Women in India Aren’t Safe on Twitter Either
The sexual humiliation of the streets has moved online
By Sonia Faleiro
Every morning Nilanjana Roy, the Indian novelist, goes through the same routine in her New Delhi apartment: a few minutes of yoga and meditation, before turning on some Hindustani classical music to drown out the sounds of the traffic, flipping open her laptop, and refreshing Twitter. Roy has 100,000 followers; today there are 300 replies. The first one sets the tone: “You hole who should be raped by a bamboo lathi.”
Roy, who shares strong, widely read opinions on politics and gender, is used to the barrage. In the past, the web was a safe space for women—or at least safer than the unpoliced, unpredictable wildness of India’s streets. These days, though, nowhere is protected: some Indian men are determined to use the web to target women whose opinions they hate or fear. And, just like street hoodlums, they employ a mob mentality, work in packs, and deploy sexual language to terrorize and humiliate women.
It’s clear from their online behavior that these men are largely privileged Hindus, many of whom live outside India and enjoy well-paying jobs. Prominent political journalist Sagarika Ghose, who has 361,000 followers on Twitter, calls them “communal techies.” She also coined the…
