Mob violence just under the surface in India?

Courtesy Sepia Mutiny, a distrubing story: during an outdoor New Years celebration in Mumbai, a mob of 60 men tore off the clothing of a young woman and groped her while a crowd watched. The news account says the incident "has also left Mumbai asking: Are we a sex-starved state?" and quotes a "social psychologist" who seems to suggest the incident happened because the crowd was high on ecstasy. or maybe he just means they were very excited. Here is the whole quote:

'In the US there are more rape cases reported. In India, I would say the business of deterrence is missing and there is also a collapse of judicial mechanism. Also, we do not know how to enjoy alcohol. Besides, there is this global selling of ecstasy pushed forward by a market-driven economy, and so, the line of demarcation between fun and ecstasy is getting blurred. Hence, we find some youngsters indulging in such behaviour," says Dr Harish Shetty, social psychologist, says.

You should read the over 100 comments to the blogger's entry, where people raise all sorts of issues both interesting and weird, including this doozy:

india is sitting on a volcano of envy and greed. the misery of those who arent part of the boom will be nurtured and exacerbated by those who are riding the boom. it is a vicious cycle, because those who risk easing up on their brutality against the masses must themselves fall beneath the wheels and get crushed to a mass of pink and white ooze. it has been this way for a while and is only going to get worse. you will see a rise in private militia, contract killings and gated communities. you will see vile sex crimes from the rich like you could never imagine -- because the lust of the indolent needs to be appeased through new depths of depravity. you will see violent robberies from the poor like you could never imagine - because you can only beat a person only so much until he loses all that defines humanity. ...

This isn't the first time I've seen someone in a blog or blog comments talking about a current of underclass violence running under the surface of the "world's largest democracy." But I don't know how accurate this picture is -- it might just be the paranoid fears of the nouveau riche. In fact, there seems to be nothing in the news story that suggests the attackers were of the lower classes.

Most of the comments diagnose the incident as an extreme version of sexual harrassment and point out that groping is so frequent in public areas of Indian cities that women have started an anti-harrassment movement -- something I blogged about several months ago.