An Indian spring

"She is not with us but her story must awaken us," have read many banners carried by young people demonstrating against rape in cities across India provoked by the terrible gang-rape of a young woman student in Delhi last December.

As I write and to my surprise but fierce pleasure, demonstrations with women largely in the vanguard continue to peacefully operate even all over arch-traditional Varanasi, North India, where I have lived, worked, and witnessed and written about sexual violence against women over the past fifteen years.

There, in Delhi and elsewhere in India, I have been and continue to be regularly sexually harassed myself - sometimes physically - age, modest Indian dress and comportment, nationality and various provocations signified by whiteness notwithstanding.

While many shortcomings of India's gender relations culture, policing and judiciary subsequent to the rape and murder of the young woman whom we may now know was Ms Jyoti Singh Pandey on December 16 have been closely scrutinised in the past weeks, rendering the case and indeed Delhi now internationally infamous since, it is the significance and implications of these banners' words that I think are what warrant closer contemplation.

The youth carrying these placards are of India's growing middle class which having access to social media have been able to organise in such a way that simply is not possible in India otherwise.

The 'banner' can be thought of as another dimension and extension of the social medium that is as important in this context as is a Facebook page.

It is important since it is a direct action in the public space while Facebook is indirect or virtual action.

However it is worth pointing out that this kind of 'clicktivism', has been until recently underestimated - world-wide - as a powerful new tool for the potent exercise of democratic rights which constituents of many nation-states seek to engage and exercise beyond the arguably limited choices the franchise alone offers.

Recall that recently, thousands of people publically demonstrated an outpouring of poignant grief and anger over the abduction, rape and murder of a young ABC employee Jill Meagher in Melbourne whose "Missing" Facebook page went viral in a matter of a few days.

The Occupy movement too, owes its albeit brief success to social networking.

Hence even though these young Indians have been characterised at worst in some of the recent reportage as elites protecting their own, perhaps it is economy which is facilitating the activistic articulation of a desire for the freedoms of a modernity that arise from a national change in economic fortunes.

Some of what I have read recently primitivises Indian men and Indian culture in general although this is not to say that men do not rape brutally or that there are tenets of persistent misogyny in all societies the intensity of which depends on the duration of or lack of a women's movement.

Thus it is very easy to fall into the neo-colonial trap of inferiorising nation-states like India conveniently forgetting that its present economic Spring occurs after decades of recovery from a colonisation that impoverished and ravaged it to say the least.

It is also well to remember we in the developed world have had four decades worth and three waves of feminism which began around the height of its economic prosperity in the 1970s as more women became educated.

Accompanying India's own economic blossoming comes the opportunity for more young people to become educated, both domestically and abroad, and to participate in and be exposed to cosmopolitan ideals of equality for women.

Yet despite this complex of newness, there co-exists a spatio-temporal lag which manifests concretely: women belong to either father, husband or son and as space - the world outside - belongs to men, women can only be in that world in the context of that male control.

Women being educated in, and working in, men's spaces, dressed in clothing that does not signify such possession by such a man, is disjunctive and confusing to a consciousness that has not caught up with the acceleration of economy and accompanying modernity of ideas, ethos and practices – namely of women moving freely and self-possessedly in public space.

So these new feminine freedoms signify the anomalous for men who still believe, as do many of their mothers and aunts, that women belong to men and not to the world or to themselves.

Yet we have seen that it is thousands of educated young people who have drawn attention to this issue, because their privilege, education, increasing cosmopolitan consciousness and access to technology both inspired and facilitated doing so.

The demonstrations continue today around India and in Nepal as well; they have spread to youth and to older people who may not be as privileged as those who began and have led the groundswell.

Meanwhile in Delhi the perpetrators of the grievous rape and murder which has inspired what I believe is the start of a powerful national movement for reform are where they would never have been otherwise.

They were swiftly apprehended and are imprisoned awaiting an unprecedentedly expeditious trial; five will appear in court as soon as Monday. I have no doubt either that the police force and judiciary are also due for a hitherto unheard of and unimaginable overhaul.