For two decades, the West has been cheering India's rise. But the nation's economic and political changes have caused new cultural conflicts, a dynamic that has become all too obvious after the brutal, and eventually fatal, rape of a young woman on a bus in New Delhi last month.

It's easy to blame a retrograde culture that's hostile to women, but rapid transformation is also part of the story. Flush with the freedoms of the new India, many of its citizens have left traditional village life, but they have not found a new set of ethics in urban areas. As a result, sexual violence is flourishing.

I am one of those Westerners intrigued by India's rapid growth and expanding social mobility. I lived in New Delhi while reporting on the country and the rest of South Asia from 2002 to 2007. In that time, there were hundreds of documented incidents of sexual violence in the capital. Delhi accounted for one-quarter of all rapes recorded in India in 2011, according to the National Crime Records Bureau. When I lived there, Indian women regularly urged me to move elsewhere, calling Delhi "India's rape capital" and telling me terrifying stories of how unsafe the city was.