The Mumbai police commissioner was being absolutely truthful. It can happen anytime, he said, when told that around 80 men had violently molested two women walking towards Juhu beach in the earliest hours of the new year. And it can happen anywhere — it happened in Kochi to a Swedish teenager the same night and to a girl walking to a friend’s house in Salt Lake in Calcutta the next evening. In the last incident, it was a single molester that the girl and her sister faced. These are incidents the media have reported; there are hundreds of others during the festive week that have been shamefacedly hidden away. The reference to the festive season is relevant for two reasons. For one, the police are supposed to be especially alert to incidents of sexual harassment and molestation at these times. That women are still vulnerable — that they can have their clothes stripped off minutes away from a huge hotel in a city supposed to be much safer than Delhi — suggests chillingly what might have happened had the police not been around at all. At the same time, the casualness that the Mumbai police showed when they “rescued” the women without bothering to round up their violators is typical of the administration’s attitude — the police commissioner merely voiced it — that has led to the recklessness of the molesters. They know they will get away, because no one, except their victims, think that violent harassment and physical humiliation of women are crimes at all.

Second, in a season of celebration that spills over to public spaces, a society exhibits its sense of enjoyment. Hurting and humiliating women in a show of mob power seem to have become a prominent strain in India’s sense of ‘fun’. The power and the fun go together — a tribal girl was stripped naked on a Guwahati street a few weeks ago as an on-the-spot demonstration of political ire coupled with a desire for shared entertainment. Inevitably, the craving to hurt and gain prurient joys at the same time develops into a special taste for women from overseas. Swedish, Japanese, German — there are many such recent victims. The violence and cruelty that underlie India’s general attitude towards women, whether at home or on the street, are now finding plentiful opportunities for public expression. The police, bred of the same culture, are quite happy to turn their eyes away.