Recent activity on X (previously Twitter), once again, showcases this mode of policing. Accounts such as Team Falcon and Muslim IT Cell have employed shaming and ridicule to condemn Muslim women for entering temples, forming friendships with men outside their faith, or celebrating their autonomy. Hindu supremacist organizations have found ways of employing the same tactics to marginalize a woman’s choice to marry a man outside of their faith or community, or choose clothing outside the boundaries of permissible attire. Despite presenting opposing principles, the toolbox is strikingly similar to “police” online, to “publicly shame”, and to socially “humiliate” someone into submission and compliance. Be it ‘love jihad’ or ‘bhagwa jihad’ the perpetrators mind-set is strikingly similar.

Common ground: Shaming, justification, surveillance

What is notable about these campaigns is their use of public shaming. Women are marked and shamed for exercising personal agency.

An example: a post by Team Falcon post showed a photo of Muslim women at a temple, with the caption sneering this as “shameful conduct of Muslim women.” Another post demonstrated how a woman was shamed for holding arms with her Hindu friends—that is to say, ordinary social situations were framed as shameful. By publicising women’s names, images, and voicing their social interactions, these accounts have made private behaviour into a public spectacle of communal shaming.

One post shared a photo of two Muslim women, who reportedly were turned away from a Garba event organised at a local mosque. Instead of holding the organisers accountable, the post went after the women specifically, trying to accuse them morally for attending, despite their faith.

Shaming is almost always accompanied by an explanation that the conduct is ideologically wrong. In fact, the rhetoric goes beyond objection of personal conduct to suggesting that women’s choices are a threat to the community. In one post, visiting a temple was framed as evidence of “Bhagwa Jihad,” a term meant to suggest that religious fluidity is part of a conspiracy to transform the community.

Another example stated that Muslim women were “diluting our culture by mixing with Hindus,” which reduces friendship or interfaith marriage to a ‘betrayal of the community’.  This discursive leap from personal agency to community traitor inspires politicized agency and turns it into a conflict of identity.

These stories are preserved by a social surveillance system that invites followers and supporters to act as its enforcers, magnifying and prolonging the policing effect. For example, a Muslim IT Cell post asked supporters to “expose Muslim women who befriend Hindus and betray their deen.”

Such posts act as crowdsourced surveillance, where every choice – what to wear, who to be with – may be subject to scrutiny in the public domain. The result is a constant sense of being watched – an online panopticon in which women are made to second-guess their choices.

Taken together, these practices represent informal yet deeply felt regulations of women’s lives. The coercion is not just in the explicit threats, but also in the fear they produce. Women who are targeted suffer reputational damage, harassment, and ostracism; women who are not targeted come to feel the threat, and, ultimately, censor themselves and withdraw from public life. Hashtags like “Bhagwa Jihad” and posts calling women’s autonomy “disgraceful” function in this same way as a means of ideological control based on obedience brought about from fearing discovery and humiliation.

Constitutional protections undermined

Monitoring women’s decisions online fundamentally contradicts the guarantees in the Constitution of India. These posts constitute a breach of Articles 14, 15, and 19(1)(a) of the Constitution. Article 14 guarantees equality before the law, yet what does it matter when a post describes a woman’s behaviour as “shameful conduct of Muslim women,” only to post another opinion claiming disloyalty for visiting a temple? Article 15 prohibits discrimination on grounds of sex and religion, yet these online campaigns are based on precisely these grounds. Article 19(1) (a) guarantees us freedom of expression, which is broadly interpreted in the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence to encompass choices of dress, associations, and beliefs.

At the heart of all these violations lies Article 21. It guards against any violation of the right to life and personal liberty, which has been gradually expanded in case law to include dignity, privacy, and autonomy. Yet, the monitoring and invading of a woman’s private behaviors essentially negates these liberties. When a public social interaction or a photograph can be subclassed or reframed into a documentation of “immorality” or “betrayal,” any assurances of dignity and private space, as contemplated by Article 21, disappear.

When women are demeaned for either entering a temple or upholding interfaith friendships/relationships by being vilified with derogatory and vile terms like “Bhagwa Jihad,” their rights guaranteed in the Constitution become hollowed-out rights. Public degradation dissuades them from expressing themselves, chilling their speech and removing their agency. These case studies expose the inconsistency: constitutional guarantees and judicial pronouncements declare autonomy, dignity, and equality, but the social narrative and digital age conflict with these values every day. Women are free in principle, but the fact-checking hashtags like “Bhagwa Jihad” and public campaigns or calls to “expose” them erode the rights guaranteed to them in the Constitution.

From online narratives to real-world consequences

Online shaming is not limited to timelines or hashtags; it invades women’s daily lives. Women are often shamed through posts and subjected to abuse, harassment, trolling, and stalking. Comments online like, “shameful behaviour of Muslim women,” go beyond disapproval and serve as a way to justify policing women on the street, at school, or at work. On top of this, the damage extends to reputational damage. “Bhagwa Jihad,” and “betrayal of faith” are screen-shotted, shared in WhatsApp groups, and saved, creating a digital footprint that follows women around. Whether true or not, the stigma sticks to women — impacting lives, jobs, education, and relationships.

Furthermore, shaming online leads to community ostracisation. Families often pressure women to leave friendships, jobs, and in some cases, marriages, due to a fear of social stigma. This has deep psychological harm, resulting in self-censorship, withdrawal from public spaces, and anxiety for what could happen if they exercise their autonomy.

Narratives of extremism, whether Muslim or Hindu, utilize the same logic of patriarchal control. In some Muslim extremist narratives, having a friendship with an interfaith person or visiting their place of worship may be viewed as a “betrayal of the deen” — an expectation that women should always carry the burden of safeguarding religious purity. Similarly, Hindu supremacist narratives present a threat of “love jihad” in interfaith marriage, while insisting that women should employ prescribed dress codes to preserve “cultural purity.” The terms may differ, but the strategy is the same: reduce women to instruments of ideological reproduction and limit women’s freedoms to protect the imagined community.

The counter voices as an act of resistance

In the current context of online shaming and moral policing, we have begun to see, from both public figures and ordinary users, a push back against the misogyny present both in Hindu and Muslim extremist narratives. Historian Ruchika Sharma has been particularly vocal, using her X account to explicitly call out Muslim men for hypocritically excluding women from public and religious spaces, while also criticising Hindu supremacy for their almost violent moral policing of women’s dress, marriage, and friendships.

By not allowing either side the luxury of moral high ground, Sharma demonstrates how patriarchy traverses ideological boundaries. These interventions are far from simply rhetorical and create important counter-spaces of resistance, wherein women’s choices become reframed as matters of constitutional rights, rather than communal loyalty. The assertion by Sharma that women’s freedom cannot be bartered away because of any anxieties concerning faith or culture reflects the guarantees embedded in Articles 14 (equality), 19 (freedom of association), and 21 (the right to dignity). Her voice, in fact, shows how social media, notoriously a tool of harassment against women and gender non-conforming persons, can be reclaimed as a space for accountability and counter-narrative.

These instances of resistance signal to us that the digital space is not only a realm of control but also a site of struggle. Resistance voices undermine the legitimacy of an extremist tongue, and in doing so, disrupt the cycle of shaming and surveillance, and offer women and allies a shared vocabulary of solidarity.

In a similar vein, feminist groups, journalists, and student activists condemn moral policing on the internet, provide targeted women with legal and psychological support, and educate the public on constitutional protections. These alternative voices reclaim social media as a public space of accountability and solidarity, demonstrating that resistance is indeed possible and effective.

Women’s autonomy as first casualty

Patterns traced across ideological lines reveal an unsettling truth: women are the first and primary victims of extremist strategies because controlling women constitutes an effective means of enforcement and compliance with extremism. Public shaming, ideological justification, and social surveillance follow women from digital spaces into families, workplaces, and communities, exposing women to reputational, psychological, and social harms.

These practices violate Articles 14, 15, 19, and 21, undermine the aspirations of Vishaka and Shafin Jahan, and erode dignity, freedoms, and the equality of living. Social media and public discourse are vehicles of cultural policing that further amplify exposure to threats and surveillance.

Women’s autonomy is not a negotiable cultural or religious project; it is foundational to democratic society. Maintaining women’s autonomy is non-negotiable and requires platform accountability, legal protections, institutional fortitude, and proactive counter-speech, all stemming from an understanding that gender is to be the first fault line along which extremist ideologies seek to exert control.

(The legal research team of CJP consists of lawyers and interns; this community resource has been worked on by Preksha Bothara)

Related: 

Exclusion at the Gate: Navratri becomes the new front for communal politics

Muslim women publicly assaulted, hijabs forcefully removed in twin attacks

2024: Love Jihad as a socio-political tool: caste, endogamy, and Hindutva’s dominance over gender and social boundaries in India

Right-wing groups demand Muslim ban at Jabalpur Navratri garba

The post Misogyny & Faith: Extreme narratives curtailing the autonomy of women appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The ruling has already sparked protests on the NUJS campus, with students calling for the Vice Chancellor’s resignation, citing not only sexual harassment but also claims of financial misconduct. In a broader sense, the ruling has also reopened questions about whether India’s workplace harassment statute is too strict in its time limits and whether the courts should interpret those provisions flexibly in cases where survivors fear retaliation or are subject to institutional hierarchies. This judgement, combined with both a statutory formalism and symbolic sanction, captures the tensions at the heart of India’s struggle to reconcile due process, survivors’ rights, and accountability for sexual harassment.

The Judgment at a glance

On September 12, the Supreme Court in Vaneeta Patnaik v. Nirmal Kanti Chakrabarti & Ors., dismissed a claim of sexual harassment against the Vice Chancellor of the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences (NUJS), because the claim was outside the limitation period under section 9 of the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013. The Vice Chancellor was Dr. Nirmal Kanti Chakrabarti, who took office in 2019, and the complainant was Prof. Vaneeta Patnaik, a senior professor. She alleged that VC Chakrabarti subjected her to unwelcome behavior in April 2023, but filed her complaint only in December 2023. The Local Complaints Committee (LCC) dismissed the case in its entirety, citing that it was beyond the six-month time limit set by the Act.

In opposition to the LCC complaint dismissal, Patnaik appealed to the Calcutta High Court. A Single Judge accepted the appeal and directed that the continuation of a retaliatory measure against her, namely being removed as director of the MA programme, and questioning her actions, would come in due course, was a form of continuing behaviour of harassment and meant the allegations were in time. The Division Bench overturned that finding by the Single Judge by ruling that other administrative decisions of the Executive Council of the University were not like sexual harassment.

The Supreme Court confirmed the Division Bench’s ruling that statutory timelines under Section 9 are compulsory. The Court gave the Court’s judgment a startling ending: while the complaint could not be resurrected, the alleged misconduct cannot be ignored. It was ordered that the incident should be recorded in the Vice Chancellor’s official record, without the complainant being heard on the merits, and the accused subject to a reputational cloud.

Statutory framework under the PoSH Act, 2013

The PoSH Act was intended to establish a time-bound and effective mechanism for addressing a complaint concerning harassment at a workplace. These provisions are particularly relevant to the NUJS judgment, specifically:

Section 2 (n) of the act defines sexual harassment as –

“sexual harassment” includes any one or more of the following unwelcome acts or behavior (whether directly or by implication), namely:—

• physical contact and advances; or
• a demand or request for sexual favours; or
• making sexually coloured remarks; or
• showing pornography; or
• any other unwelcome physical, verbal, or non-verbal conduct of sexual nature;

Section 9

Complaint of sexual harassment — (1) Any aggrieved woman may make, in writing, a complaint of sexual harassment at workplace to the Internal Committee if so constituted, or the Local Committee, in case it is not so constituted, within a period of three months from the date of incident and in case of a series of incidents, within a period of three months from the date of last incident:

Provided that where such complaint cannot be made in writing, the Presiding Officer or any Member of the Internal Committee or the Chairperson or any Member of the Local Committee, as the case may be, shall render all reasonable assistance to the woman for making the complaint in writing:

Provided further that the Internal Committee or, as the case may be, the Local Committee may, for the reasons to be recorded in writing, extend the time limit not exceeding three months, if it is satisfied that the circumstances were such which prevented the woman from filing a complaint within the said period.

Section 9 (1) establishes a period of limitation to allow the victims to make their complaints.

The problem with limitation

The NUJS case demonstrates how unyielding time limitations deny survivors of harassment the ability to redress for their injuries. Women facing sexual harassment, especially when the perpetrator is a person of power, are often silenced due to fears of retaliation, damage to their reputation, and institutional bias. The Supreme Court has acknowledged this reality in State of Punjab v. Gurmit Singh (1996), where the Court asserted that delay in reporting an incident of sexual assault should not cast doubt on one’s credibility in and of itself, particularly where there is stigma associated with reporting. Under the PoSH Act, however, if a six-month time limit has been met, a complaint cannot be entertained, no matter the context of the harassment.

This rigid scheme conflicts with the Act’s very object: to create safer workplaces and protect women from harassment. Although the drafter intended to prevent stale claims and situations that would have been better dealt with if reported earlier, the relatively inflexible nature of the six-month limit places unacceptable burdens on complainants in hierarchical institutions such as universities, with their potential for administrative reprisal and threats to career.

Indian courts have varied their approaches to limitation depending on the applicable statute. In criminal law, courts spare no time in allowing reasons for delays in FIRs relating to sexual offenses, while highlighting trauma and coercion as valid excuses.

In contrast to the Supreme Court in this judgment, the High Courts, generally speaking, have adopted a stricter stance. For example, the Jammu & Kashmir High Court in Mohammad Altaf Bhat vs Principal Chief of Commissioner (2024) firmly ruled that the limitation set out through Section 9 was binding and not subject to extending the limitation period for any reason. In an institutional grievance circumstance [PoSH], courts have made clear they will not modify the length of the limitation even in the face of claims of imbalance of power.

The criminal justice paradox

This difference reveals a contradiction: while the criminal justice system has become more accepting of delays in sexual offense cases, workplace harassment law creates an absolute barrier that excludes exactly those complaints most affected by fear and power. Survivors who take time to process their traumatic experiences or wait until they feel safer to report are left without recourse. As a result, a legal framework is in place that prioritizes procedural finality over substantive justice. A broader application of the Act would involve either amending the law to include a minimum one-year limitation period for complaints, with flexibility for exceptions in special circumstances, or judicial innovation by interpreting retaliatory reprisals as a “continuing wrong” under Section 3 to extend the limitation period. Without such changes, the Act risks undermining its own protective purpose by silencing valid claims made at a later time.

Justice for both complainant and accused

In deciding that Prof. Vaneeta Patnaik’s complaint was time-barred, the Supreme Court left her with no meaningful opportunity to show that the alleged sexual harassment occurred. Survivors in hierarchical institutions may also experience retaliation, reputational damage, and institutional pressures that may prevent a timely report. The Supreme Court’s rigid application of the six-month time limit available under Section 9(1) of the PoSH Act barred an ostensibly justified legal claim while raising the question of whether the procedural aspects of statutory law should override or take precedence over justice.

For Dr. Nirmal Kanti Chakrabarti, the Vice Chancellor who was accused, the Court’s odd instruction to record the incident in his service record impacts his reputation, without a formal inquiry. The statute may protect him from a determination, but he will bear the reputational burdens that last much longer than the proceeding — punishment without due process.

This sort of result begs a deeper question: is the injustice an inherent part of the legal structure, the judiciary’s framework, or both? The structure has an arbitrary limitation of six months, and does not seem to take into account the fact that the nature of being targeted for harassment often delays the complaint. Power dynamics, fear of retaliation, and fears about one’s job security all impact the complainant’s decision about when to report. Meanwhile, the judicial handling of the case, in adhering strictly to the text of Section 9, compensates with symbolic punishment—a contradictory outcome that could not ultimately satisfy either party. Rather than working to align fairness with the Code-delimited response, the court demonstrated both the limitations of law and the labour of judicial improvisation.

A global perspective

By global standards, India’s limitation period under the PoSH Act is remarkably short. In the United States, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) permits victims to bring complaints about workplace harassment for up to 180 to 300 days, depending on state law. In the United Kingdom, the Employment Tribunal typically permits complaints within three months but permits extensions where “just and equitable.” In general, some European jurisdictions (France and Germany, for example) allow survivors years to bring complaints. The ILO has previously stated that restrictive timelines can be important for protection and has encouraged flexible limitation rules for gender-based violence at work.

In this context, India’s maximum of six months (very rarely) is inadequate and does not meet international standards. It is an effort to achieve administrative efficiency rather than considering substantive justice, which itself dismisses the numerous real (and documented) hurdles that survivors face in reporting harassment in the first place.

Need for reform

The NUJS decision highlights a critical need for change in the PoSH Act. At a minimum, Section 9(1) should be amended to allow for an extension of one year, with a provision for condoning delay if the complaint is received in exceptional circumstances because of retaliation, intimidation, or psychological trauma. A workable definition of sexual harassment, as per Section 2(n), should be amended to explicitly include retaliation and reprisals to ensure that administrative actions that are hostile are not deemed irrelevant in some way. Without such changes, the PoSH Act runs the risk of defeating its purpose. Potentially, governments can empower women, but they can also entrench silence when complaints violate arbitrary and excessive technical aspects of filing. The Supreme Court’s judgment, restricted by the statute, also exemplifies that contradiction. It leaves a discomforting lesson – that even if a hearing in a sexual harassment matter isn’t a complete denial, unless certain aspects of law are adapted to include the lived experiences of survivors.

The entire judgment in Vaneeta Patnaik v. Nirmal Kanti Chakrabarti & Ors may be read here:

The judgment of Mohammad Altaf Bhat vs Principal Chief of Commissioner (2024) may be read here:

The judgement in State of Punjab v. Gurmit Singh (1996) may be read here:

(The legal research team of CJP consists of lawyers and interns; this community resource has been worked on by Preksha Bothara)

Related:

Sexual Harassment in the Media

Women’s protests against sexual violence continue as institutions bend to power

Mapping Gender-Based Violence in India: Trends, determinants, and institutional frameworks

Evolving legal protections for survivors of sexual assault: Anonymity, privacy, and media regulation

The post Time-Barred Justice? The Supreme Court’s Dismissal of NUJS Sexual Harassment Complaint appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Facts, procedural history & the Court’s reformative lens

The case dates back to 2003, when Shubha (accused no. 4) was set to marry a man, a union that she did not want or choose, but one that was forced upon her by family considerations. The prosecution demonstrated that she held animosity towards the marriage and worked with others to plot the murder of her fiancé. Both the trial court and the Karnataka High Court found her guilty of Sections 302/120-B IPC and sentenced her to imprisonment for life. The case was reviewed by the Supreme Court and, after considering the record, Justices M.M. Sundresh and Aravind Kumar found the evidence of conspiracy convincing and compelling and directed that the conviction be upheld.

What made this ruling truly distinctive was not simply reinstating guilt, but the court’s articulation of social context. The court recognised that the behaviour exhibited by Shubha was a product of alienation caused by being married off against her will. An alienation that the court described as “the worst form of alienation.” While the court recognised this was not to be a defence of culpability, it emphasised that the conditions of gendered invalidation must be considered at sentencing and post-sentence relief stages, if a person was deemed to have been coerced. Consequently, while invoking Articles 72 and 161 of the Constitution, it stressed that pardon powers were a constitutional vehicle of individualised justice – one that should openly consider gendered oppression as legitimate grounds for clemency. In suspending the arrest for eight weeks, to enable Shubha to seek relief from the governor, the court’s ruling indicated that processes of clemency required engagement with gendered oppression.

Social context versus retributive logic in Indian courts

The Shubha decision makes us wonder: have Indian courts consistently take into account the social context when women engage in crime under coercion, or has retributive logic been dominant? The record shows a mixed, often inconsistent, picture.

In some instances, courts invoke coercion and systemic oppression as important mitigating factors. For example, in cases involving women who commit murder or manslaughter of their abusive partners after protracted violence, some High Courts have appealed to the long-standing nature of domestic violence as an acknowledgment of provocation, by virtue of coercion. In the context of honour cases, where women kill under the pressure of the family, again, courts have articulated, at times, the coercive background as relevant to culpability. These decisions show courts are willing to place women’s actions in structural contexts of patriarchy, violence, and limited agency.

At the same time, there is more often than not, retributive reasoning. In cases of homicide where intent and planning have been established, courts have articulated that social context and coercion cannot abrogate responsibility. For example, in Kehar Singh v. State (1988), the Court held that personal or political motivation for killing could not mitigate the culpability for murder. Lastly, in many honour killings and conspiracies to murder cases, courts have been more punitive, demanding stricter sentences for deterrence and for the sanctity of life as opposed to situating context within mitigation.

The jurisprudence, then, is inconsistent: there are reformative strands, but they typically take second place to traditional retribution. Shubha is an effort to marry both currents – placing liability but allowing for reform and mercy in cases where coercive power influenced behaviour is the causation of the crime.

Reformative justice and gendered social contexts

There is no mistaking that the Shubha decision reflects a careful but significant move towards more compassionate and contextualised treatment of women in conflict with the law. The Court maintained accountability by upholding the conviction but also offered recognition of the coercive reality of forced marriage, opening the door to mercy and rehabilitation. This simultaneous emphasis illustrates an important recognition of the fact that punishment cannot be understood separately from the social systems that structure women’s behaviour, particularly in a society in which family control, patriarchy, and honour codes remain entrenched.

The shift toward compassionate treatment produces a clear implication for sentencing practice. The finding encourages both first instance judges and appellate judges to record social facts and any coercive pressures that influence culpability, including forced marriage, prolonged domestic abuse, or economic dependence. These narratives help courts exercise a more considered approach to punishment and provide a credible evidentiary basis for executive review of punishment proposals. This re-orientation could eventually cultivate a sentencing culture that emphasises deterrence and reformation rather than purely retributive reasoning.

The ruling also presents an altered vision for the role of executive clemency under Articles 72 and 161. By inviting Shubha to request a pardon from the Governor, the Court signalled that mercy is not just political grace but a constitutional safeguard of individualised justice. If consistently applied, this would create an expectation for state authorities to consider mercy applications in a timely and transparent manner, particularly in cases where gendered coercion has informed criminal behaviour. Related to this idea of carving out space to consider mercy is the potential for rehabilitation: if coerced marriage is structural harm, this strengthens the case for gender-responsive rehabilitation programming (counselling, vocational programming, access to legal aid, and safe housing post-release) for women in prison. In this context, rehabilitation is not only seen as a component of clemency but as a necessary precursor to successfully reintegrating into society.

Risks, criticism, and a path forward

The Shubha ruling is promising, but it is not without risks. Critics may worry that this mental health context creates different standards for women compared to men, who, similarly, may be acting under coercive pressures. Others will warn of a slippery slope: it becomes concerned with the social context at the expense of culpability, including for intentional and premeditated crimes.  Finally, the effect of executive mercy varies by state and is politically driven rather than principled, and can therefore be arbitrary.

Concerns over presumptions of public policy in favour of leniency and reforms aimed at the offender’s mental state have been raised in previous cases. For example, various courts have considered leniency in cases involving “honour killings” (Shivani v. State of Haryana; State v. Rani). They recognized family coercion, societal pressures, and gendered vulnerabilities as relevant considerations in criminal conduct while also endorsing proportional sentences to ensure confidence in the joint processes of responsibility and punishment.

To mitigate prospective harms, a structure of procedural safeguards is essential. Courts must document coercive situations with factual, transparent findings so that context-driven reasoning does not degrade into irrational discretion. Executives should require uniform timelines and reasoned approaches for mercy petitions, and gender-responsive pre-sentencing reports prepared by psychologists and social workers should provide an evidentiary basis for assessing coercion claims. To maintain fairness and public safety, a rehabilitation programme should be coupled with the clemency decision.

Seen in this light, Shubha adds value to justice without undermining accountability. It requires Indian criminal law to remain firm in punishing spousal murder while expressing compassion about how coercive social structures shape culpability. If this ruling becomes standard, it could mark a significant point toward a principled, gender-sensitive, and rehabilitative justice system similar to lessons from earlier reform-oriented cases while ultimately addressing consistency and context-sensitive application.

Towards a gender-aware and reformative criminal justice

The ruling in Shubha v. State by the Supreme Court of India signifies an important moment in the history of Indian criminal law.  It highlights an important departure from the strict retributive stance towards context-sensitive and reformative justice. By recognizing the coercive circumstances that led to the commission of the crime by Shubha, and allowing her to seek a pardon, the Court has brought gendered social realities into focus within criminal law–an evolution which may emerge in new sentences, clemency petitions, and rehabilitative interventions from the Courts in the future.

There will be obstacles to a continued consistent approach in practice; however, this ruling supplies an initial manual for thinking about how judges and supporting actors can weave empathy, social context, and reformative thinking into judicial reasoning. Most importantly, it is a simple reminder that justice is not merely punishment–it is understanding the human and social conditions that lead people to commit a crime, especially women who commit a crime in the face of coercion.  By demonstrating this, Shubha v. State begins a liberating journey towards a more compassionate, fair, and gendered criminal justice system in India.

Judgements cited here may be read below:

Shubha v. State of Karnataka, 2025

Kehar Singh v. State (1988)

Shivani v. State of Haryana; State v. Rani, 2025

(The legal research team of CJP consists of lawyers and interns; this community resource has been worked on by Preksha Bothara)

Related

Section 498A: Misuse or inappropriate application?

Bodily autonomy & safe abortion, a right under Article 21

As Woman, Citizen and a Muslim: How Courts Have Treated the Hadiya Case

“Anti-conversion laws being weaponised”: CJP seeks interim relief against misuse of anti-conversion laws

2024: Love Jihad as a socio-political tool: caste, endogamy, and Hindutva’s dominance over gender and social boundaries in India

The post Shubha case: Reformative Justice meets Gendered Realities appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Criminal Incidence: The Scale No One Can Ignore

Official figures from India’s National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) show that 445,256 incidents of crimes against women were reported nationally in 2022, an alarming increase from the previous year. These crimes encompass domestic violence, sexual assault, dowry harassment, kidnapping, and murder. The most frequently documented offense: cruelty by husbands or relatives (over 140,000 cases). Rape is another grim category, with 31,516 reported incidents. Assault with intent to outrage modesty hovers at more than 83,000 cases nationally.^[1][2]

Nearly one-third of women aged 18–49 in India admit to having experienced domestic abuse in their lifetimes, a figure confirmed in both the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5) and recent academic research. These findings, aided by improved reporting mechanisms, reveal not just the prevalence but the social normalization of violence against women.^[2][3][4][1]

Geography of Violence

The burden of violence falls more heavily on some states and cities than others. Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, West Bengal, and Madhya Pradesh consistently top the list for crime volume and intensity. Delhi remains infamous for per capita rates, underscoring that urbanization and economic advancement do not guarantee women’s safety.^[1][2]

In Uttar Pradesh—the state contributing nearly 15 percent of all GBV cases—the legislative and executive branches routinely fail women. Less than 4% of the vital Nirbhaya Fund, earmarked for women’s protection, has been utilized, even as politicians pay lip service to women’s safety while perpetuating regressive attitudes in public and policy.^[1]

Social Determinants and Discriminatory Layers

Gender-based violence in India is neither uniform nor isolated from broader social fractures. Caste and religion make Dalit and Adivasi women, along with religious minorities, particularly vulnerable—Dalit women face a conviction rate for rape at just 2% compared to the already-low national average of 25%. This points to entrenched impunity and profound system neglect. Their labor and suffering are chronically erased from narratives; almost 98% of manual scavengers are women from oppressed castes.^[1]

Violence rooted in patriarchy is so endemic that 49% of survey respondents in 2025 said men and women face violence equally, a dangerous misconception that undermines the severity and specificity of women’s experience. Instead, facts show the overwhelming majority of crimes against women are perpetrated by men in domestic and community contexts.^[2]

Reporting, Stigma, and New Threats

Despite growing awareness, much gender-based violence goes unreported. Stigma, fear of reprisal, lack of economic independence, and social ostracisation silence survivors. On the other side, digital advances—while aiding some survivors—introduce new problems. A recent Asia-Pacific report revealed that 76% of women parliamentarians have faced psychological violence online, while 60% have experienced direct threats through social media platforms.^[5]

Child marriage also persists at a rate of 23%, adding another layer to the matrix of control and violence imposed on women, especially in rural India.^[3]

Government and Institutional Responses

India has, in recent years, expanded the legislative toolkit against gender violence. The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (2023) increased sentences for sexual offenses and broadened definitions, while the government rolled out One-Stop Centres, Women Helplines (181), and Emergency Response Systems across the country. The Nirbhaya Fund and special Fast-Track Courts are designed to improve survivor access to justice and speed up trials.^[6][2][1]

Yet, the disconnect between policy and practice is glaring. States with the highest GBV rates remain reluctant or slow to utilize central funds for women’s protection. Trials for high-profile cases last for years; conviction rates stay stagnant; perpetrator impunity remains the norm, not the exception.^[1]

The Cost of Inaction: Personal and National

Economic advances and social mobility for women are hindered by violence. India’s youth female literacy rate is now 96% and labour force participation stands at 45%, milestones reached over decades. But every act of violence robs these gains of their value and meaning, forcing many to abandon work, education, or public life altogether.^[2]

Married women are expected to rely on husbands, and divorces or widowhood leave women financially dependent on family members who may themselves be abusers. In rural areas, widowhood can make women burdens to their families, further restricting their autonomy.^[2]

Fact-Driven Solutions Must Replace Rhetoric

The facts underscore an urgent need for more than symbolic reform. Real change requires:

• Mandatory gender sensitization in schools and workplaces. Education must break the cycle of normalized violence early, bolstered by evidence-based curriculum and teacher training.^[2][1]
• Universal, accessible support infrastructure. One-Stop Centres and Helplines should be boosted with more funding and staff to address the needs of survivors with trauma-informed care.^[6]
• Justice reforms to improve conviction rates and reduce trial length. Fast-track courts must operate at full capacity, with police and judicial actors held accountable for delays and failures.^[1][2]
• Economic empowerment for women. Policies should enable survivors to pursue education and find employment, reducing financial dependency.^[2]
• Technology for protection, not exploitation. Law enforcement must adapt rapidly to new digital threats, training officers in cybercrime and prioritizing online safety, especially for women in public life.^[5]

Responsibility of Leaders and Society

Elected officials and civil society have a unique responsibility. Leaders must reject platitudes and manifest real intent—by allocating resources quickly, measuring outcomes honestly, and enforcing laws without bias. Civil society should amplify survivor voices, ensuring stories do not disappear behind statistics.^[1]

Conclusion: Confronting the Crisis with Facts

India’s gender-based violence crisis is not a mystery lacking solutions: it is a test of national will and honesty. Facts alone lay bare the limitations of silence and lip service. Only when the country commits fully to fact-driven progress—spanning education, justice, economics, and social attitudes—can cycles of violence be broken.

In this task, editorializing is a call not merely for outrage but for remedy. Women’s safety, dignity, and freedom cannot wait. The facts demand it, and so must our laws, leaders, and communities.^[5][2][1]

(The author is an Indian writer and economist, author of three books)

1. https://cjp.org.in/mapping-gender-based-violence-in-india-trends-determinants-and-institutional-frameworks/
2. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/india-country-policy-and-information-notes/country-policy-and-information-note-women-fearing-gender-based-violence-india-august-2025-accessible
3. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11932463/
4. https://ijmr.org.in/violence-against-women-in-india-comprehensive-care-for-survivors/
5. https://www.ipu.org/news/press-releases/2025-03/60-women-mps-asia-pacific-report-online-gender-based-violence
6. https://static.pib.gov.in/WriteReadData/specificdocs/documents/2025/mar/doc2025329529701.pdf
7. https://www.emro.who.int/emhj-volume-25-2019/volume-25-issue-4/gender-based-violence-in-new-delhi-india-forecast-based-on-secondary-data-analysis.html
8. https://www.mospi.gov.in/publication/women-men-india-2024-selected-indicators-and-data
9. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2116557
10. https://data.unwomen.org/global-database-on-violence-against-women
11. https://www.isdm.org.in/blog/its-womens-day-but-on-ground-little-has-changed

The post India’s Gender-Based Violence Crisis 2025: Facts must drive change appeared first on SabrangIndia.

1. Student of IIM Calcutta arrested for allegedly raping a woman on campus: The survivor said that she had been sexually assaulted by the accused while she was unconscious.”
2. Drugged, filmed, threatened: Lucknow mall supervisor arrested for raping, assaulting 20-year-old
3. Days after horrific murder, woman assaulted on suspicion of practising black magic in Bihar’s Purnea
4. Harassed over dowry, Kerala woman kills infant daughter, then self
5. Radhika Yadav’s Murder: Psychology Of Pride, Patriarchy, And Prejudice. Parents may expect success and obedience from their children by projecting their own goals or fears onto them.
6. She Set Herself on Fire to Be Heard: Odisha student’s death is a wake-up call

• Girl set on fire by miscreants in Odisha airlifted to AIIMS Delhi for advanced treatment

7. Odisha: Congress student wing chief Udit Pradhan arrested in connection with alleged Bhubaneshwar rape case

These headlines, together, barely scratch the number of incidences of sexual violence against women in India, or the larger issue of gender-based violence in the country. However, what they are representative of is very important. According to the World Population Review’s Women Danger Index, India ranks 9th in the list of countries that are the most unsafe for female solo travellers.

Looking beyond the headlines, CJP’s analysis of the data from the National Crime Records Bureau’s Crimes in India 2022 report reveal that the states of Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Rajasthan have the highest number of incidences of crimes committed against women, with West Bengal and Madhya Pradesh not far behind.

Indian “culture” and its various segmentations have different sets of beliefs regarding women, but one thing it is inextricably linked to is patriarchy – and its various manifestations through different forms of violence. In this report, we analyse gender-based violence women and a few other gender minorities in India, gauging them into a timeline of what can be called a post-2020 one, through an intersectional lens that factors in caste, class and religion – and keeps in mind the structural and systemic inequities and inequalities that exist in contemporary Indian society.

In this report, we use data from CJP’s own database, and also data from multiple reliable think-tanks, non-governmental organisations, news outlets, legal filings and academic publications. We also take into account cross-verified posts from social media accounts that specialise in hate-watching, reporting on Dalit and Adivasi issues, etc. The data from the National Crime Records Bureau’s own publications has also been used for contextualization.

We have attempted to classify this data on the basis of geography, types of violence, and looked into institutional response: from law enforcement and respective state governments’ attitudes to caste-based violence. The report endeavours to be grounded in intersectionality, taking into account the changing metrics of class and gender, which quite obviously come into play while discussing caste.

Understanding Gender Based Violence

The UN Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women defines Gender Based Violence (GBV) as “any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life.” While the acronyms GBV and VAW (Violence Against Women) have been historically used as interchangeable terms post the former entered popular vocabulary in the 1990s, in current discourse GBV spans beyond the male-female binary of violence typology, and extends to multiple gender presentations and sexual identities, thus widening its working scope. The Council of Europe states, “Gender-based violence is based on an imbalance of power and is carried out with the intention to humiliate and make a person or group of people feel inferior and/ or subordinate. This type of violence is deeply rooted in the social and cultural structures, norms and values that govern society, and is often perpetuated by a culture of denial and silence. Gender-based violence can happen in both the private and public spheres and it affects women disproportionately.

Gender-based violence can be sexual, physical, verbal, psychological (emotional), or socio-economic and it can take many forms, from verbal violence and hate speech on the Internet, to rape or murder. It can be perpetrated by anyone: a current or former spouse/partner, a family member, a colleague from work, schoolmates, friends, an unknown person, or people who act on behalf of cultural, religious, state, or intra-state institutions. Gender-based violence, as with any type of violence, is an issue involving relations of power. It is based on a feeling of superiority, and an intention to assert that superiority in the family, at school, at work, in the community or in society as a whole … there is more to gender than being male or female: someone may be born with female sexual characteristics but identify as male, or as male and female at the same time, or sometimes as neither male nor female. LGBT+ people (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and other people who do not fit the heterosexual norm or traditional gender binary categories) also suffer from violence which is based on their factual or perceived sexual orientation, and/or gender identity. For that reason, violence against such people falls within the scope of gender-based violence.”

These forms of violence vary across countries and cultures, and manifest in different formulations of perpetuating various degrees of hurt at women and other gender minorities.

Gender Based Violence on Women

GBV against women is systemic and structural. Chitra Lakhera writes, “When we frame violence systemically, it is freed from the liberal as well as radical assumptions of male dominance. It places emphasis on the observation of the system from within so that “actions” and not “actors” take precedence. While it does begin with a set of dichotomous variables—like men and women, violator and violated— but in its analysis, it discards such positions and only analyses communicational patterns that bring about peculiar forms of organizations. Luhmann [12] argues that social systems are essentially organized through communicational acts, which are also ultimately affected by psychological interpretations. Thus, the cultural codes and their psychological interpretations interact to produce a distinct social form of communication that, over time, formulate and sustain specific meanings and realities associated with women. Once internalized social systems built a self-destructive pattern within themselves, and they can no longer recognize injustice, inequality and violence as undesirable. A systems approach therefore re-reads the problem by unravelling the conscious and unconscious forces of aggression that produced historically through an interaction of social codes and psychological attributions.” In India, violence against women has been normalized to an observable form of a “natural precondition”, where the increasing figures of incidences reported do not raise alarm, but short-lived shock at best. This could be connected to Bourdieu’s conception of the “paradox of doxa” – which “refers to the puzzling observation that people often accept and even perpetuate social structures that disadvantage them, a phenomenon he termed “symbolic violence”. This paradox arises because doxa, the deeply ingrained, taken-for-granted beliefs and values of a society, are so normalized that they appear natural and inevitable, even when they contribute to social inequality.”

These forms of violence invent and reinvent themselves in more insidious styles, with the advancement of time – keeping at par with feminist progress, thus actively existing as a force of dismantlement, parallel to advancement of any sort – consistently undoing, if not essentially returning things to the original state. This violence, obviously, does not exist as a vacuum, assuming women as a uniform class that face the same degree of it across society. Caste, class and religious dynamics heavily influence the nature and the intensity of violence borne by women (and individuals, in general). Simantini Mukhopadhyay and Trisha Chanda explain that the failure to recognize intra-group differences would be detrimental in the context of violence against women since the experience of violence is often shaped by the simultaneous and complex interactions of the other identities of women, namely class and race, – as Crenshaw (1991) argued. Feminist writing in India has likewise argued that gender needs to be considered at its intersection with class and caste (a stratification unique to India) to understand how the control of female sexuality relates to the organization of production, sanctioned and legitimized by certain ideologies.

Typology

 Besides structural violence, in which there is no singular perpetrator-victim dichotomy but the existence of something larger, social and systemic – The World Report on Violence and Health, (WRVH 2002), presents a typology of violence that, while not uniformly accepted, can be a useful way to understand the contexts in which violence occurs and the interactions between types of violence. This typology distinguishes four modes in which violence may be inflicted: physical; sexual; psychological attack; and deprivation. It further divides the general definition of violence into three sub-types by using the victim-perpetrator relationship framework as required. These include

• Self-directed violence in which the perpetrator and the victim are the same individual and are subdivided into self-abuse and suicide.
• Interpersonal violence, between individuals, is subdivided into family and intimate partner violence and community violence. The first category includes child maltreatment; intimate partner violence; and elder abuse, while the second is broken down into acquaintance and stranger violence and includes youth violence; assault by strangers; violence related to property crimes; and violence in workplaces and other institutions.
• Collective violence refers to violence committed by larger groups of individuals and can be subdivided into social, political and economic violence (WRVH 2002: 6)

We can see this categorisation seep and structure itself into the categories of violence that we talk about further into the report.

We begin our typological analysis by looking at the last released intensive report by the National Crimes Record Bureau (NCRB): Crimes in India 2022. The data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) reveals that the rate of crimes against women in India (calculated as crimes per 100,000 of the women population) increased by 12.9% between 2018 and 2022. In India, the reported crimes against women per 100,000 women population is 66.4 in 2022, in comparison with 58.8 in 2018. This increase could be owed to a bevy of different factors, as Bushra Ansari and Sowmya Rajaram write, “including an increase in actual crimes, an improvement in reporting mechanisms, and a growing willingness of women to speak out about their experiences of violence.”

According to the NCRB, there were 445,256 incidents of reports of violence on women in India – inclusive of crimes categorized under the IPC (Indian Penal Code) and SLL (Special and Local Laws). Of these, the categories with the highest incidences were as follows:

1. Cruelty by Husband or his relatives (Sec. 498 A IPC, section 85 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita): 140019 incidences, 144593 victims
2. Kidnapping & Abduction of Women (Total): 85310 incidences, 88273 victims
3. Assault on Women with Intent to Outrage her Modesty (Sec. 354 IPC, Section 74 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita): 83344 incidences, 85300 victims
4. Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (Girl Child Victims only): 62095 incidences, 63116 victims
5. Rape (Total):  31516 incidences, 31982 victims

The following is a categorical breakdown of the shares of the different kinds of violence enacted upon women in the year 2022 – represented visually.

Kinds of Violence vs Number of Incidences – pictured.

According to the 2022 data, Cruelty by Husband or His Relatives is the crime with the highest number of incidences – and it comes under the banner of IPV (Inter Personal Violence) – and also its subcategory, intimate partner violence.

Giri and Parveen report in Intimate partner violence in India: Patterns, causes and way forward, that about 31.4% of Indian women between the ages of 18 and 49 report having at least once experienced domestic abuse, according to the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5), which was performed between 2019 and 21. This rate is lower than the statistics from NFHS-3 but slightly higher than the results of the previous survey (NFHS-4), which was conducted in 2015–16. The below graph shows the percentage of women who have experienced spousal violence at least once since the age of 15, according to the NFHS Report.

Based on data from the NFHS-5 report, the graph shows the proportion of women who have at least once experienced domestic abuse since they were 15 years old. The average percentage of spousal violence nationwide is 32%. It is important to note that intimate partner violence and domestic violence in India are conflatable categories, and domestic violence manifests in a number of different strategies that are used to corner the victim in households where the woman is married. This includes all the four forms of violence aforementioned: physical, psychological, sexual and deprivation.  The NCW (National Commission of Women), by May, had recorded 7698 complaints from women across the country, with domestic abuse topping the list by category. The Hindu reported, “The total comprised 367 cases in January, 390 in February, 513 in March, 322 in April, and two in May. The category alone accounted for nearly 20 per cent of all complaints, according to official data.

Closely following were complaints of criminal intimidation, which saw 989 cases over the three months – 268 in January, 260 in February, 288 in March, 170 in April, and three in May. Assault was the third most commonly reported issue, with 950 complaints — 249 in January, 239 in February, and 278 in March, 183 in April and one in May.”  Scholars have attributed this widespread prevalence of domestic violence in India – right from the very hetero-patriarchal structure that they are born into – with most parents holding men to a higher preference due to their status as “economic providers”, to their disempowerment in their adulthood which is a consequence of this setup – resulting in lower rates of literacy and financial freedom among them. Jennifer C Hughes and Shreya Bhandari refer to the use of the Duluth Power and Control Wheel. The wheel helps in understanding the different combinations of abuse tactics used by the abuser to keep control over the victim – “The diagram portrays the tactics an abusive partner uses to keep the victim in the relationship. Whereas the inside of the wheel consists of subtle, continual behaviours, like using threats and intimidation, the outer circle ring clearly states the various blatant forms of violence. The abusive acts in the outer ring (physical & sexual violence) are explicit, forceful and often intense in nature that reinforce the regular use of other subtle methods of abuse. The types of DV stated in the inner and the outer circle of the wheel are universal in nature and applicable globally (Pence & Paymar, 1993).”

The Duluth Power and Control Wheel (Source: Lived Experiences of Women Facing Domestic Violence in India, Shreya Bhandari & Jennifer C Hughes)

These tactics clearly highlight the fact that women are not safe in the confines of their own home – and almost every aspect of her emotional and social life are manipulated and weaponized against her to maintain the disequilibrium of power that exists in most marital homes for them.

A lot of the violence that comes within the ambit of domestic violence is that which is related to dowry negotiations. It is suggested that traditionally, dowry was a voluntary marriage gift from a bride’s family to the groom at the time of marriage.  According to Mitchell and Soni, a precise chronology of the development of dowry is not available; however, the literature suggests that the dowry system was gradually institutionalised and expanded during the British period in India.

Over the course of time, however, the nature of this gift turned from a voluntary one into a compulsion for the parents of young daughters to make large payments to the grooms’ families in order for their daughters to marry. Additionally, dowries are increasingly being extorted after the time of marriage, where husbands’ families are demanding money from the wives’ families long after the time of marriage by threatening the life and physical safety of the wife. When the dowry is not paid, the husband or his family may beat, burn or murder the wife as a means of punishing her family for not paying.

Historically, dowry was recognized as streedhan within the dominant-caste Hindu tradition, a form of women’s inheritance and female property. Accordingly, a common justification for dowry is that it is a pre-mortem inheritance since women do not get any share of their fathers’ property. In the absence of any inheritance, dowry has also been argued to be a pro-women institution. Another point of view is that dowry was primarily a strategy to compensate for women’s shares of immovable property and land. Nonetheless, the contemporary dowry practice is a ‘cultural oxymoron that has no resemblance to the historical institution’, and a bride rarely has any control over her dowry. The practice of dowry was originally limited to the upper caste community of northern India, but today, dowry is practiced across regions, castes and classes.

The caste system in India is a hereditary social ordering which historically prescribed an individual’s occupation and place in society. Numerous Indian communities that traditionally practiced bride-price have since switched to dowry, contributing to the rise of dowry demands. A bride-price is when a groom or groom’s family provides a gift to the bride and her family, and both practices have historically occurred in India. In South India, the change from bride-price to dowry appears to have occurred first among the urban, educated Brahmin caste and then spread rapidly to rural areas, among the lower castes, and to Christians and Muslims.

Data available on the NCW websites state that up till December 31, 17%, or 4383 complaints were received which were related to dowry harassment, along with 292 reports of dowry deaths.

Sexual Violence on married women: In 2011, The International Men and Gender Equality Survey revealed that one in five men have forced their wives to have sex. The United Nations Population Fund Survey revealed that more than two-thirds of Indian married women between 15 and 49 years old claimed to have been beaten or forced into sex by their husbands. In another study, conducted by the Joint Women’s Programme, an NGO, New Delhi – it was found that one out of seven married women in India has been raped by her husband at least once. The International Institute of Population Sciences claimed that 26 per cent of women in Pune, 23 per cent in Bhubaneswar, and 16 per cent in Jaipur often have sex with their husbands against their will. The study found a direct link between alcoholism and sexual abuse. One-fifth of the women surveyed said their husbands were often drunk while forcing sex. (Chhibar, 2016).

It is imperative to be mentioned that marital rape in India is not criminalised. Over the last few years, the Supreme Court has heard multiple petitions challenging the very exception in Section 375 of the IPC, which continues to be held up by its so-called revamped and progressive successor Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, states “Sexual intercourse or sexual acts by a man with his own wife, the wife not being under fifteen years of age, is not rape”. The Supreme Court Observer notes that “On October 4, 2024, the Union government filed an affidavit opposing the striking down of the marital rape exception. The 49-page affidavit is said to be the first time where the Union has opposed the removal of the exception. The affidavit stated that while the husband has no right to deprive the fundamental right of a woman, describing this violation as “rape” under the “institution of marriage can be arguably considered to be excessively harsh and therefore, disproportionate.” It stated that marital rape should be made illegal and criminalised as “a woman’s consent is not obliterated by marriage…However, the consequences of such violations within marriage differ from those outside it.” However, it relied on other provisions in the IPC and the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 which are equipped to “ensure serious penal consequences for such violations”. On October 23, 2024 – the Supreme Court deferred hearings related to petitions involving the same. Earlier this year – a High Court judge, in Chhattisgarh acquitted a 40-year-old man of all charges who was convicted in 2019 by a trial court of rape and unnatural sex with his wife, who died within hours of the assault. Geeta Pandey reports for the BBC, “According to the prosecution, the incident took place on the night of December 11, 2017, when the husband, who worked as a driver, “committed unnatural sex with the victim against her will… causing her a lot of pain”.

 After he left for work, she sought help from his sister and another relative, who took her to hospital where she died a few hours later.

In her statement to the police and her dying declaration to a magistrate, the woman said she became ill “due to forceful sexual intercourse by her husband”.

A dying declaration carries weight in court and legal experts say it is generally enough for conviction, unless contradicted by other evidence.

While convicting the man in 2019, the trial court had relied heavily on her dying declaration and the post-mortem report, which stated “the cause of death was peritonitis and rectal perforation” – simply put, severe injuries to her abdomen and rectum.

Justice Vyas, however, saw matters differently – he questioned the “sanctity” of the dying statement, noted that some of the witnesses had retracted their statements and, most importantly, said that marital rape was not an offence in India.”

The Duluth Wheel’s centre is not just applicable to domestic violence – but to all forms of it. It is explicit that different forms of violence exist to enforce power and control on women – both on their bodies and their consciousnesses. Social and state infrastructures consistently employ mechanisms to ensure “obedience” in women. Women’s bodies and minds consistently become sites of violence outside their homes — in familiar spaces, in unfamiliar ones, and structurally, by impinging on their freedoms and dignities.

In Indian culture, women are assigned value in terms of a connotative form of honour that directly correlates her virginity / sexuality with the idea of the reputation of the family and the morality of the society she belongs to. This often results in honour killings, forced marriages, and in some cases – imprisonment on accusations of ‘love jihad’ inter-community or inter-caste unions, and ostracism. There have been reports that worldwide, nearly 20000 honour killings happen annually – with a third of them being from India and Pakistan. Namrata writes, “Within the ambit of a society built on honour-based social boundaries, having any sexual desires, having any kind of romantic relationship or sometimes even friendship with the opposite sex is wholly impossible. Thus, to be a “good daughter”, one has to refrain from developing romantic interests prior to marriage arranged by the family. As a result, those who transgress these social boundaries of honour have no option but to elope from their homes. Previous research has shown how couples are compelled to leave their homes due to severe parental opposition to their ‘self-arranged’ relationship/marriage and subsequent threats of violence or even killing. In addition, there is increased opposition if the couple belonged to caste, class, religion, same sex or same gotra.”

Violence in the workforce: Women in the workforce are often subjected to symbolic and physical violence – in the form of comments, verbal abuse, and “teasing”, while at the same time bearing with sexual harassment and assault. Women in the formal sectors have recently started relying on the POSH [Prevention of Sexual Harassment Act] – however rates of reporting remain incredibly low, especially in corporate spaces. Experts have also recommended to companies to start taking the implementation of this act not just to smoothen legal procedure, but also to ensure that their employees are not afraid to come forward with their allegations. In 2024 and 2025, there has been an added spotlight on workplace insecurity for women working within the formal sector – with the rape of a young female trainee doctor at the with the rape of a young female trainee doctor at the RG Kar Hospital in Kolkata, and the publication of the Hema Committee report.

Similarly, women in the informal working sector, also pretty often fall victim to the predatory actions of their employers and co-workers. With very little legal protection available to marginalised women who work in economies like this — these cases impact these women to such an extent that they are also deterred from further approaching institutional figures in fear of more exploitation. To begin with, unlike women in the formal sector, a daily wage earner or a domestic worker has no proof of employment to establish that she was at a workplace. Apart from this, according to section 9, any complaint of harassment has to be reported within three months. But as per the act, the committee is allowed to accept complaints even after this period. Social science researcher Anagha Sarpotdar found that committees do not interpret the provision to account for the marginalised condition of informal sector workers as a reason for delays in filing complaints.

— Digital Violence: The digital biosphere is one more space where women and queer people are consistently victimized — Technology Facilitated Gender Based Violence, or TFGBV — is a form of violence that has heightened over the last few years. Women often find themselves cyberstalked, harassed, abused, doxed, and even sexually violated. The advent of generative AI has made it extremely easy for abusive users to utilize publicly available photos on social media to make deepfake porn, and non-consensual nudes that they then circulate around the internet. A lot of this occurs especially to women who are outspoken on social media platforms — who are cyberstalked, harassed, and essentially “put in their place”. There has been extensive research done on manospheres across the Internet, and its growth in the Indian digital space — and its insidious connection to Brahminical patriarchy.

A report by USAID states, “Male dominance in online spaces and gendered cultural norms often make the internet inhospitable for women and girls. Just the idea of independent women making their opinions known online, regardless of the content, challenges the patriarchal social structure in India and makes them more vulnerable to violence. Because of this, research shows that female journalists, women’s rights activists, and politicians face much higher rates of online abuse compared to other women. This also contributes to women and girls self-censoring online. Women tend to only communicate to people they know online, use more private settings for communication, and are more selective about posting online—yet these actions create a barrier to being able to fully exercise their rights and freedoms in online spaces. This further perpetuates the patriarchal notion that women are unwelcome in public spaces.”

Indian Muslim Women and their trials with Gender-Based Violence

Muslim women in India face an intense form of gender-based violence that is located at the conjunction of multiple misogynies and oppressive structures. As feminist geopolitics research shows, territory-making and nation-building produce gendered victims and threats that necessitate assimilation or securitization within those borders. Gupta et. al suggest that women have been cast as victims in need of saving in many “femo-nationalist” state projects; here Muslim women are positioned as subjects to be protected by the Indian state while Muslim men are criminalized as intimate and geopolitical threats and become the targets of securitization. Muslim women’s legal claims for gender justice and equality are submerged in discourses of nationalism, religion, class, and electoral politics. The Triple Talaq judgment produces similar effects. Muslim women’s demands for marriage and divorce rights have paved the way for the state to criminalise Muslim men.

Nationalism takes a specific form in India, which was paradoxically defined in 1947 as secular through borders drawn according to religious identity. Post-independence politicians foregrounded India’s secular nature as one of its defining features, but in recent decades, this secularism has been contested. Hindu nationalism has gained force since the 1980s, portraying religious minorities in India as an existential threat. This is particularly true for the Muslim population, as partition along religious lines laid the foundation for Muslims to be understood as India’s eternal internal and external other. Under the government of Narendra Modi, systematic retrenchment of this othering has escalated in events such as the February 2020 violence against Muslims in New Delhi, which killed 52 (mostly Muslim) people. These episodes of violence targeting Muslims were in response to peaceful anti-citizenship amendment Act (CAA) protests (HRW, 2020), reaffirming the systemic violence inflicted against Muslims by the state. The Triple Talaq case reverberates and intensifies the RSS territorial notion of Akhand Bharat, i.e., an India undivided along religious lines. Akhand Bharat is a claim to territorial space that requires the exclusion of the other, with the Muslim populace being cast as such – with them being rendered into a shield of sorts, where their entire existence is flattened into deflection and villainization

In the context of a postcolonial nationalism that has relied upon representations of a Muslim other, legal cases that treat Muslim marriage and divorce practices as a problem requiring a legal solution are a means through which this minoritised religious community can be further marked as outside the boundaries of the nation-state. At the same time, through these legal cases, Muslims are selectively gendered and, through carceral logics, hailed into the state through legal subjecthood. As state actors and politicians seek to shore up the state’s ontological security, or to emphasize security threats for political purposes, they imperil the bodily safety and security of those marked as threatening others.

Gupta et. al further go on to suggest that these personal laws relegate Muslim men and women into the role of managed and manageable threat. When Muslim women are called into the state through the auspices of the law, they cannot engage in the fullness of their humanity, but are rendered as symbols and geopolitical instruments in relation to religious identity. The law is one vector through which global and national forms of paternalistic and Islamophobic discourses land upon women’s and men’s bodies. Laws can protect, safeguard, alienate, or criminalise people, places and entities. Laws that are ostensibly for the protection of Muslim women, minorities and other marginalized communities (and the discourses that surround them) can further state building and territory making. Muslims residing within the territory of India are marked as perpetual outsiders, and securitized through the creation of laws to manage their produced outsiderness. Following Perry, the law in this case situates Shah Bano within the “architecture of patriarchy,” here, a patriarchy formed in relation to the Hindu nation. This limits the horizons of possibility in terms of what kinds of justice can be obtained through legal recourse. To turn to the law, in this case, compromises the humanity of the community.

This continuous struggle with the state compounds and complicates the misogynistic attacks that Muslim women otherwise face, from their own and other communities alike. Not only do they face the culturally Indian patriarchy that looms over every female citizen in the country, they also have to constantly be wary of facing communal violence.

In 2021, many Muslim women – particularly those who had been outspoken in some shape or form in relation to feminist causes were found to be auctioned off on apps like Sulli Deals and Bulli Bai. Functionaries of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board have also been criticised for their excessively staunch stances. Amana Begam Ansari writes for the print, “AIMPLB also exhibits casteist and classist characteristic, as majority of its members come from the Ashraaf castes and upper socio-economic backgrounds. They often fail to understand or acknowledge the realities faced by ordinary Muslims, particularly those belonging to the Pasmanda community. These communities have distinct cultural differences from those in Arab countries. However, in the name of Sharia, the AIMPLB tends to prescribe laws based on their own cultural perspectives. Take this for example. Majority of Muslims do not practise polygamy and divorces are not socially acceptable. Hence, banning polygamy would make sense to protect the interests of ordinary Muslim women. However, the AIMPLB consistently opposes such measures.”

Within the Dawoodi Bohra sect of Muslims in India, there also exists a tradition of Female Genital Mutilation / Cutting (FGM/C) : in which there is a complete or partial removal of the clitoral hood because of its implied existence as an immoral piece of flesh. Currently, there are no legal protections against FGM/C.  Many scholars within the Dawoodi Bohra committee have protested against this practice, along with many pointing out that it is banned across the world in multiple Islamic countries. With the spread of dowry practices from Hindu to Muslim communities, resulting in multiple deaths across the nation.

It is to be noted that all of this violence that Muslim women are subjected to does not exist in a bubble or a vacuum. Patriarchal control over their lives has been challenged and condemned by Muslim women over decades, with them adopting different versions of feminism, be it Islamic or secular.

Violence faced by Dalit, Adivasi and Christian Women in India

Dalit women find themselves triply marginalised by gender, caste and class hierarchies in India. Out of the 200 million population of Dalits in India, 50% are women who disproportionately suffer from gender based violence and casteism. Pupul Lama writes for COFEM that the feminist research indicates that violence in the form of ‘caste privilege’ occurs due to the upper caste hegemony wherein men assume autonomy over Dalit women’s bodies and sexuality. This ideological hegemony of the caste-gender connection maintains caste boundaries and legitimizes GBV against Dalit women and girls to preserve the ‘purity of caste.’ In the Brahmanical sense, severe forms of sexual violence such as gang rape are often viewed as a weapon by the oppressor caste males to reinforce caste hierarchies and exercise power by collectively stealing the honour of Dalit women and their communities. It is also horrifying — the plight of Dalit girls who also become victims of SGBV through heinous caste-driven religious practices such as the Devadasi system, i.e., female prostitution in temples where they are forced to offer sexual services with religious sanctions. Not only are such practices rarely condemned by Hindus, they have also managed to romanticise this practice over time through various ostentatious displays of “culture”.

Between 2009 and 2019, the incidence of rape against Dalit women increased at a gruesome rate of 159%. What one also notices is that through time, Dalit victims of sexual and gender based violence and/or other crimes perpetrated by oppressor caste communities have reportage of the same neutralized, to completely invisibilise casteism and making it a solely gender issue. The judiciary and the institutional actors repeatedly fail at protecting Dalit women — IDSN had once pointed out that the conviction rate of rapes in India against Dalit women is only at a mere 2%, as opposed to the national average of 25%. The labour of Dalit women is also constantly erased — with almost 98% of those forced into manual scavenging being women.

Violence on Dalit and Christian women are intertwined in India. While savarna Christian women report on violence and patriarchal rules that affect many of them, Dalit/Adivasi Christian women, who are converts, are treated quite differently. One of the major allegations against Christians ever since the rise of the Hindutva government has been ‘conversion’. CJP recorded multiple hate crimes in the month of June, where women were attacked by Hindutva fanatics and “activists”, and they were humiliated constantly. At the same time, Dalit and Adivasi bodies of women are recognized as “more available”, when it comes to becoming subjects of harm.

Blessy Prasad writes in In India: Bearing the cross of gender, faith and tribe — that Christian Adivasi women often face trouble in their villages in the form of ostracism and harassment, and it concerns them further because they are primary caregivers within their families. Christian tribal women face severe economic marginalization, exacerbated by their tribal status and faith. Tribal economies in India rely heavily on agriculture and forest resources, where women contribute significantly but rarely hold land titles due to patriarchal customary laws. Conversion to Christianity can further restrict their access to communal resources, as village councils may deny them rights to shared land or forest produce. In Chhattisgarh, Christian tribal women often are excluded from government welfare programs, such as the Public Distribution System, due to religious discrimination by local authorities. Economic opportunities are scarce in remote tribal areas, and women face additional barriers in accessing credit or markets due to mobility restrictions and social stigma. Unlike non-Christian tribal women, who may rely on traditional networks, Christian converts often are cut off from these support systems, pushing them into precarious labour like daily wage work.

Christian tribal women have long been targets of gender based violence – during the 2007 Kandhamal riots, a huge number of them were raped and sexually assaulted. With forest areas in India becoming increasingly militarized / with government employed forces treating Adivasis like criminals in areas like Chhattisgarh and Telangana, the safety of women becomes another pressing issue to keep in mind.

Mapping Gender Based Violence on Women in India

Ansari and Rajaram further state, “The statistics in “Crime in India 2022”, the annual report by NCRB, show that a total of 13 States and Union Territories recorded crime rates higher than the national average of 66.4. Delhi topped the list at 144.4, followed by Haryana (118.7), Telangana (117), Rajasthan (115.1), Odisha (103.3), Andhra Pradesh (96.2), Andaman and Nicobar Islands (93.7), Kerala (82), Assam (81.2), Madhya Pradesh (78.8), Uttarakhand (77), Maharashtra (75.1), and West Bengal (71.8). The rate of crime in Uttar Pradesh — which contributed nearly 15 percent of the cases in India — stood at 58.6.” On an incidence count-metric, the four worst offending states would be Uttar Pradesh (65743 incidences), Rajasthan (45058), and Maharashtra (45331). Among Union Territories, quite predictably – is Delhi maintaining its spot as the region with the most number of crimes as it does when it comes to metropolitan cities.

The following are graphical representations of the same.

This choropleth map locates the incidences of violence in India on the basis of state-wise intensity.

This map shows intensity of violence with regards to cities.

As visible in the data above, the three worst offending states were Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, West Bengal and Madhya Pradesh.

Uttar Pradesh: While Google search results would lead you to believe that Uttar Pradesh has been taking aggressive steps in making sure that violence against women stays in check, the on-ground reality has been quite different. For starters, UP’s state assembly only has 51 female MLAs out of  the 403 elected members — which only amounts to a rough 12.65%. The reigning party, BJP, in the state has had a lot of issues — with members attacking each other. The state’s Yogi Adityanath, has also stigmatised women in his speeches before.

At the same time, the Minister of State for Child Development, Nutrition and Women’s Welfare of Uttar Pradesh — Pratibha Shukla, has previously vocally stated her partiality to Brahmins, going as far as to tiff with a fellow party leader on the grounds that he was promising the people a lot. According to current National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) data, Uttar Pradesh tops the list for crimes against women, yet the state has been hesitant to use the Nirbhaya fund, which is designated for guaranteeing the protection of women. Smriti Irani, the former Union minister for women and child development, recently informed parliament that Uttar Pradesh had used less than 4% of the funding allotted to it.^[1] Only 39.3 million of the 1,193.98 million dollars allotted to the state under which the fund has been used. Just 3.29 percent of the budgeted cash has been used. Following the violent rape and murder of a Delhi resident, the Nirbhaya Fund was revealed in the 2013 Union budget. The grant was intended to be used for initiatives that would directly improve women’s safety and security. (Meena & Kumar, 2022).

Maharashtra: Maharashtra has only 22 female MLAs, down from 24 last term – constituting only 7.6% of the total number. The state government has also not been faring well in terms of promises it made before coming to power. A Frontline report revealed that the Mahayuti government has been grasping for straws as its most successful strategic device, the Ladki Bahin Yojana – something that they had taken from MP’s style of governance – is looking to shrink. The Maharashtra Mahayuti government’s promised scheme, to grant Rs.1,500 every month to women below the poverty line, has begun to show cracks as the State faces a financial crunch in development work. Out of the 2.5 crore women registered under this scheme, the state is looking at a massive cutdown of around 15% – which is around 32-35 lakh women.

The rape case at Pune’s Swargate bus terminus has resulted in a lot of discourse surrounding the myth that Maharashtra is a “safe” state for women. The comments of the accused’s lawyer, and minister Yogesh Kadam who insisted that the victim did not ‘resist’.

In May, Nisha Nambiar had reported for The Times of India, that there exists a critical gap in Maharashtra’s emergency response system — as the integration of the women’s helpline (181l with the police helpline (112) remains incomplete even 2 years after its launch. The state government run call centre functions on only five operating systems, instead of the required 15. 15 personnel, apparently, handle the brunt of 3000+ calls every day. 

Rajasthan: Rajasthan, currently, has 21 female MLAs out of the 200 total count – barely crossing the 10% mark. On the other hand, Down To Earth reported that during the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, there were nearly 21 million women “missing” — women who were eligible to vote, but their names were excluded from lists due to the absence of voter cards or other complications. Out of these, Rajasthan was one of the top 3 offenders, which accounted for 10% of the 21 million women who were “missing”.

The security of women within the state has denigrated — as CJP, in its June report, Rajasthan recounted so many incidents of violence that it added up to a rape crisis. The Femme First Foundation reported in 2023 the state has initiated movements for the empowerment of women and girl children by introducing various schemes, focusing on education, the right to life and even financing women entrepreneurs  – ideal when . Sneha Sharon Patra writes, “Women have been moulded into living in a controlling lifestyle of multiple traditions, especially patriarchy, for so long that most get accustomed to the discrimination and accept it as natural. The dominance of certain traditions such as child marriage, dowry system, inferior treatment shown to women, sex selection, not celebrating the birth of girl-child, naming girls Mafi (Sorry), forcing them to drop out of school after primary level to assist at home while boys are expected to be educated and working are some examples of this. This develops into a conservative lifestyle for the women and restricts the voice of young girls adding to reasons for not being able to stand up for themselves.”

While now often referred to as a stereotype, Child marriage is still prevalent in Rajasthan, with 25.4% of women aged 20-24 having been married before 18, according to NFHS-5.

This is higher than the national average of 23.3%. The decline in child marriage rates has been observed, with the percentage of women married before 18 decreasing from 35.4% in 2015-16 to 25.4% in 2019-21.

West Bengal: West Bengal’s political relationship with the women residing in it is increasingly complicated. While the State Assembly has 41 female MLAs out of 294 – the state also has a Chief Minister who is female. While citizens had kept expectations of Mamata Banerjee and her party, Trinamool Congress in having a proactive approach towards handling women’s issues, the ministry has often disappointed. Post the gang-rape of a law student in Kolkata, Mahua Moitra, an MP from the state’s ruling party called out MP Kalyan Banerjee and MLA Madan Mitra for stating that women should be careful about the kind of company they keep – and not accompany those who have a “dirty mindset”. This is not a stand-alone incident, Banerjee herself has referred to the Park Street rape as an “orchestrated” event to malign her government. The state has also seen a string of high-profile cases of extreme violence against women, leading the citizens to lead consistent protest marches.

Soham Bhattacharyya and Torsa Saha write in Making of a Rape–Murder Atrocity and the Failed State of West Bengal, “The sense of irony that inspires and informs this write-up is produced by the popular portrayal of the TMC as the champion of women’s welfare in mainstream media. Economic pundits have lauded the TMC regime for its initiatives such as “Lakshmir Bhandar” (conditional cash transfers to married women), Kanyashree (cash transfer support towards female students), etc. Such schemes have been celebrated as evidence of the “progressive welfare force” at play, highlighting the support from the rural female vote bank that enables the TMC politically and socially (Bhattacharya and Chowdhury 2024). The recent reportages on rape and threat culture, however, point towards the rise of a politico-cultural mechanism that creates and sustains such a social environment, controlled largely by a network of locally operative TMC henchmen and their “franchise” (Bhattacharya 2023). If one puts together all the registered cases of crime and violence against women, it becomes evident that the figures have increased manifold. The fact that West Bengal consistently contributes to 5%–6% of total registered rapes and attempted rapes against women in India per week also highlights the failure of the mainstream media in reporting such instances of crime and atrocity.”

According to the authors, the data and discussion therefore bring to light two significant aspects. First, the two metrics of an emerging political ideology and the economic policies that sustain the socio-political system complement each other surreptitiously. The mainstream discourses around the economic welfare schemes introduced by the TMC government not only dilute the gravity of the increasing crimes against women but also serve to normalise a culture of gendered violence. Second, there seems to be no accountability for the recurrent institutional lapses that render women, especially working women from every socio-economic stratum, more and more vulnerable to the rising degrees of crime and violence in the state. These politico-economic mechanisms—as evident in the cases of Park Street, Kamduni, Sandeshkhali, R G Kar and so many other unreported ones—operate to create an atmosphere of fear and shame, enabled and controlled centrally by the informally organised wings of the TMC.

Madhya Pradesh : While Madhya Pradesh has a better share of women MLAs in their legislature, the state continues to appear in the news for the very reasons it should not. A recent report from The Indian Express notes, “A mob in Tetgama village of Purnia district assaulted and burnt alive five members of a tribal family, including three women, when the 16-year-old boy allegedly named his own mother as the witch. Three months ago, a 60-year-old indigenous woman in Rohtas suffered a similar fate. There are reports of women being strangled, and abandoned in jungles in the Khunti and East Singhbhum regions of Jharkhand because they were made scapegoats, blamed for someone’s sickness. In another recent incident in Umaria, Madhya Pradesh, on July 7, a tribal man was almost killed by physical assault by neighbours who believed he had used demonic powers to call out disease.” Witch-hunting in India, while sounding like it’s rooted in superstition, is far more complicated than that. It is an entirely gendered process of identification. While the male spiritual healers, called ojhas, are held in reverence and allowed the liberty to point out the witch – the “evil” female is blamed for poor harvests, land grabbing, and even ill-health in children. It often so happens that these women are the ones who have objected to sexual advances, hostile land takeovers, or essentially self-asserted. Madhya Pradesh, in the last few years, has emerged as a hotspot for such activity.

The state ministry is not far behind either, with MP Kailash Vijayvargiya announcing in a public meeting that he prefers girls who do not “wear skimpy clothes”. While Shivraj Singh Chouhan has earned the name “mama” for his intensive introduction of welfare schemes for women and for increasing the budget of the Women and Child Development Department from Rs 14,686 crore in the last fiscal to Rs 26,560 for the financial year 2024-2025, him and his government continue to stay silent on the fact that nearly 31,000 girls have gone missing from the state – from 2021 to 2024. Indore, reportedly, had 2384 cases of disappearances, but only 15 were registered by the police.

Delhi emerges as the city with the highest incidences of crime in the country. According to the WHO, data shows that the population of women in New Delhi was 1.5% of that of India as a whole, while crime against women was slightly higher at 5.2% (Table 4). In regard to the pattern of crime against women, it was noticed that the number of cases registered under “outrage and insult to modesty” was much higher in New Delhi (40.4%) in comparison to the country as a whole (27.8%). However, cruelty by husband and in-laws (members of husband’s family) was less common in New Delhi (20.5%) in comparison to the whole country (34.6%) (Table 5). Similarly, kidnapping and abduction cases registered were also higher in New Delhi (25.0%) in comparison to the country (18.1%). The One Stop Centers (OSCs) which were set up in Delhi post the Nirbhaya Rape Case failed completely – with The Reporter’s Collective digging up an undisclosed report from NITI Aayog, which stated that there was only 4% awareness existed among people regarding these centre’s existence. So have the 181 helplines.

This is clearly indicative of a deeper rot, where systematically, information has been hidden and configured in a way to protect the unpalatable ways the government of the city failed its women. Delhi’s status as national capital while being

Violence on LGBTQ+ People in India

The NCRB , as per the data from Trans Murder Monitoring (TMM), does not maintain specific data on crimes against trans people. a global project tracking homicide against transgender and gender-diverse persons, India recorded 102 registered murders of transgender persons between 2008 and 2021.

The NCRB report from 2021 reported that 236 Trans persons are reported victims of all crimes in India. As is apparent, these numbers are extremely low, and they are a reflection of severe underreporting of crimes, a result of inadequate documentation of the lives of trans persons — and genuine lack of initiative and interest in the lives of trans people in this country by the government. Trans, intersex, and hijra people already exist in the frays of society in India — with decisions taken on their life and living without active thought put into them.

As per a 2016 study conducted by National AIDS Control Organization (NACO), 31.5% of transwomen reported having been “forced to have sex in their first sexual encounter with a male partner. However, the legal framework under the old penal regime failed to adequately protect transwomen. In India, the landmark NALSA judgment of 2014 granted a range of rights to transgender persons under the Indian Constitution, with the right to self-identification being a primary focus.

The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act 2019, codified these rights into law.

However, the execution of the right to self-identification remains entangled in procedural difficulties such as issuing trans identity cards is hobbled by bureaucratic delays, gender biases, digital access issues, lack of sensitivity among the administrative staff, and unwarranted verification processes, rendering the lives (and deaths) of transgender individuals largely invisible in the country’s statistics. While Trans women could register their complaints under section 354A of the IPC, which has now been introduced as section 74 in the new BNS Act, without any change, for the offence of sexual harassment, the removal of section 377 leaves Trans persons with limited options for legal recourse for sodomy.

This purposeful reading out of protection for men and Trans persons is not only a failed opportunity to create a more just and equitable legal system but also reeks of misogyny in as much as there is a tacit understanding that it is only the bodies of women that need protection and that such protection need not be given to an anyone who is not a woman or a child. It also reflects a very one-dimensional understanding of the workings of gender justice.

The situation gets worse, as justice falters most profoundly in the cases of sexual assault against transgender individuals, who are mostly caught under the definitional void of men and women — considering any comprehension of non-cis identities are still treated as unnecessary and marginal in India, with the most inclusivity being available in the recognition of a “Third Gender”. Trans people were subject to different forms of sexual assault, like rape, sodomy, bestiality etc., collateralized with extortion, abuse, and violence, and often get unrecognized due to lack of proper protection and specific mentioning under the relevant statutes interwoven with various other socio-economic factors. A sampled survey shows an overwhelming eighty percent of the sample had experienced sexual assault and 37% reported repeat victimization-assault during both childhood and adulthood, a testament to their consistent vulnerability.

Abuse faced by Trans sex workers can also be worse than female sex workers. Compared to Section 376 of the Indian Penal Code, which deals with sexual abuse of a ciswoman and punishes the accused with rigorous imprisonment of at least ten years to life and a fine, the provisions under the Trans Act are starkly discriminatory and violative of the Constitutional right to equality of trans persons, thus reaffirming the near-subhuman legal treatment meted out to them.

According to the Centre for Law and Policy Research,  apart from the Trans Act, there are other laws that are used to harass and arrest trans persons in public spaces. One such example is the Telangana Eunuch Act, 1919 which borrows definitions and provisions from the repealed Criminal Tribes Act, 1871. Both Acts from colonial times, classify ‘eunuchs’ as habitual criminals, who by virtue of their birth, were seen as predisposed to committing petty offences and under Section 4 of the Act, police and state authorities are often found arresting transgender persons in cases where they are found singing or dancing or cross-dressing in public spaces. The said legislation has been stayed by the Telangana High Court in a petition challenging the constitutionality of this legislation. (Singh, 2023)

Institutional Action and Policy Changes

In India, institutional failures in addressing gender based violence is a combination of wilful ignorance, large-scale logistical failures, discriminatory policy making which is a feature of an ethnonationalist state — and large-scale corruption. The problem with the current state apparatus is that in its entire ordeal of promoting India as an “old civilization” rooted in culture, and holding mythology and scripture to apotheosized value — a lot of its machinery has refused to let in progress that is non-technological, in order to hold onto a homogenised idea of “Indian culture”, which is a combination of post capitalism and Brahminical heteropatriarchy.

Some of the Key Areas of Institutional Failure are as follows:

Law Enforcement:

Underreporting: Many GBV cases, particularly domestic violence and sexual assault, go unreported due to fear of stigma, lack of trust in law enforcement, and inadequate support systems. This is further exacerbated by ministers and government mouthpieces who further blame victims, questioning their morality.

Ineffective Investigation and Police Incompetence: Even when reported, police investigations are often delayed and inadequate. Officers often lack empathy or form any sort of respect for the survivor’s needs, leading to a lack of justice — and this failure is systemic because of administrations’ incompetence to train officers in gender sensitivity. A number of times, also, the police refuse to register cases if the perpetrator is influential — or if the victim does not fit the ideal of one.

Bias, Dog-piling, and Victim-Blaming: Law enforcement officers may exhibit biases against survivors, especially in cases of sexual assault, and may even engage in victim-blaming, therefore leading to women making the decision to avoid this added trauma altogether. The judicial process in GBV cases can be entirely too lengthy, which might span years, thus multiple people might not want to go through a process so taxing.

Even when perpetrators are convicted, sentences may be lenient, particularly in cases of domestic violence, sending a message that such violence is not taken seriously. Many judicial officers and lawyers may lack adequate training and awareness regarding GBV, leading to insensitive handling of cases and perpetuating harmful stereotypes. A lot of the time gender sensitisation is so little that judicial officers have no conception of dealing with people with histories of facing abuse.

Lack of Social Support Systems:

There is a severe shortage of safe shelters and accessible counselling services for survivors of GBV, leaving them with limited options for immediate support and long-term recovery. As aforementioned, when the governments are doing the needful, and setting up systems, they are not divesting enough money or energy in promoting these resources, thus fundamentally leaving them defunct.

Reformed Approach to Development

India needs a drastic restructuring of its policymaking practices, and ground the entire process in feminist allyship — and inclusivity, rather than using everyone as pawns to secure vote banks. Empathy should be one of the foremost devices that the state should employ, rather than a later thought.

The approach should also be rooted in the understanding that women are to be assimilated into society, and not segregated into confinements. Nilanjana Bhowmick writes, the institutional response to gender-based violence in India has mostly been to segregate women further. They want women to be confined to “safe” zones – pink carriages in the metro, pink autos, pink bus tickets, pink parks, pink toilets, separate queues. This segregation does not make public spaces any safer or more comfortable for women. This isolation of women, and invisibilization of non-cis, queer bodies enforces the belief that the public space is not a collective one, but only leased out by men out of their withdrawable benevolence.

The current figure on the NCW website for the number of complaints it has received is 13,583. When we started writing this report –a period of a month, approximately– it was in the 12,000s!

(The legal research team of CJP consists of lawyers and interns; this graphic visualisation report has been worked on by Saptaparma Samajdar)

[1] In the second term of the Modi Government, 2019-2024, Irani was appointed given the key portfolio Union Minister for Women and Child Development. Subsequently, in the cabinet re-shuffle of July 2021, Irani was again given the charge of the Ministry of Women and Child Development.

The post Reading Violence: Gender injustice in India and its dimensions appeared first on SabrangIndia.

On July 28, 2025, Kavin Selva Ganesh, a 27-year-old Dalit software engineer from Arumugamangalam near Eral in Thoothukudi district, was hacked to death in broad daylight in KTC Nagar, Tirunelveli. The accused, S. Surjith (21), allegedly attacked Kavin with a sickle over his relationship with Surjith’s sister, Subashini, a Siddha practitioner. Kavin and Subashini had been in a long-term inter-caste relationship, which Surjith and his family, belonging to the dominant Maravar community (MBC), vehemently opposed.

Surjith is not just an ordinary civilian — he is the son of two serving Sub-Inspectors in the Tamil Nadu Armed Police, Saravanan and Krishnakumari, both of whom were also named as co-accused in the FIR. Despite this, the couple was only suspended and has not been arrested, triggering public outrage. The FIR has been filed under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 2015, and relevant sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS).

According to Kavin’s mother, S. Tamizhselvi, who filed the police complaint, her son had received repeated threats from the accused’s family. On the day of the incident, Surjith reportedly lured Kavin under the pretext of their parents wanting to meet him and then brutally attacked him with a sickle, chasing him down and killing him less than 200 metres from the hospital where Subashini worked. Eyewitnesses, CCTV footage, and multiple media reports corroborate these details.

Petition filed with the National Commission for Scheduled Castes (NCSC)

On July 30, 2025, a citizen petition was submitted at the National Commission for Scheduled Castes (NCSC) headquarters in New Delhi by Shailendar Karthikeyan, law student seeking urgent intervention in the caste-based killing of Kavin Selva Ganesh. He met the Personal Secretary to the Chairperson and submitted detailed documentation, including press clippings. During the interaction, the petitioner was informed that the Commission had already taken suo moto cognizance of the case.

While a formal number was not assigned to the newly submitted petition, the representation was accepted and acknowledged by the Commission. The petitioner urged the Commission to treat the matter with utmost urgency and to include the following demands in its proceedings:

1. Immediate arrest of the accused’s parents — Sub-Inspectors Saravanan and Krishnakumari — who are named in the FIR.
2. Constitution of a fact-finding committee to investigate the role of caste bias and police complicity.
3. NCSC’s ongoing monitoring of investigation and prosecution, including regular status reports from the State Government.
4. Provision of witness protection to the victim’s family, who continue to fear retaliation.

The petition can be accessed here 

Arrest, CB-CID transfer, and body acceptance

In a significant turn of events, Saravanan, a serving Sub-Inspector and father of the main accused Surjith, was arrested by Tamil Nadu police in connection with the caste-based killing of Kavin Selva Ganesh. The arrest came soon after a petition was filed with the National Commission for Scheduled Castes (NCSC), though it is unclear if the two are directly connected. The case has since been transferred to the CB-CID, reflecting its seriousness and the growing demand for an impartial investigation. Following Saravanan’s arrest, Kavin’s family ended their five-day protest and accepted his body from the Tirunelveli Government Medical College Hospital, where Minister K.N. Nehru and Collector R. Sukumar paid their respects. Notably, the family had earlier rejected the state’s ₹6 lakh compensation, insisting that they sought justice and not money by demanding the immediate arrest of both police officers named in the FIR.

Deafening Silence from Political Leaders

The response from Tamil Nadu’s mainstream political parties has been largely muted, drawing criticism from activists. Only leaders of VCK (Thol Thirumavalavan), NTK (Seeman), and Puthiya Tamilagam (K. Krishnasamy) have issued strong public statements demanding separate legislation to curb honour killings. The silence of ruling and opposition parties has left Dalit voices further isolated.

A Broader Pattern

This is not an isolated incident. Tamil Nadu has seen a disturbing pattern of caste-based honour killings from the 2016 murder of Sankar in Udumalpet to the more recent cases in Cuddalore and Krishnagiri. In most cases, justice has been delayed, and police bias is often evident.

The murder of Kavin Selva Ganesh is a stark reminder that caste continues to determine who gets to love, who gets to live, and who gets away with murder in this country.

Related

Kausalya’s Courageous Fight for JusticeWoman takes own family to court for Dalit husband’s murder

CJP files complaint with NCSC, 11 anti-Dalit incidents highlighted since July 2023

The post Petition filed with NCSC seeks justice in Tirunelveli honour killing of Dalit techie appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Additional City Civil And Session Judge Santhosh Gajanan Bhat had on April 3, framed charges against Revanna under Sections 376(2)(k) (rape by a person in a position of dominance), 376(2)(n) (repeated rape), 354(A) (sexual harassment), 354(B) (assault or use of force with intent to disrobe), 354(C) (voyeurism), 506 (criminal intimidation), and 201 (causing disappearance of evidence) and Section 66(e) of the Information Technology Act. 

The Supreme Court of India, had, in November 2024 dismissed the bail plea of ex-MP Prajwal Revanna booked for rape, sexual assault. In August, a Special Investigation Team of Karnataka which is probing four cases of sexual assault and harassment against Revanna submitted a 2,144-page charge sheet. A bench of Justices Bela M Trivedi and Satish Chandra Sharma rejected the plea and observed that Revanna is a very influential person. Appearing for Revanna, senior advocate Mukul Rohatgi said that a charge sheet has been filed in the case and section 376 of the IPC was not there in the initial complaint.

The special court had, on April 3 had framed charges against Prajwal Revanna for sexually assaulting the farm labourer who worked for his family. The 1,625-page-long charge sheet, filed on September 14, 2024, said that the woman was sexually assaulted thrice, two times at the family’s farmhouse and once at their residence in Basavanagudi, Bengaluru.

As per prosecution, the victim worked as a maid at a farmhouse owned by the Revanna family. It is claimed that from 2021, during the COVID-19 lockdown, Revanna repeatedly raped her and filmed the assaults in different locations. Further, it is alleged that Revanna used the videos to intimidate and silence her, preventing her from complaining.

The SIT formed in this case is also investigating three cases registered against Prajwal and he is presently in judicial custody. The SIT had arrested Prajwal at the Bengaluru Airport on his arrival from Germany on May 30 last year. He was arrested in Crime No.107/2024, registered with the Holenarasipura Town Police Station.

Senior advocates Ashok Nayak and BN Jagadeesha were special public prosecutors in the case. 

The complainant, the 47-year-old farm labourer, Mridula*, was working at the family farmhouse in Gannikada and also accompanied the family during their trips to Bengaluru. She had accused Prajwal of raping her when he had called her inside the room on the pretext of bringing him water at the farmhouse. He was accused of raping her a second time when she had accompanied the family to their house in Basavangudi, Bengaluru.

According to the chargesheet, the assault took place in 2021 at the Gannikada farmhouse. “Mridula was cleaning a room on the first floor when Prajwal came and asked if the room was cleaned. He then asked her to fetch some water. Mridula came back with a jug (chombu) of water when Prajwal suddenly pulled her inside his room. He then locked the door. Mridula asked him to open the door, “Baagilu tegi anna, bhaya aagutte (Open the door anna, I’m scared),” the chargesheet said. Prajwal responded with “Enu agalla” (Nothing will happen) to her cries and then raped her. The chargesheet said that he recorded the assault on his phone.

A case of kidnapping has also been filed against Prajwal’s parents, HD Revanna and Bhavani, and Prajwal’s relative, Satish Babanna, as Mridula had complained that she was taken to the farm on April 29, 2024, and kept for a few days. This coincided with the time that the videos had started circulating. On May 2, Mridula’s son filed a complaint of kidnapping against Prajwal after he came to know of the videos. At the time, Mridula was forced to record a video saying she was alright and had not been kidnapped. A couple of days later, she managed to escape from the farm where she was being held.

Prajwal has been in jail since June 2024, after complaints of sexual assault and having recorded the encounters on video emerged. 

The complaints started after thousands of video clips of these alleged encounters started circulating during the general elections held last year, when Prajwal, the incumbent MP, was contesting from the Hassan Lok Sabha constituency. A Special Investigation Team was formed to look into all the allegations, and four women came forward with complaints against him. 

Other cases against Revanna

There are three more cases filed against Prajwal Revanna. Of these, the first complaint was filed by Girija* and her daughter, Sunitha*. Prajwal is accused of raping Girija and forcing Sunitha to strip on a video call.  In another case, Prajwal is accused of raping Priya*, a former member of the local body and JD(S) party worker. This assault is said to have taken place at Prajwal’s then official residence in Hassan, says The News Minute. A case of molestation has also been filed against Prajwal by another woman who said that he had molested her when she had approached him to seek help on a personal matter.

* Names of the victims have been changed to protect their identity.

Related:

India’s flawed rape laws: a betrayal of equality

Report card: BJP and crimes against women

The post Prajwal Revanna convicted of rape in first case, sentencing of August 2 appeared first on SabrangIndia.

What triggered the abuse?

The incident occurred on Tuesday, July 8, after school staff allegedly discovered bloodstains in a washroom. Instead of handling the situation with discretion and sensitivity, the school principal decided to launch a public and humiliating investigation. According to the police, the girls were herded into the school’s convention hall, where they were shown images of the bloodstains via a projector and asked to identify whether they were on their periods, as reported in The Indian Express.

“Who Is Menstruating?”- Thumbprints and strip searches

Those who disclosed they were menstruating were asked to submit their thumb impressions. Girls who said they were not were taken, one by one, to the washroom by a female attendant who allegedly forced them to remove their clothes and undergo a physical inspection to confirm if they were telling the truth, according to NDTV. One parent of a Class 7 student spoke to Times of India and said, “My daughter came home trembling. She told me she was forced to undress in the washroom, in front of other students. This isn’t discipline; it’s mental harassment”.

Police action and legal charges

According to Thane (Rural) Additional Superintendent of Police Rahul Zalte, the parents protested outside the school premises on Wednesday, demanding strict action against the school staff involved. The police promptly registered an FIR against eight individuals, including the principal, four teachers, the woman attendant, and two trustees.

The accused have been charged under the BNS Sections 74 (assault or use of criminal force to woman with intent to outrage her modesty) and 76 (assault or use of criminal force to woman with intent to disrobe), in addition to relevant provisions of the POCSO Act, as reported by Free Press Journal.

On Wednesday evening, the principal and attendant were arrested, and the school management dismissed the principal from her post, officials confirmed. A senior police officer said both women would be produced before a court on Thursday, according to the report of Mumbai Mirror.

Students left traumatised

A particularly harrowing detail emerged when one girl, who had denied menstruating, was accused by the principal of lying. She was reportedly asked, “Why are you using a sanitary pad if you’re not menstruating?” and then forced to give her thumbprint under coercion. Many girls reportedly went home crying and mentally disturbed, revealing the trauma to their families. Parents and local child rights groups have labelled the incident mental and physical abuse, demanding further criminal prosecution and inquiry by the Maharashtra State Commission for Protection of Child Rights (MSCPCR).

Thane Rural Police have stated that they are currently recording statements from students and witnesses. “We are taking the testimonies of other children and school staff, and gathering all electronic and forensic evidence,” said an investigating officer, while speaking to India Today.

Related:

A Silent Emergency: Farmer suicides surge in Maharashtra amid apathy, debt, and systemic collapse

Beed to Delhi: Lawyer beaten in Maharashtra, judge threatened in Delhi—what the path for justice means for women practioners in today’s India

When Courts Fail Survivors: How patriarchy shapes justice in sexual offence against women cases

Surviving Communal Wrath: Women who have defied the silence, demanded accountability from the state

The post Thane School Horror: Principal, attendant arrested for forcing girls to strip in menstruation check, case registered under POCSO appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Thevars [caste Hindus] treat Sikkaliars [Dalits] as slaves so they can utilise them as they wish. They exploit them sexually and make them dig graveyards for high-caste people’s burials. They have to take the death message to Thevars. These are all unpaid services.
— Manibharati, social activist, Madurai district, Tamil Nadu

In the past, twenty to thirty years ago, [Dalits] enjoyed the practice of “untouchability.” In the past, women enjoyed being oppressed by men. They weren’t educated. They didn’t know the world… They enjoy Thevar community men having them as concubines… They cannot afford to react; they are dependent on us for jobs and protection… She wants it from him. He permits it. If he has power, then she has more affection for the landlord.
— A prominent Thevar political leader, Tamil Nadu^[1]

“Dalit” is a term first coined by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, one of the architects of the Indian constitution of 1950 and revered leader of the Dalit movement. It was taken up in the 1970s by the Dalit Panther Movement, which organized to claim rights for “untouchables,” and is now commonly used by rights activists.^[2] Violence against this section of the Indian people, Dalits, who constitute (2011 Census figures) 16.6 per cent of the population is both societal, systemic and instructional cutting through all intersectionality’s. This analysis and graphic visualisation looks at this phenomenon, not contain, today normalised, in 2025.

On June 24, 2025 — The Indian Express reported, “Nine people have been detained after a mob forcibly shaved the heads of two Dalit men and forced them to crawl over allegations of cow smuggling in Odisha’s Ganjam district. According to the police, the victims had bought a cow and two calves and were returning home when a mob accosted them in Kharigumma village under Dharakote police limits and demanded Rs 30,000. When the men expressed inability to pay, the mob allegedly beat them up, forcibly shaved their heads, made them crawl and had them drink sewage water. A video purportedly shows the two men crawling with grass clamped between their teeth as some men follow them. The group also took away cash of Rs 700 from them and their mobile phones, police said.” This is not, unsurprisingly, a stray or isolated event – with CJP recording 113 incidents of anti-Dalit atrocities from the month of January to June.

The all-pervasive caste system has long cemented itself as a fortifying structure of Indian society. With a state machinery that openly runs on a proto-fascist, pro-Hindutva model – the continued marginalisation of Indian minorities has become, in dystopian fashion, extremely normalized in the day-to-day news cycle. This report tries to trace this normalisation by forming understandings of the historical, typological and the systemic nature of the violence enacted upon Dalit and Adivasi/tribal individuals in India by considering data consolidated within the months of January-June.

Historical & Structural Context – Everydayness of Caste Atrocities

One must always remember that caste atrocities in India is not a regime-specific conundrum, and that while there is a strong relationship between the (present, ideologically driven) Hindutva state and the exacerbation of such atrocities — India has had a long, shameful history where the caste system has been entrenched into every facet of living. Ania Loomba, in The Everyday Violence of Caste, writes: “Caste violence in India is one of the most long-standing instances of the routinisation of violence, predating European colonialism although not unshaped by it, and now firmly enmeshed within the new global order. Despite untouchability being constitutionally abolished in 1950, caste oppression is pervasive today. Over 160 million Untouchables- or Dalits- are subject to different forms of discrimination: they are denied access to places of worship, clean water, housing, and land; their children are still kept out of, or ill-treated within, schools; they are forced into menial and degrading occupations, notably manual scavenging; and, despite a governmental policy of affirmative action, they remain largely excluded from the country’s businesses, educational establishments, judicial services, and bureaucracy.1 If violence against lower castes and outcastes is rendered banal by being woven into the fabric of everyday life, it is also conducted via spectacular acts. Dalits are raped and murdered for daring to aspire to land, electricity, drinking water, and to non-Dalit partners. Inter-caste marriages, especially those between lower caste men and women of higher castes, result in murders, kidnapping, and the public punishment of such men and (often) the women involved. Dalit women remain subject to constant sexual assault by upper caste men. In general, caste segregation shapes India’s rural landscape, as well as large parts of its urbanity.”

In Indian society, the entrenched hierarchy of caste is all-pervasive, affecting the lives of Dalit, Bahujan, and Adivasi individuals – through popular and institutional violence at different scales. This routinization, that Loomba writes about, is a process that has spanned centuries: almost from the birth of Hinduism, as a religion — and therefore, the committing of atrocities has been naturalized into social order. We could invoke Martin Macwan, who rightly wrote, in 2001, “The systematic elimination of six million Jews by Nazis hit us hard on the face because it took place in such a short span of time. In the case of Dalits, though the “genocide” has been systemic, it has taken place at a slow pace. The current government statistics of murder, rape, and assault that Dalits are subjected to paint a horrible picture if extended to a history of 3000 years. We have reason to believe that approximately 2,190,000 Dalits have been murdered, 3,285,000 raped and over 75,000,000 assaulted.”

Methodology and Data Sources

In this report, we use data from CJP’s own database, and from multiple reliable think-tanks, non-governmental organizations, news outlets, legal filings and academic publications. We also take into account cross-verified posts from social media accounts that specialise in hate-watching, reporting on Dalit and Adivasi issues, etc. The data from the National Crime Records Bureau’s own publications has also been used for contextualization.

We have attempted to classify this data on the basis of geography, types of violence, and looked into institutional response: from law enforcement and respective state governments’ attitudes to caste-based violence. The report endeavours to be grounded in intersectionality, taking into account the changing metrics of class and gender, which quite obviously come into play while discussing caste.

Typology of Violence: Key Patterns from 2025

• Violence Against Adivasis and Tribal Populations

Tribal and Adivasi lives have also been rife with violence within the country – being victimised by large scale unrest, institutional crackdowns, and targeted attacks in different parts of the country. While encounters have intensified in the BJP ruled state of Chhattisgarh, and CRPF camps being set-up in the “most vulnerable Maoist locations”, the CPI (Maoist) party has proposed peace talks with the government. This was followed by 200 civil rights groups and individuals urging for the government to show their intent at reaching a ceasefire and some form of agreement. The statement from the signatories of these organizations is as follows,

“It is now exactly 20 years since the state sponsored and now banned Salwa Judum began in Bastar, causing enormous misery in terms of people killed, villages burnt, rapes, starvation, mass displacement and other forms of violence. Since then, the villagers of Bastar have known little peace. They barely returned to their villages when they were faced with Operation Green Hunt and successive operations. Since 2024, under the name of Operation Kagaar, over 400 people have been killed (287 in 2024, 113 in 2025).i While the exact numbers of civilians killed is unknown, given that several of those claimed as Maoists have been identified by villagers as civilians, it is evident that civilians are being disproportionately affected ii. An Article 14 estimate between 2018 and 2022 counts more civilians (335) killed than security personnel (168) and Maoists (327). iii 2024 saw several incidents of children being killed. SATP gives the breakup for 2025 to 15 civilians, 14 security forces and 150 Maoists. The forces have got Rs. 8.24 crore as rewards for these killings.”

Parallely, the centre’s failure at dealing with ethnic clashes in Manipur has drawn widespread criticism from the states – according to Human Rights Watch – at least five people have died and scores injured, including security force members, in recent clashes, alone. On March 8, a man was killed and several were injured in Kangpokpi district when violence broke out after the authorities attempted to restore transportation connections across the state. On March 19, another man was killed following clashes between two tribal communities in the state’s Churachandpur district. The violence, so far, has killed more than 260 people and displaced over 60,000 since May 2023.

Land conflicts have also followed tribal populaces – according to Land Conflict Watch, there are 962 reported ongoing land conflicts in their Conflicts Database. Out of these 116 conflicts are in the Conservatory and Forestry sector, with 459,735 people currently affected. The following charts shows the shares of the kind and numbers of conflict going on in the country, in context of land area and people affected — based on data available from the Conflicts Database of the Land Conflict Watch website.

As mentioned before, while state actors do perpetrate a huge share of the violence borne by the tribal populations in India – this does not mean that they are spared from acts of targeted violence by upper-caste perpetrators.

CJP recorded 74 incidents of anti-Christian violence in India in 2025— out of which, 48 were cases of harassment, assault and violence under the pretext of allegations of conversion. While not all of these were mandated on Adivasi individuals, a bone of contention that the propagators of the formulation of the Hindutva state has with the so called “Christianisation of tribals/Adivasis” has been rooted in ideas of “foreignness”. It is also manifest in the Adivasi v/s Vanvasi formulation, with the RSS and it’s multiple outfits like the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram committed to an alteration/manipulation of the pre-Hindu, Adivasi identity, threatened as they are by the ‘original inhabitant’ argument, before the onset and domination of the “Vedic period” in early Indian history.

A recent book, among several earlier studies on the subject, Kamal Nayan Choubey’s Adivasi or Vanvasi-the politics of Hindutva, observes, “Akhil Bhartiya Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, popularly known as Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram or VKA is the tribal wing of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). As the largest tribal organization in the country, it works in many areas of Kerala, Jharkhand and the North-east of India. Till the late 1970s, VKA’s work was limited to a few districts of Chhattisgarh (then Madhya Pradesh), Jharkhand (then Bihar), and Odisha but it has gradually and continuously expanded its footprint in different parts of the country…. It is noteworthy that from its inception VKA focused on spreading Hindu values by organizing religious rituals in tribal areas and working in the area of education and hostels.” Academic works and publications on the methods of RSS’ penetration among tribals stress on the Ekal School, an education model that not just imposes “caste Hindu practices” among Adivasis who’s traditional belief systems are animistic, but also instils an element of the “outsider other” when it comes to the Indian religious minority, the Christian or the Muslim.[3] Studies of the syllabus taught in these schools also reveals how the “project was intended to spread disharmony”. Subsequent incidents of targeted violence in several Adivasi-dominated areas of Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh has empirically shown Adivasis adopting an assumed adversarial role against India’s religious minorities.[4][5]

The Washington Post reported in February 2025 about multiple grassroots evangelical pursuits of the grassroots organizations of the far Hindu right, under the pretext of developmental work – has been trying to induct millions of tribal people who have been outside mainstream religion, or are Christians. All of this is conducive to the central ahistorical one-dimensional belief that the converted Adivasi has been stolen away from the “homogenised Hindu original-state” — ignoring all dimensions of oppression, dynamics of caste and struggle, and presenting a dichotomy of the “homegrown” Hinduism and the “foreign” Christianity – ignoring the neo-colonial model that has been replicated by Hindutva outfits. Satianathan Clarke writes for the Harvard Theological Review, “First, Christians, through their sustained service among the Adivasis, “enjoy considerable appreciation of and support for their work from the local population.”37 This presents an obstacle for the Hindutva organizations to infiltrate the Adivasi areas. “The advance of the Parivar [Network of Hindutva organizations] in the tribal area is, therefore, possible only if the Christians are discredited and displaced.” Second, Christians are targeted because of the secular position they have increasingly taken over the last decade. In the context of Hindu communalism’s fascist potential, Christians present a counter model in their “reaching out to secular, liberal and Left formations for joint initiative.” Christianity, especially among Dalits and Adivasis, must be stopped at any cost from being presented as an alternative option to Hindutva. Panikkar’s discussion, I believe, is in line with my claim that Christians are being persecuted because their work among the Dalits and Adivasis is perceived as an effort to thwart the homogenizing aim of Hindutva.”

Besides these, there have been incidents of harassment, and torture, where tribal women have been gang raped, Adivasi people repeatedly subjected to humiliation and assault at the hands of upper caste individuals and community members.

Anti-Dalit Violence

Between the months of January and June, CJP recorded 113 incidents of caste atrocities on Dalit individuals across different states in India. A general categorisation of this violence can be seen as follows.

This chart tells us that out of the 113 cases, assaults had the highest rate of incidence – with a combined percentage of 25.9% [Assault and Assault with the intent of humiliation, combined], followed by high rates of harassment in the form of discrimination – and finally, more grievously, murder and sexual violence – at 20.5% and 18.8% respectively. What is essential for us to remember, is the fact that caste atrocities cannot be neatly separated in clinically placed boxes of violence. Each category is deeply inter-related with the others, and Dalit people, as individuals and as collectives, go through multiple enactments of violence.

Snigdha Adil writes, “The confluence of the material (the body) and the symbolic (language) suggests that the recurrent embodied experiences of exclusions manifest on the caste body and are consequently, articulated; these orations, then, reproduce marginalisation in the lived reality. Such rhetoric is internalised by the Dalit individual, and imposes a state of humiliation and self-loathing upon them. Chakrabarty asserts that the Dalit person’s sense of their body is refracted through a third-person consciousness; it is impossible for the Dalit individual to imagine a reprieve from the corporal schema of degradation that is imposed upon it by the ‘upper’-castes. The process of discrimination as it is enacted against the body and, thereby, shapes (or contorts) it entails the construction of the Dalit (non-)self. To comprehensively understand the agents and methodologies of discrimination within the context of modernity – which is characterised by social mobility through urbanisation, education, and employment opportunities beyond the caste-specific occupational fields – as opposed to the feudal past, one must adopt an archaeological approach towards an understanding of the practice of Untouchability. The camouflage of caste discrimination into innocuous practices to detect and distance the ‘lower’-caste individual despite the external performance of progressive beliefs unveils the “inalterability of the ‘Indian mind’” (Archaeology of Untouchability 219). As one is compelled to operate in ambiguous spaces of social exchange wherein the identity of those one engages with is unknown, exacerbated by the need to concomitantly maintain a façade of transcendence from outdated religious codes as well as the superiority of the self; one must evolve new codes and signifiers that accommodate plausible deniability. … In the same vein, it may be argued that the social, material, and personal deprivation of Dalits is not inherent but maintained through the performance of caste practices and symbols.”

Therefore, we can also make two conclusions from what Adil writes, and a historical study of Brahminical violence on Dalit communities: one, that the nature of attacks is aimed to be a debilitating force on the dignities and the abilities— because the intent behind these attacks is to impinge upon the Dalit sense of self and identity – both individual and communal. Two, the style and the formations of attacks have modified themselves over time while maintaining the same antediluvian spirit of oppression – manifesting through different forms of ostracisation, causation of humiliation, and outright physical and psychological violence.

Structural and systemic violence, cultural and symbolic assertion, physical and sexual violence, caste slurs and verbal abuse, exclusion and boycott are all different forms of atrocities affecting Dalit individuals in India. If we were to look at the data for just the month of June, we would see that all of them can be put into the aforementioned “categories”, or exist at the intersections between two or many of them.

1st June, 2025: A Dalit family was attacked by a group of men with sticks and rods during a wedding ceremony on Friday night, police said. The attackers reportedly shouted caste-based insults, angry that a Dalit family was using a marriage hall in Rasra, Uttar Pradesh. Raghvendra Gautam, the brother of one of the injured men, filed the police complaint. He said, “We were celebrating happily when suddenly a group of men stormed in and shouted, ‘How can Dalits hold a wedding in a hall?’ Then they started beating everyone.” The attack happened at the Swayamvar Marriage Hall around 10:30 p.m. Two people, Ajay Kumar and Manan Kant, were badly hurt and are now in the hospital.

June 1, 2025: A minor Dalit girl who was raped and found with nearly 20 knife wounds in Muzaffarpur died at the Patna Medical College and Hospital on Sunday, June 1, 2025. The 11-year-old was transferred to Patna on Saturday for better medical treatment, but was allegedly left in pain inside the ambulance outside the Patna hospital for about five hours, and was admitted after intervention by Bihar Congress president.

 June 4, 2025: A Tribal woman was gang-raped and then her intestines were pulled out by inserting hands in her rectum, incident happened in Khandwa city of Madhya Pradesh.

June 10, 2025: Dhanush, a Dalit youth employed in an IT firm in Coimbatore, was reportedly in a relationship with a woman from a different religion. He was found hanging at his lover’s residence.

June 18, 2025: Due to not being able to repay a loan of 80 thousand, a Dalit woman was tied to a tree, humiliated and beaten in front of her own child, the child will not be able to forget this shock for the rest of his life, the incident is from Kuppam in Andhra Pradesh. The woman’s husband has left her, she has the responsibility of two children, she earns her living by working as a daily wage labourer.

June 20, 2025: On Sunday, A Dalit teenager who dared to ask for ration was shot dead in broad daylight in Bilhari village in Chhatarpur district of Madhya Pradesh. His brother, Ashish, who had accompanied him, was also injured. 

June 22, 2025: The incident occurred in Dadrapur village, within the limits of Bakewar Police Station, where a group of Brahmin men attacked a Katha Vachak (religious preacher) and his aides for organising Baagavat Katha in the village after discovering that he belongs to a lower caste.”

June 22, 2025: A 13-year-old patient from Meerut admitted to the orthopaedics ward at a top hospital in the city, was allegedly sexually assaulted by a 20-year-old man inside the women’s washroom around 1 am on Sunday. The girl, a Dalit, was being treated for knock knees, and was accompanied by her mother at the facility’s general ward.

June 22, 2025: At a hospital in an Andhra Pradesh district, a 15-year-old girl, almost eight months pregnant, spends her days in a 150-bed ward, surrounded by expectant mothers and wailing infants. Authorities have deemed it dangerous to terminate her pregnancy at this stage, and say sending her home is not an option either – the teenager is the victim of sexual abuse over two years by 14 men, who are from an influential community in the village where the crimes took place.

June 22, 2025: “A shocking incident of caste-based violence has emerged from Etawah district in Uttar Pradesh on Sunday, where members belonging to the Bahujan community were severely assaulted by upper caste men, who brutalised them and forcefully tonsured their hair, urinated on them, for taking part in a religious event.

June 23, 2025: Two Dalit men were allegedly subjected to brutal physical and psychological abuse in Kharigumma village under Dharakote block in Ganjam district.

June 24, 2025: “Dalit assistant professor Dr Ravi has allegedly faced caste discrimination after the principal at SV Veterinary University’s Dairy Technology College in Andhra Pradesh removed the chair from his office, forcing him to work while sitting on the floor. He alleged that he was on leave on Thursday, and when he returned to the college on Friday and went to his room, he found that there was no chair. Associate Dean Ravindra Reddy, who had come to test the milk in the existing device, had removed the chair from his room.”

June 26, 2025: Nearly All Students Withdrawn from Karnataka School After Dalit Woman Appointed Head Cook. “In a shocking incident from Karnataka’s Uttara Kannada district, a 60-year-old differently abled Dalit woman was allegedly raped and robbed by a known history sheeter. The accused, identified as 23-year-old Fairoz Yasin Yaragatti, was later shot in the leg by police during an encounter”

June 27, 2025: On Friday, members of the family were sowing seeds in their land in Narayanapura village of Madhya Pradesh’s Lateri tehsil when some people, allegedly from the Gurjar community, attacked them. The men not only beat up members of the family, including two women, but also snatched their soybean seeds and sowed them in their own field.

Jyoti D. Bhosale, in The Intensification of the Caste Divide: Increasing Violence on the Dalits in Neoliberal India, [emphasis ours] writes, “The increased physical infliction of violence on the Dalits, apart from simply being the perception of threat, is a reactionary response to prevailing psyche steeped in prejudice and caste arrogance and are expressions of retention of privileged positions within the caste order, in spite of long drawn resistance and constitutional efforts against the same. In their study of Bhumihars (landowning caste) and caste violence in Bihar, Nandan and Santosh (2019) argue that in the context of the crumbling down of traditional mode of dominance through upper-caste identity and feudal agrarian structure, and also with the increased representation of OBCs and other lower castes, the goalpost of the Bhumihars has shifted. It has now become that of establishing themselves not as perpetrators of violence but as guardians of Hindutva which also protects their caste identity. They thus resort to ‘symbolic’ violence towards the lower castes, while on the ‘enemies’ of Hindu right-wing ideology, overt violence is inflicted. Can the quantitative reduction of incidents of bodily violence itself account for decreased brutality against the Dalits? Numerous incidents of violence such as Tsundur massacre (1991); Bara massacre (1992); Bathani Tola massacre (1996); Melavalavu violence (1997); Laxmanpur Bathe massacre (1997); Ramabai Killings(1997); Bhungar Khera incident (1999); Kambalapalli violence (2000); Khairlanji massacre (2006); gangrape of Sumanbalai (2009); Mirchpur killings (2010); Dharmapuri violence (2012); Marakkanam violence (2013); Dangawas violence (2015); Ariyalur gangrape (2016); Kanchanatham temple violence (2018); Hathras gangrape and murder (2020) are amongst the very many clear cases of explicit brutality. These challenge the underlying liberal presumption prevalent across social sciences that with progression in time, democratization etc, societies become more civil. There is evidence to say that with such progression, cruelty may not just continue but also sharpen (Rushe and Kirchheimer 2003).

Thus, it will not be erroneous to state that these enactments of violence are located at the juncture of asserting caste-pride, and the violent need to humiliate and assert dominance through forms that adapt and reinvent themselves with the passage of time.

Sexual Violence

Amidst the different forms of violence enacted upon Dalit and Adivasi people, sexual violence happens to be one of the foremost ones.

Sourik Biswas writes for the BBC, “These [Dalit] women, who comprise about 16% of India’s female population, face a “triple burden” of gender bias, caste discrimination and economic deprivation. “The Dalit female belongs to the most oppressed group in the world,” says Dr Suraj Yengde, author of Caste Matters. “She is a victim of the cultures, structures and institutions of oppression, both externally and internally. This manifests in perpetual violence against Dalit women.” Out of the 113 incidents recorded by CJP, 29 were acts of sexual violence. Approximately 10 rape cases are reported every day when it comes to Dalit women.

Manisha Mashaal, the founder of Swabhiman Society, told Equality Now that one of the biggest challenges in cases of sexual violence is that survivors or the families are pressured into compromises with the accused. Community and social pressure plays a major role in impeding access to justice in such cases. Another issue is the lack of quality and effective systems in place to provide the survivors of violence and their families with immediate social, legal, and mental health support along with proper and timely rehabilitation. This pattern of violence also translates to Adivasi women – even intensifying, with the stereotyping of these women as “promiscuous” and an allotted sexual availability – which ultimately reduces them to fetishized commodities. While Behanbox, upon perusal of a report ‘Beyond Rape: Examining The Systemic Oppression Leading To Sexual Violence Against Adivasi Women’ – found that while the two-finger test that checks the hymen and its rupturing has been outlawed by the Supreme Court, in almost 15 of the 32 cases studied had the victims go through them.

It found that according to the National Crime Bureau Report (2022), a total of 10,064 cases were registered for crimes against Scheduled Tribes (STs), an increase of 14.3 per cent over 2021 (8,802 cases). The crime rate increased from 8.4 per cent in 2021 to 9.6 per cent in 2022. The report reveals that 1,347 cases of rape and 1022 cases of assault on Adivasi/Tribal women were reported in 2022.

Mapping Caste Atrocities and Socio-Political Dynamics

The 113 cases that CJP documented were spread out all over the country– which you can see in this map– although some states emerged as hotspots.

As displayed above, the worst offending states were Uttar Pradesh (34 cases), Madhya Pradesh (15), and Tamil Nadu (8). This calculation tracks with NCRB data that the Deccan Herald reported, “About 97.7 per cent of all cases of atrocities against SCs in 2022 were reported from 13 states, with Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh recording the highest number of such crimes, according to a new government report … Of 51,656 cases registered under the law for Scheduled Castes (SCs) in 2022, Uttar Pradesh accounted for 23.78 per cent of the total cases with 12,287, followed by Rajasthan at 8,651 (16.75 per cent) and Madhya Pradesh at 7,732 (14.97 per cent).”

This intensity of caste-based violence in states is deeply reflective of the social structures present within these states and their respective hierarchies.

In Uttar Pradesh, the last caste census was conducted in 1931. According to the data from this census, it was found that only 9.2% of the population was composed of Brahmins, while 7.2% was made up of Rajputs (Thakurs). Sudhir Hindwan’s CASTE AND CLASS VIOLENCE IN THE INDIAN STATE OF UTTAR PRADESH – the intermediary (backward) castes made up about 42 per cent of the population, the scheduled castes 21 per cent and Muslims 15 per cent. While no caste census details are available after that, estimations based on the data from the 2011 census leads us to believe that the 20% of the “forward caste” demographic are composed by the 12% of the populace who are Brahmins, and the remaining 8 the Rajputs.

A report from the policy research lab of Jindal Global University found that out of the 80 constituencies in the state, 23 of the dominant general caste constituencies have representatives from the respective castes, thus indicating a 100% rate of correlation when it comes to caste identity and election of representation. The report states, “Whereas there were 15 constituencies who have OBC as their dominant caste and their MP too comes from the OBC. On the other hand, there are 3 constituencies where Muslims are dominant, and the winning candidate too comes from the same … Out of the 19 winning candidates who won the 2024 parliamentary elections and come from the scheduled caste background, 17 came from those seats which were reserved for the scheduled caste in the elections, thus out of 80 there were only 2 seats where the winning candidate was from the scheduled caste and the seat was not reserved. This highlights the social disparity that persists within the political and social realm of UP.” The maps pictured here represent this disparity when it comes to the distribution of political power among different caste compositions in Uttar Pradesh.

Madhya Pradesh reflects a similar vein of absences. For the 2023 state legislative elections, The Print found on a fieldwork based investigation that the now-ruling party of the state, BJP, had given 34% (79) of its tickets to upper caste candidates, followed by 30% to Backward Classes (69) — while only providing the Scheduled Tribe and the Scheduled Caste candidates 21% (47) and 15% (35) of its tickets — despite being the state with the largest number of tribes. It is also to be remembered that none of these tickets were given to candidates in unreserved constituencies.

This preference given to the provision of tickets to non-Dalit candidates translated in the poll results. The Hindu reported, “Despite its rhetoric over the question of caste census, Congress failed to make a dent in the OBC vote. Thus, BJP’s landslide victory was shaped by an accretion from most social sections, including the OBCs of Madhya Pradesh. Besides consolidating among its upper caste voter base, the BJP this time managed to attract more OBCs and Adivasis compared to 2018.

The Congress stayed significantly ahead of the BJP among SC communities, while other parties bagged 16%. The BSP polled 19% of the Jatav votes; with the Congress securing almost half the Jatav votes. Among the tribal voters, the Congress maintained an advantage over the BJP. The vote share was the closest among the Bhil community with a difference of only 4% between the Congress and BJP. The Congress secured half or more of the votes of other tribal communities; while the BJP managed more than a third of the votes. Congress did get overwhelming support among Muslims, though their population in the State is barely 7%—hardly enough to help the Congress make an impact. As mentioned above, with BJP gaining among Upper Castes, the Congress found very thin support among these sections, including the Rajputs, compared to 2018. In conclusion, it is clear that the BJP has consolidated its traditional upper caste vote bank, along with making significant inroads into the OBC communities in Madhya Pradesh. The Congress’s vote among the SC, ST and minority communities is not large enough to match the BJP’s social bloc.”

Tamil Nadu: Exceptional Violence

Tamil Nadu, on the other hand, has been known for fostering caste-consciousness from time immemorial. The private sphere is an example – where the National Family Health Survey data suggested that the state had one of the lowest rates of inter-caste marriages, only reaching a meagre 2.59%. The state also has the highest number of consanguineous marriages, with a whopping 28% share, as opposed to the national average of 11%. In a report on caste-based tensions in two villages in Tirunelveli, ThePrint reported, “Students wear coloured T-shirts inside their school uniform, which also refer to their caste identity. Sometimes, those T-shirts will also have the image of leaders of their communities,” said the headmaster of a government school in Madurai, who did not wish to be named … “In the village, we reside in Dalit colonies and they reside in the Upper Caste streets. So, once we get into the school, this segregation remains the same; they don’t sit next to us or mingle with us,” said a Class 10 student of a state-run school in Tirunelveli district.”

As the state gears up for the 2026 elections, one sees the carrying over of trends from 2024 Lok Sabha elections, as the BJP tries to shed its image as a Brahminical party in the state, and makes alliances and coalitions with smaller caste-based parties for greater parties. South First reports, “Tamil Nadu’s ruling DMK, despite its anti-caste image, continues to partner with the KMDK, a regional ally whose leaders have made inflammatory caste-based remarks. The DMK’s support for KMDK-led cultural events, such as Valli Kummi performances, is seen as a move to win over the influential Kongu Vellalar Gounder community. Critics say the alliance highlights a growing ideological dissonance, where electoral calculus increasingly trumps the party’s professed commitment to social justice.” Many political theorists, like TN Raghu, have pointed out that the DMK and the AIADMK are two sides of the same coin – where they have alienated their rooting in Periyar’s anti-caste politics for vote banking strategies. Raghu told SF, “Whether in power or not, DMK has never really raised its voice against the dominant castes. Take for instance the honour killing of Sankar and the struggles of Kausalya – DMK never staged major protests or spearheaded movements around such incidents. They fear that aggressively opposing caste oppression will alienate majority caste voters. Often this silence is justified as political strategy … In elections, it is almost like a competition between DMK and AIADMK – who can stay more silent about caste issues and thereby win more votes from caste-dominant Hindu communities.”

Law Enforcement Failures

While most of these cases have never had any political leadership comment anything reformist, or acknowledge the depth of the rot in each state – the police have been equally responsible in lackadaisical delivery of judgement, if not perpetrating the very same violence in themselves. Out of the 113 cases calibrated by CJP when it comes to anti-Dalit atrocities, 9 were cases where the police directly were violent towards the victims, 6 were cases where no action was undertaken, and 5 were cases where it was unclear if a report was filed. Out of the remaining 92 cases where action was undertaken – there were 4 cases where the action undertaken was merely conducive to procedure and not actual ensuring of justice.

This tracks with NCRB data, which states that 12,159 cases of atrocities against STs were pending investigation, and a total of 2,63,512 cases of atrocities against Scheduled Castes (SCs) while 42,512 cases of atrocities against STs went for trial. Conviction percentage under the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 in conjunction with the Indian Penal Code (IPC) remained at 36 per cent for SCs and 28.1 per cent for STs. At the end of the year, 96 per cent of cases of atrocities against SCs were pending trial whereas, for STs, the percentage stood at 95.49.

GC Pal, in Caste and Consequences: Looking through the Lens of Violence, writes, “As caste relations are rooted in the social structure, caste traditions and the advent of modernity together produce a new ‘coalition’ between dominant caste perpetrators and the classes (powerful members from their caste groups in community and also from administration). The social status of the accused and its association with larger ‘social class’ plays a significant role in course of access to justice. Overwhelming caste loyalties and sentiments influence the decisions of the personnel in administration and judiciary. Moreover, the administration being represented majorly by the dominant caste members very often show apathy towards the complaints. In this regard, Ambedkar (1989) is of the view that: ‘When law enforcement agency- the police and the judiciary, does not seem to be free from caste prejudice- since they are very much part of the same caste ridden society- expecting law to ensure justice to victims of caste crimes is rather an impractical solution to this perennial social problem.’ That is why, he emphasises that the presence of elaborate legal provisions may not always guarantee rights to social justice, it necessarily depends upon the nature and character of the civil services who administer the principle…‘If the civil services, by reason of its class bias, is in favour of the established social order in which the principle of equality had no place, the new order in the form of equal justice can never come into being’ (ibid)”

Conclusion

This report details the deep rot within the Indian socio-polity, and its exacerbation by the current Hindutva machinery, ideologically driven with accompanying violence against targeted sections as a key tool for penetration. Dalits are one such target.

The way forward, would perhaps be rooting policy action in accountability and welfare, then just vote bank strategy. Over the years, multiple judicial decisions have weakened the PoA, with judgements refusing to grant caste slurs “prima facie value” – when not made in “public view”.

According to Equality Now, the NCWL’s recommendations to India’s Central Government and State Governments outline steps duty-bearers should take to protect Dalit women and girls from sexual violence, and ensure justice and protection:

• Incorporate and effectively implement the abolition of caste-based discrimination and patriarchy in national-level law and policy;
• Recognise Dalit women as a distinct social group; develop and implement policies specifically focused on advancing their rights, wellbeing, equal standing, and protection within the law;
• Produce and disseminate disaggregated data on the status of Dalit women, particularly in government plans and development programmes; address intersectional forms of discrimination throughout the criminal justice system;
• Ensure full and strict implementation of existing legal protections, particularly the Scheduled Castes & Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, and the timely investigation and disposal of cases of violence against Dalit women and girls;
• Organise, support and fund community-based education, legal literacy and training programmes that improve understanding of intersectional discrimination and violence, including combating casteist and sexist stereotypes amongst criminal justice system officials; empower Dalit communities to better understand their legal and constitutional rights;
• Recognise that economic dependence is a significant reason behind Dalit women not filing police complaints; deliver a national plan with separate funding aimed at accelerating efforts to reduce the poverty gap between Dalit communities and the general population;
• Ensure Dalit survivors who report sexual violence are legally protected by the state from retaliation by the accused; prevent further violence targeting them, such as through social boycotts, and impose restrictions on these;
• Provide Dalit survivors and family members with immediate and longer-term assistance including medical aid, free legal aid, psycho-social support services and counselling, and quality, holistic rehabilitation.

Key to these systemic changes is acknowledgement of the deep-rootedness of the problem. Indian society and politics, resistant and rigid against such self-scrutiny when it comes to caste bias and communalism, has remained obdurate in its inability internalise this malaise. Until that happens, any measures taken to address the issue could remain palliative.

(The legal research team of CJP consists of lawyers and interns; this graphic visualisation report has been worked on by Saptaparma Samajdar)

Sources

1. https://indianexpress.com/article/india/dalit-men-tonsured-forced-crawl-cow-smuggling-allegations-odisha-10083930/
2. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/606848/pdf
3. http://www.india-seminar.c0m/2001/508/508%20martin%20macwan.htm.
4. https://thewire.in/rights/maoists-government-dialogue-plea-salwa-judum-chhattisgarh-adivasi
5. https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/03/27/india-ethnic-clashes-restart-manipur
6. https://www.landconflictwatch.org/all-conflicts
7. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/harvard-theological-review/article/abs/hindutva-religious-and-ethnocultural-minorities-and-indianchristian-theology/E61809FF5F9D5A78D9E9A6E817226B39
8. https://syahissc.wordpress.com/2023/12/10/the-banality-of-caste-recognising-caste-through-concealment-narratives/
9. https://revistascientificas.us.es/index.php/araucaria/article/view/27036/24166
10. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-54418513
11. https://equalitynow.org/press_release/india_caste_system_preventing_justice_nov2020/
12. https://www.ncwl.org.in/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/BEYOND-RAPEv1.0.pdf
13. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48504938
14. https://jgu.edu.in/jsgp/jindal-policy-research-lab/caste-and-victory-uttar-pradesh-analysis/
15. https://theprint.in/opinion/bjps-madhya-pradesh-candidate-list-lacks-obc-representation-congress-can-best-it/1837583/
16. https://www.thehindu.com/elections/madhya-pradesh-assembly/the-role-of-castes-and-communities-in-madhya-pradesh-vote-share/article67611007.ece
17. https://theprint.in/india/not-just-wristbands-life-in-tamil-nadu-schools-is-caste-coded-punishments-to-t-shirts/2160880
18. https://www.ncwl.org.in/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/BEYOND-RAPEv1.0.pdf
19. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48644566?searchText=&searchUri=&ab_segments=&searchKey=&refreqid=fastly-default%3A822b3e6ad5e2a5029ebffd9856f2a875&initiator=recommender&seq=7
20. https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/not-every-insult-against-scst-persons-can-be-considered-as-offence-under-scst-protection-law-says-supreme-court/article68559244.ece
21. https://equalitynow.org/news/press-releases/indias_government_must_do_more_to_end_caste_based_sexual_violence_say_dalit_womens_rights_activists/
22. https://www.9dashline.com/article/narrating-violence-is-hindutva-responsible-for-violence-against-indias-christians
23. https://www.thetablet.co.uk/news/hindutva-groups-increase-attacks-on-india-s-christian-school/
24. https://theprint.in/india/adivasi-identity-st-status-politics-whats-fuelling-anti-christian-attacks-in-chhattisgarh/1305275/

[1] From Human Rights Watch’s pathbreaking 1999 Report, Broken People. These quotations are from: 1 Human Rights Watch interview, Ahmedabad district, Gujarat, July 23, 1998. See explanation of manual scavenging below in the Summary and in Chapter VII. 2 Human Rights Watch interview, Madurai district, Tamil Nadu, February 17, 1998. 3 Human Rights Watch interview, Madurai city, Tamil Nadu, February 18, 1998. https://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/india/India994-02.htm#P350_19723

[2] “Dalit” is a term first coined by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, one of the architects of the Indian constitution of 1950 and revered leader of the Dalit movement. It was taken up in the 1970s by the Dalit Panther Movement, which organized to claim rights for “untouchables,” and is now commonly used by rights activists.

[3] https://www.amazon.in/Adivasi-Vanvasi-Tribal-Politics-Hindutva/dp/0143470485 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09731849241260929;

[4] A Committee set up by the Ministry of Human Resource Development and headed by Avdhash Kaushal reported on Ekal Vidyalaya schools in the Singhbhum district in Jharkhand and in the Tinsukia and Dibrugarh districts in Assam. The Committee’s report, submitted to the MHRD in 2005, brings out the communalisation that is rampant in these schools and in their curriculum and textual materialsThe teacher at the Ekal Vidyalaya in Chirchi in Tantnagar block, Singhbhum district, proudly claimed that rather than imparting alphabetical knowledge, he was more intent on protecting “Hindu culture”. He also boasted of his role along with other colleagues in the illegal destruction of a half-built church in the village in 2002. The report states: “The training to the teachers of Ekal schools was mainly to spread communal disharmony in the communities and also to inculcate a fundamentalist political ideology… creating enmity amongst communities on the basis of religion.” The complete report, ‘Final Report on the field visit and observations of Mr Avdhash Kaushal for Singhbhum district in Jharkhand and Tinsukia and Dibrugarh districts in Assam’, can be accessed at: http://www.sabrang.com/khoj/ekal_report.pdf

[5] MS Golwalkar, the chief ideologue of the RSS had espoused in We or Our Nationhood Defined, “…only those movements are true ‘National’ that aims at re-building, re-vitalising and emancipating from its present stupor, the Hindu Nation. Those only are nationalist patriots, who, with the aspiration to glorify the Hindu race and Nation next to their heart, are prompted into activity and strive to achieve that goal. All others are eithertraitors and enemies to the National cause, or, to take a charitable view, idiots…outsiders, bound by all the codes and conventions of the Nation, at the sufferance of the Nation and deserving of no special protection, far less any privilege or rights. There are only two courses open to the foreign elements (Christians and Muslims), either to merge themselves in the national race and adopt its culture or to live at its mercy so long as the national race may allow them to do so and to quit the country at the sweet will of the national race. That is the only sound view on the minorities’ problem’; https://sabrangindia.in/document/we-or-our-nationhood-defined-1947-edition/

The post Caste Atrocity in 2025: Normalisation, neglect and the crisis of accountability appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The case involved K. Umadevi, an English teacher in a government school in Tamil Nadu, whose personal circumstances brought a crucial service rule under judicial scrutiny. The judgment is a detailed exploration of how personal life changes, such as divorce and remarriage, intersect with employment rights, and how courts must adopt a purposive and humane approach rather than a rigid, technical one.

The facts of the Case

The story of the legal battle began with the petitioner marrying her first husband in 2006 and had two children, born in 2007 and 2011. In December 2012, she joined the Tamil Nadu state government as a teacher. Her first marriage was legally dissolved in 2017, and the custody of her two children remained with her former husband.

A year later, in 2018, Ms. Umadevi remarried. When she conceived a child from this second marriage, she applied for maternity leave for a period of nine months, from August 2021 to May 2022.

Her request was turned down. On August 28, 2021, the Chief Educational Officer of Dharmapuri District rejected her application. The reason cited was Rule 101(a) of the Tamil Nadu Fundamental Rules, which governs the service conditions of state employees. The rule stipulates that maternity leave can only be granted to a woman government servant with “less than two surviving children.” The authorities concluded that since Ms. Umadevi already had two children from her first marriage, she was ineligible for maternity leave for her third child. The rejection order flatly stated that there was “no provision” for granting such leave for a third child born through remarriage.

The Journey through the Courts

Aggrieved by this decision, Ms. Umadevi approached the Madras High Court. A single-judge bench heard her plea and, in a judgment dated March 25, 2022, ruled in her favour. The judge adopted a liberal interpretation, holding that the central Maternity Benefit Act, 1961, should prevail over the state rule. The court reasoned that the phrase “having surviving children” should imply that the children are in the mother’s custody. Since Ms. Umadevi’s children from her first marriage were not living with her, the child from her second marriage was, for all practical purposes, her first child in her new family unit. The single judge set aside the rejection order and directed the state to sanction her leave.

However, the relief was short-lived. The Government of Tamil Nadu filed an appeal before a Division Bench of the same court. On September 14, 2022, the Division Bench overturned the single judge’s order. It took a stricter view, stating that the government’s policy was clear and restricted the benefit to two children. It held that maternity leave was not a fundamental right but a right flowing from service rules. The bench found the single judge’s decision unsustainable and allowed the government’s appeal, leaving Ms. Umadevi without the benefit.

This set the stage for the final appeal before the Supreme Court of India.

The Supreme Court’s analysis

The Supreme Court, in a detailed and empathetic judgment authored by Justice Ujjal Bhuyan, delved deep into the constitutional and international legal frameworks surrounding maternity rights.

The state government argued that its policy was tied to fiscal responsibility and the national objective of population control. Granting leave to Ms. Umadevi, it contended, would set a precedent that could strain the exchequer and undermine the “small family norm.”

The petitioner’s counsel argued that the Division Bench had erred by not following the spirit of a previous Supreme Court decision in Deepika Singh vs. Central Administrative Tribunal, which had dealt with a similar situation. It was also emphasized that the right to maternity leave is a facet of a woman’s reproductive right, which is protected under Article 21 of the Constitution—the right to life and personal liberty.

The Supreme Court’s reasoning was multi-layered:

1. Constitutional Foundation: The Court grounded its decision firmly in the Constitution. It described Article 21 as a “potent provision” that includes the right to live with dignity, the right to health, and the right to make reproductive choices. It also invoked Article 42, a Directive Principle of State Policy, which mandates the state to make provisions for “just and humane conditions of work and for maternity relief.”
2. Harmonising Conflicting Goals: The Court acknowledged the state’s objective of population control as “laudable.” However, it stated that this goal is not “mutually exclusive” with the objective of providing maternity benefits. The two, the Court said, “must be harmonized in a purposive and rationale manner to achieve the social objective.” A rigid rule that forces a woman to choose between her employment and her desire to start a family in a new marriage was seen as counterproductive.
3. Purposive Interpretation: The Court stressed that beneficial legislations like maternity leave rules must be given a “purpose-oriented approach.” The purpose is to protect the dignity of motherhood and enable a woman to care for her child without fear of losing her job. The fact that Ms. Umadevi’s children from her first marriage were not in her custody and that the child in question was the first from her subsisting marriage were crucial factors. The Court implicitly suggested that the term “surviving children” in the rule should not be read in a purely statistical or biological sense, but in the context of the employee’s current family and dependents.
4. International Obligations: The judgment extensively referenced international conventions that India has ratified, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which recognizes that “motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance,” and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which obligates states to provide maternity leave with pay. The Court used these to underscore that maternity benefits are a globally recognized human right.
5. Guidance from the Maternity Benefit Act: The Court drew guidance from the provisions of the Maternity Benefit Act, 1961. It noted that the Act, after the 2017 amendment, does not completely bar maternity leave for a third child; it only reduces the duration of the leave. This, the Court observed, shows a legislative intent to provide support, not to create a hard stop after two children.

The Verdict

The Supreme Court concluded that the view taken by the Madras High Court’s Division Bench was incorrect. It stated, “In the circumstances, we are unable to agree with the view taken by the Division Bench of the High Court.”

The Court declared that Ms. Umadevi was entitled to maternity leave as per the rules. It set aside the Division Bench’s order and directed the Tamil Nadu government to release all admissible maternity benefits to her within two months.

The judgment is a significant step forward in the jurisprudence of service law and human rights. It sends a clear message that administrative rules, especially those concerning fundamental aspects of life like childbirth, reproductive rights cannot be interpreted in a vacuum. They must be viewed through the prism of the Constitution and with a sense of compassion that acknowledges the complex realities of human lives. The Court has affirmed that the state, as a model employer, must not only create policies but also apply them in a manner that is just, humane, and respects the dignity of its employees.

(The author is part of the legal research team of the organisation)

Related:

Maternity leave no ground for dismissal: SC

Woman Employee Entitled To Claim Maternity Leave For Period Of 6 Months: Allahabad HC

Policy on paid menstrual leave not on the horizons of the union government?

The post A Question of Rights: Supreme Court backs teacher in maternity leave dispute appeared first on SabrangIndia.