Nagaland: Where She Is Not Scared

‘Many women in more civilised parts of India may well envy the women of the Naga hills their high status and their free and happy life; and if you measure the cultural level of a people by the social position and personal freedom of its women, you will think twice before looking down on the Nagas as ‘savages’,’ wrote the Austrian ethnologist Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf in 1939. Known for his formidable fieldwork in Northeast India, his observations have an echo in the last annual report compiled by the National Crime Records Bureau on ‘Crime in India’, 2014, published in July 2015. It shows Nagaland as the safest state for women in India—with the lowest number of cases reported under ‘Crimes against Women. The state has an estimated female population of over 1.1 million, and so, by NCRB records, a crime rate against women of just six per 100,000 people. This makes it the only state with a single digit on this score. The all-India average is 56.3. Needless to say, Delhi has the highest such crime rate: at 169.1.