Fill in the blanks:

Why was she wearing ____ ?
Who told her to go to _____ ?
Wasn’t she being too adventurous in ____?

The latest horror story out of Jharkhand has inflamed social media—not so much because of the violence of the crime, but because the woman is a foreign national who has spoken about her ordeal on a now deleted Instagram post, her bruised and battered face for all the world to see.

Here's what happened. On the night of March 1, the woman travelling on a Spanish passport along with her husband, was attacked in Dumka, Jharkhand. According to the first information report (FIR), the woman has said she was gang-raped by seven men (at the time of writing all seven have been arrested along with one more) and her partner was beaten, assaulted and robbed. They were found by a night police patrol and taken to a hospital where the woman told the doctors she had been raped.

A senior journalist (male obviously) tweeted: “A single horrific assault like this can reverse a decade of efforts to talk about ‘Incredible India’ as a tourist destination.”

You can’t make this up. A woman is gang-raped and terrorised. And a man finds it appropriate to bemoan….the impact on the country’s tourism potential.

The Jharkhand high court echoed the view. Ordering financial compensation—a cheque paid to the husband amid a blaze of cameras—and a status report on the crime, the court said it would have ‘serious national and international repercussions including impacting the tourism economy’. “A sex-related crime against a foreign woman is likely to bring adverse publicity against the country and thereby tarnishing the image of India across the globe,” the court noted.

Rekha Sharma who heads the National Commission of Women decided to wade in. In response to a journalist who shared on X that the ‘level of sexual........

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