IN an ashram perched high on a hill above the noisy city of Guwahati in north-east India is a small exhibit commemorating the life of India's most famous son. Alongside an uncomfortable-looking divan where Mahatma Gandhi once slept is a display reminding visitors of something the man himself said in 1921: “Of all the evils for which man has made himself responsible, none is so degrading, so shocking or so brutal as his abuse of the better half of humanity; the female sex (not the weaker sex).”

One evening two weeks ago, just a few kilometres downhill, a young student left a bar and was set upon by a gang of at least 18 men. They dragged her into the road by her hair, tried to rip off her clothes and smiled at the cameras that filmed it all. It was around 9.30pm on one of Guwahati's busiest streets - a chaotic three-lane thoroughfare soundtracked by constantly beeping horns and chugging tuk-tuks. But for at least 20 minutes, no one called the police. They easily could have. Many of those present had phones: they were using them to film the scene as the men yanked up the girl's vest and tugged at her bra and groped her breasts as she begged for help from passing cars. We know this because a cameraman from the local TV channel was there too, capturing the attack for his viewers’ enjoyment. The woman was abused for 45 minutes before the police arrived.

When the police eventually turned up, they took away the woman, who is 20 or 21 (oddly, Guwahati police claimed not to know exactly).

While NewsLive re-played pixellated footage of her attack throughout the night, she was questioned and given a medical examination. No attempt was made to arrest the men whose faces could clearly be seen laughing and jeering on camera. Soon afterwards, the editor-in-chief of NewsLive (who has since resigned) remarked on Twitter that “prostitutes form a major chunk of girls who visit bars and night clubs”.

The damage was already irreversible. Most Indians know full well how tough life as a woman can be in the world's biggest democracy.

A glance at the Indian media reveals the range of abuse suffered by the nation's women on a daily basis. Yesterday (July 23]) it was reported that a woman had been stripped and had her head shaved by villagers near Udaipur as punishment for an extramarital affair.

Villagers stoned the police when they came to the rescue. In Uttar Pradesh, a woman alleged she was gang raped at a police station — she claimed she was set on by officers after being lured to the Kushinagar station with the promise of a job.

In June, a father beheaded his 20-year-old daughter with a sword in a village in Rajasthan, western India, parading her bleeding head around as a warning to other young women who might fall in love with a lower-caste boy.

Even in Mumbai, India's most cosmopolitan city, women have been arrested and accused of being prostitutes when drinking in the city's bars.

Every Indian woman we spoke to for this article agreed that harassment was part of their everyday lives. Mahanta revealed that she always carries chilli powder in her handbag if she ever has to take public transport and needed to throw it in the face of anyone with wandering hands. Deepika Patar, 24, a journalist at the Seven Sisters newspaper in Assam, says city buses are notorious for gropers. “If women are standing up because there are no seats, men often press up against them, or touch their breasts or bottom,” she explains.

Speaking under condition of anonymity, the 35-year-old blogger says she had experienced sexual harassment “tonnes of times”. “I hate to use the word, but I'm afraid it has become ‘normal’,” she says. “Like if you're in a lift, men will press up against you or grab you or make a comment about your appearance. It's because of this that I stopped travelling by buses and started travelling by auto rickshaws, and eventually got a car myself — to avoid this ordeal. When the metro was launched I loved it — it's an improvement in public transport, very well maintained, you feel safe.

By Thursday [July 19] last week, the Guwahati molestation case had become even murkier. Police had arrested and charged 12 men with “outraging the public decency of a woman”, and on Friday they charged journalist Gaurav Jyoti Neog of NewsLive with instigating the attack he filmed. Neog denies orchestrating the attack or taking any part in it, apart from filming it “so that the perpetrators can be nabbed”. But police have forced him to give a voice sample, which has been sent to a forensic laboratory for analysis, to compare with the footage. The verdict is out on that case, but one thing is clear: 91 years after Gandhi urged Indian men to treat their women with respect, the lesson has yet to be learned.

Key numbers

45 per cent: Indian girls who are married before the age of 18 (International Centre for Research on Women, 2010)

56,000: maternal deaths recorded in 2010 (UN Population Fund)

52 per cent: adolescent girls who think it's justifiable for a man to beat his wife. For boys, the figure is 57 per cent (Unicef, 2012)

7.1 per cent: increase in crimes against women between 2010 and 2011 (National Crime Records Bureau in India)

12 million: estimate of number of girls aborted in India in the past three decades (The Lancet, 2011)

914: there are now just 914 girls to 1,000 boys in India thanks to female foeticide (Indian census, 2011)

8,618: number of Indian women murdered in 2011 for not providing a sufficient dowry (National Crime Records Bureau)

65.46 per cent: female literacy rate; male literacy rate is 82.14 per cent (2011 census)

By arrangement with the Guardian