India Against India

• Satara doctor dies by suicide, accuses cop of rape; two booked

• South Asian University student ‘sexually assaulted’ by security guard and his 3 friends

• Sex assault on Australian cricketers: ‘Wanted a selfie’, says accused; later admits he stalked players

These are just a few headlines from October 2025—and clearly they’re not aberrations. Flip through a newspaper or scroll your feed, and every day brings another report of sexual assault or rape. I feel myself drifting toward indifference, and it frightens me. Part of it is occupational: as a journalist working in open-source investigations, I’ve learned to compartmentalise to the point of avoiding being overwhelmed. I already sift through enough graphic material; adding more only deepens the anxiety.

But stepping outside, the pattern widens. I’m reading reports of cow vigilantism and housing discrimination against Muslims. I’m walking past ghettos ringed with surveillance cameras but starved of basic services: no working drains, no overhead lights. Rubbish lies uncollected for weeks; the roads are cratered with dents and dust.

I realise I haven’t gone numb to violence, prejudice, and neglect. It’s the country that has. We’ve normalised the unacceptable—and that, more than any headline, should terrify us.

Source.

Recently, I visited Singapore; on my first night in the country, I landed around 11 pm and took the MRT into town. Changing lines, I noticed three middle-school girls travelling alone. I was startled. In almost any Indian city, this would be unthinkable. I almost frantically messaged a friend, while also trying not to sound like a wide-eyed tourist, because the sight genuinely surprised me. In that moment, all I could articulate to my friend was that the insecurity we’ve normalised at home stunts our children’s independence.

Over the next few days, I did the tourist circuit and took the MRT everywhere, clocking about 15,000 steps a day. Some stations were a 20-minute walk, and in Singapore’s humidity, that should have felt daunting, but I did it anyway because I knew I wouldn’t get this chance at home, i.e., to simply walk wherever.

In New Delhi, a “20-minute walk” on the map often becomes an hour of dodging traffic, broken pavements and open drains, so you take an e-rickshaw. Then I open Twitter to the ritual sneer from certain leftist accounts: “I can’t trust anyone who has a disdain for public transport.” I love walking; I enjoy public transport. What I don’t enjoy is inhaling dust and exhaust or losing half my hearing to uninterrupted honking. By the time you reach the metro, you’re already exhausted and famished.

Upon returning to Delhi, I indulged in the ritual of jumping open drains, dodging traffic, taking an e-rickshaw, and breathing in exhaust fumes and dust beneath a sparse canopy of trees. Still buoyed by Singapore, I made the classic mistake of waiting for passengers to alight before boarding, only to be pushed past by people behind me. At the security checkpoint, I waited patiently for the CISF officer to call me over, but someone simply went ahead of me, and the people behind me bristled. When I try to examine these instances from a neutral perspective, everything seems like a caricature; everything seems to have a cartoonish embodiment of survival of the fittest.

As I entered the metro coach, I noticed some passengers arguing over a seat. These frictions keep compounding. I think back to Singapore and those unaccompanied schoolchildren; once you start noticing them, you see them everywhere. In Delhi, by contrast, we’ve built curated pockets—the Dhaan Mills and the Khan Markets—these are miniature Europes within India, where rich people can cosplay a pedestrian life. Frankly, I enjoy visiting these pockets too. You can’t help but admire rich people’s attempt to escape India in India.

Outside those bubbles, my compadres, the “middle class”—or the slice that insists on the label—can be as unforgiving as the Indian summer. Beyond those protective rings, everyday incivility can escalate without warning: over a parking space, a dog on a loose lead, a lane change taken as an insult by the natives of NCR.

These things accumulate into something larger. You know you cannot always protect those you love. What if someone stalks your friend, your partner, or your mother? What battle can you win? You look to the ultra-rich and long for their insulation—an India-proof life. So you start planning: buy a car, buy a flat, take out term life and health insurance, join the gym, invest in mutual funds and fixed deposits. You conspire to keep your loved ones safe because you know the status quo will hold: the violence, the sexual assaults, the inequalities and incivilities, the missing pavements, the foul air, the absent trees. You either leave the country or build a walled garden. But you’ll never build it like the ultra-rich. In the end, you’re pulled back into the same incivility—the city’s creed of survival of the fittest.

The despair sets in. You pause, catch your breath, and try to manoeuvre the anxiety. A couple of hours later, you open social media again and read that the government is gaming the AQI, while ordering HEPA-grade air purifiers for its own offices. So you start plotting again. It isn’t that your loved ones are weak or need rescuing; it’s that you can’t bear to watch them suffer the everyday cruelties of India.

I keep thinking of Wang Huning’s America Against America, which argues that the very engines of U.S. modernity—technological advance and consumerism—produced its inner social and economic turmoil. If we were to sketch India Against India, the charge would be different: not technology corroding society, but an active choice by elites and aspirational classes to withdraw. Reclusivity and “premiumness” become a philosophy: gated towers, private security, subscription healthcare and schooling, curated high streets, built to keep India out of India. The public is abandoned to decay while the private is fortified; modernisation turns inward, against the commons.

---

Author’s note:

These are just raw thoughts I’ve articulated in this blog post over the past hour. As I continue to navigate adulthood as a Muslim in an Indian metropolis, I feel helpless, just like you, the reader, and I’m tired of being anxious for my loved ones. Unfortunately, I don’t have a solution to offer.