A YOUNG woman going home with her boyfriend is gang-raped on a bus. Complicit in the crime, the bus driver tries to run over the victim. She dies some days later.

The whole nation is deeply shocked. Politicians and pundits debate how this could have happened in a civilised country where respect for women and family values is high.

Then one politician alights on the answer.

This horrific crime was committed by migrants. It’s the ‘other’ who are to blame.

Depravity is no respecter of boundaries. All this could have taken place in the United Kingdom.

In fact, this particularly terrible rape occurred in Delhi, India’s capital city on December 16.

I know India pretty well. We were there again over the Christmas break.

The rape was big international news, but in India itself it completely dominated public discussion for over a fortnight.

It led to fury by women’s groups about what they claimed was the negligent way in which sex crimes were dealt with by the police; and to great heart-searching about what kind of society could have produced such monstrous behaviour.

There are no simple answers to why some members of the human race lose all sense of humanity. But there are in all societies leaders willing to offer glib explanations.

The easiest one of all is to unfairly pin responsibility on those who look, or sound different.

Thus, Raj Thackeray, leader of a right-wing regional party in the state around Mumbai told the Times of India: “All are talking about the Delhi gang-rape, but ...no one is talking about the fact that these rapists are from Bihar.”

Bihar, in the north east, is one of India’s poorest states.

Many thousands have had to seek work in India’s much more prosperous parts, including Delhi and Mumbai, where they are paid subsistence wages, and live in squalid conditions.

Nothing excuses the mindless violence of those who committed this, or any, rape.

But blaming an ethnic group for the isolated crimes of a tiny minority will never produce solutions, just hatred.