KHAIRLANJI— a caste atrocity
The rape and murder of two women in Khairlanji drew belated attention from the media. This was a crime against the community as a whole and a crime of identity. A Dalit family living on the edge of a village in apartheid was fighting for a piece of land that had been encroached upon by members of the upper castes in the village.
The fight for their rights led to retaliation from the upper castes. Two women were raped and murdered and this was a case that typically should have been decided under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prohibition of Atrocities) Act, 1989.
Yet, when the case was taken to court, the accused were held guilty of murder but not of rape or committing offences under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prohibition of Atrocities) Act. The dispute was personalised instead of looking at the political and social context in which it occurred.
Anand Teltumbde states that the State controlled the narrative. The legal outcome was: “The shattering atrocities were transformed into a simple crime committed in a fit of rage. The prosecution failed its brief on every front, whether in using the available hard evidence or in establishing an order of events that would have confirmed a history of caste abuse preceding the crime, or unearthing the crime that the revenge executed in a ghastly manner for defying the writ of the powerful had a clear caste context.
“The crime was far from being preceded, it was merely the latest in a series of similar atrocities, and the neglect of this context could only have been deliberate.”
Here again, we see not only the context being erased, but the very law which was intended to meet such a situation of discrimination and atrocity based on caste being erased. The allegations that the women were paraded naked and that the men had their genitals cut off sounded like an exaggeration to the judges, though these very acts find a place in the definition of “atrocity” in the Act. This was unbelievable.
Kathua
The 2018 gang rape and murder of an eight-year-old Muslim tribal girl in Jammu and Kashmir revealed the deep intersection of communal tensions and sexual violence.
The crime was meticulously planned— she was drugged and raped multiple times in a temple, with evidence such as traces of her hair recovered from the site. Delegations of Hindus supporting the accused disrupted proceedings, even blocking the filing of the chargesheet, prompting the Supreme Court to shift the trial to Punjab.
Convictions were ultimately secured, thanks to the vigilance of J&K’s then Chief Minister. Yet, justice remains tainted, with figures such as Lal Singh— who obstructed justice— later rewarded with an election ticket by the Congress party in 2024. He lost the election but why was he given a ticket at all? There was no social disapproval of the gang rape, but rather denialism persisted.
Hathras
A 19-year-old Dalit woman in UP was attacked and gang raped by four upper-caste Thakurs. Her body was found half-naked in the field. The filing of the first information report (FIR) was delayed and the body was cremated in a hurry in the absence of her family.
One person was convicted of culpable homicide not amounting to murder while there was no conviction for rape. Those who visited Hathras to support the victim came back and reported that this was a hapless situation with the accused Thakurs having the full support of the Chief Minister.
Sidheeq Kappan, the reporter who was travelling to Hathras to report on the crime, was arrested and kept in prison for over two years, leading to a sharp decline in his health. It was important to keep the facts away from the public domain and Kappan paid the price for trying to do that.
Manipur
In May 2023, videos of two women from Manipur being harassed and paraded naked went viral. The incident occurred in Thoubal district, where the victims initially sought refuge in a police vehicle. Despite their pleas, the police claimed the vehicle had no key and later abandoned them to the mob. The mob assaulted the male victim accompanying them, leading to his death, and tore off the women’s clothes before assaulting them.
This was one of the recent cases in which the Supreme Court took suo moto notice after the videos of the women went viral. A commission headed by a retired high court judge was set up to deal with relief and rehabilitation for refugees who were internally displaced.
While the relief was seen as a humanitarian exercise necessary for relief, there was no reparation. No attempts were made to seek accountability, legal or political, for the conditions of near civil war in Manipur, which continues till today.
But at least the Supreme Court was honest enough to acknowledge that it was not the competent authority to call out the army to bring the situation under control. The violence continues despite the fact that the ruling party at the Union level and in the state are the same, and the Chief Minister in office is also from the same party. His support for his own community makes any resolution of the conflict impossible.
R.G. Kar
Junior doctors, whom I was also asked to represent, instead of being supported for raising structural issues, were demonised for going on strike and for supposedly neglecting patients, who were allegedly dying for want of medical assistance.
The Supreme Court took suo motu notice of the case, as the “conscience of the nation was outraged”. The spectacle in court had to be seen to be believed. Innumerable lawyers were representing West Bengal, which was in denial, and on the other side, there was a crowd of Bharatiya Janata Party lawyers demanding justice.
In the middle stood the lawyers representing the voice of rationality, of the doctors, who spoke in a unified voice drawing attention not only to the rape and murder but also to the “threat culture”, a term that entered legal discourse for the first time, that is the context in which the rape and murder occurred.
The focus was effectively taken away from the rape and murder and its cover-up to the absence from duty of the doctors. We did to some extent succeed in shifting the conversation in court back to the main issues of rape and death as also the complete absence of safety at the workplace for women.
One of the first things that the Supreme Court did was to set up a National Task Force of Doctors (NTF) from all over the country with a mandate to suggest what changes were necessary to ensure the safety of doctors in the workplace. Its report has been recently submitted, suggesting additions to infrastructure and recommending security measures for hospitals to enable access to the police force.
It is unfortunate that the NTF had no member on it from West Bengal. An opportunity to address the specificity of the situation in West Bengal was lost. The Supreme Court has asked all states to respond to the suggestions. No doubt all states will accept the suggestions but how many of them will implement them is another matter. Independent monitoring and constant engagement with the state will be required by the movement of doctors to achieve the desired outcome.
States cannot be expected to monitor themselves. When statutory bodies give up on their monitoring and standard-setting role, the rule of law has broken down. There are a host of statutes governing the field: The West Bengal Medical Act of 1914 sets up the West Bengal Medical Council. Its duty is to register medical practitioners.
It is at these points that medical professionals experienced threats of non-registration if they raised demands at the student level, jeopardising their careers. They were thus silenced by the fear of not being registered to practise medicine.
Why did the council allow this to happen? The West Bengal Medical Act has been passed to set up the University of Medical Studies and to affiliate medical colleges. Why has this statutory body failed to monitor the functioning of medical institutions?
The anti-ragging regulations were framed under orders of the Supreme Court to prevent students from being threatened and harassed. Why has this body not become functional? Elections to student bodies are meant to be conducted annually, why were no elections held since 2012? The West Bengal health recruitment board was accused of favouritism in recruiting staff, why was this allowed to happen?
At each stage of the journey of doctors as students or as junior residents, they faced the threat of loss of employment or educational benefits. There were no grievance redressal mechanisms in place and no internal complaints committees for sexual harassment.
When nominated doctors and students are put in representative bodies, it is the way to end the democratic functioning of an institution. The administration of individual hospitals is in the hands of the principal. When these bodies fail to monitor or actively take sides, there is bound to be discrimination, victimisation, corruption, rape and murder.
The cover-up
Almost all the cases mentioned above involved an attempt to cover up what happened. The activism of the women’s movement has been to uncover the cover-up and demand systemic change. It is not enough to say that the rape and murder are being investigated by the CBI, what must also be investigated is the cover-up and the systemic causes that lead to the rape and murder.
Impunity
A cover-up can only be made possible when a culture of impunity exists at the centres of power. From the medical university to the medical council, from the examination board to the recruitment board, from the police to the highest administrators in the state, there had been a failure to monitor the health of the health delivery system.
Without the active participation of the elected representatives of the stakeholders, there can be no justice. The setting up of an NTF by the Supreme Court left much to be desired. Besides having no representative from West Bengal, its recommendations are benign and are meant to be implemented countrywide.
No one can disagree with them— more toilets, more restrooms and more CCTV cameras. But the question remains unanswered, who will watch the watchmen? Monitoring the number of toilets in the hospital is not the task of the Supreme Court. It is only stakeholders in decision-making who can do that effectively.
Nominated bodies are no substitute for a functioning democracy, all stakeholder bodies, whether they are grievance committees, redressal systems, or monitoring bodies, must have elected representatives from among the students, interns, doctors, nurses and other health workers. These are simple demands that remain unfulfilled as of now.
The atrocity that is rape
There was a time when we felt outraged by the very mention of the word “rape”. There was a time when we were scandalised that someone we know or read about was raped. Today, rape evokes a response when it becomes an ‘atrocity’.
Many have argued that the public protest and outrage that occurred in all the above cases is due to the fact that the women abused were middle-class women and not Dalit women or women from other marginalised communities. There is an amount of truth in this, but that is not the whole story. It seems to me that the outrage was focused on the brutality of the act which created an ‘atrocity’ for us all to see.
The women's movement has attempted to expose the context in which the rapes occurred and to demand systemic change. All these cases make us question— is rape really just an act of interpersonal violence? I believe no, rape is seldom an isolated act of violence; it is deeply embedded, knit and woven in broader social, political and systemic contexts. These contexts often surface most visibly when rape intersects with ‘atrocity’ or culminates in death, forcing society to confront its collective failures.
Whether it is caste hierarchies in the cases of Bhanwari Devi and Khairlanji, communal violence in Bilkis Bano and Kathua, or systemic collapse as seen in Hathras and Manipur, the context surrounding rape reflects the deeply entrenched power imbalances and structural injustices that very often motivate and facilitate the act.
In most of these situations, rape was a disaster waiting to happen. This trend reveals a harrowing reality: the forces that enable and perpetuate sexual violence are often erased or ignored unless the crime is so egregious that it shatters societal complacency. Rape as an ‘atrocity’ shakes the conscience of society that has perhaps normalised ‘mere’ rape and fallen numb to its existence.
Dead women tell no lies
What is the story that these cases are telling us? Rape must be followed by death to eliminate the sole witness to the crime. The body of the dead woman must be cremated immediately to prevent a proper forensic examination of the case.
One of the best forensic scientists I met in my life, during a coroner's court hearing, once told me: “Dead bodies tell no lies.” He went on to say, “Show me the dead body, and I will tell you how the murder occurred.”
A woman, when alive, is the best evidence of the crime, and a dead body is also the best evidence of the crime. It is necessary to eliminate both to prevent the truth from coming to light.
What triggers the public imagination is not rape. Rape is simply sex, and sex is rape, as we see in the context of marital rape. Such is the normalisation of rape in our society. It is when we see ‘atrocity’ that ‘the conscience of the nation is aroused’. Brutality, blood and murder demand justice. It is not gender justice that is demanded but death to the brute who committed the brutal crime.
Protest
To say that protest leads to law enforcement agencies waking up from their slumber is a truism with which no one will disagree. To say that some of these cases led to important law reforms is also something with which we cannot disagree.
Every change that has occurred in the law in relation to rape has occurred on the backs of working-class women and the shoulders of protest and resistance as we have seen. Beginning with Mathura, moving on to Bhanwari Devi, and then to Nirbhaya and Kathua. Each one of these rapes sparked legal reform, specific to the incident in question. There is a dynamic relationship between movements, the courts and law reform, which has led to some systemic change.
Protest is a birthright in the face of oppression. This country’s founding faith has been non-violent protest as a form of achieving independence from foreign rule. The struggle for independence did not end in 1947 since oppression did not end in 1947.
The protest that we saw in relation to the rape and murder of a junior doctor in R.G. Kar hospital ranks, in my opinion, along with other recent successful protests that we have seen. We saw the protest of the women in Shaheen Bagh against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 (CAA). This, along with the results of the national register of citizens in Assam, led to the delay in implementing CAA.
We also saw protests by farmers against the three farm laws, which the Union government tried to introduce behind their backs. This led to the withdrawal of the three laws. The protest in West Bengal, by the doctors and civil society, led to a partial check on the authoritarian tendencies in West Bengal.
Political parties of the Opposition were not allowed to destabilise the state, while maintaining the sanctity of the right to protest and the non-partisan nature of the movements of civil society and the doctors.
These three protest movements have shown us that we need not feel intimidated by majoritarian governments and that, in the ultimate analysis, protest is the harbinger of change and justice.
What is justice?
However, the bigger question still looms— unanswered and maybe even unaddressed. What is this justice that is so central and the core of all systems? We talk of gender justice with an idea in our head. But we never question what this idea demands, what this idea encapsulates and how it must be embodied.
