, a Businessman driving a fancy car yelled the same obscenities to her. By the way, the really rich and powerful of Delhi use sexually derogatory phrases that are far worse than those used by ordinary Delhites. Faced with same obscenities from such EE-Indians, Ms. Raina would have been angry, hurt and upset. But would she have reacted with same fury, the same sense of “how dare he” anger that she felt against the poor uneducated taxi driver? We don’t think so.
Frankly, her intensity reminds us of stories we have heard from deep American south where “white” women still react with same intense anger at “uppity” behavior of men of darker skin color. That feeling is now recognized as racism and that is exactly the same feeling Delhi’s EE-Indians have against uppity behavior by non-EE, usually darker colored ordinary Indians.
The above is our sense, our opinion after reading the two articles written by Ms. Raina in NYT-India Ink. Until we speak with her in detail or interview her, all we can offer are our opinions which is what we have done above. We have tried on a few occasions, both directly to India Ink & via Corporate Communications of The New York Times Company, to speak with NYT reporters. But our requests have always gone unanswered.
So we hereby publicly invite Ms. Raina or her colleagues at the New York Times to share their point of view with our readers. We will print their response verbatim. And if they show us the error of our opinions, we will publicly retract them.
5. What about NYT Editors?
Maureen Dowd and Helene Cooper are two well-known writers in the New York offices of the New York Times. Unless they are always driven around in Limousines, these two professional women come into contact with ordinary New Yorkers. They understand the loud, crass and direct nature of New York City, we think.
Would either of them react so intensely when a man screams obscenities at them in the streets of New York? Would they publicly air their anger in their articles in the New York Times? Would they publicly raise the specter of 1-year jail term for the man who screamed at them? We don’t think so.
And even if they did, would the editors of the New York bureau authorize publication of such personal claims of “mental distress” in their paper? We seriously doubt it. Because they would be driven out of town if they did. You see, “how dare he” feelings are not tolerated in New York City.
This brings us to the editors of the India Ink blog of the New York Times. Their journalistic standards are so different from those of New York based editors, their prejudice against the ordinary people of India, their culture, their religion is so deep and intense that articles like Ms. Raina’s seem perfectly acceptable to them. Because, in our opinion, they think the EE-Indians are the only Indians who deserve rights as individuals. That is what we have argued to them both in private communications and via our published opinions in this Blog.
And in our opinion, they know their own reality. That is why they will not sit down to talk with us.
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