As India’s independence month ends, the struggle for true freedom remains a distant dream for many women. Ongoing collective outrage grips the nation across Kolkata, New Delhi, Chandigarh, Lucknow, Prayagraj, Patna, and Goa. This outrage follows the violent and brutal rape and murder of a 31-year-old trainee doctor while she rested after a 36-hour shift. A familiar pattern repeats: someone rapes and murders a girl, and people take to the streets in outrage. Authorities then release a statement, law, or criminal amendment. Soon after, someone gang-rapes another woman.
Women in India: The Limitations of the Current Law
This pattern shows that outrage followed by post-mortem legislation is far too little, far too late. India’s amended laws may have contributed to increased reporting of sexual violence, with over 31,000 reported cases in 2022. A new Central Protection Act for Doctors can help standardize protections for healthcare workers. However, without effective and timely implementation from law enforcement to sentencing, these laws remain inadequate. Without a holistic, survivor-centered, and community-led approach to addressing gender-based violence, the problem persists. Additionally, without truly confronting the dehumanization of women, especially marginalized Dalit, Adivasi, and others, the law alone becomes a broken facade.
The Realities of Implementation and Enforcement
In fact, while India’s laws have been submitted to international bodies as evidence of India’s compliance with its international human rights obligations, women have been killed by their assaulters on the way to attend Court hearings for their rape cases.
Law enforcement has destroyed evidence, silenced victims and their families, and pressured victims to drop their cases or change their testimonies. Forensic evidence collection by medical practitioners is nonstandard at best and invasive at worst. Survivors largely do not receive adequate counseling or legal services. “Fast-track” courts are still slow.
When those same international bodies raise concerns about the continued sexual violence against women and girls in India, government leaders immediately admonish them for their “unwarranted” and “unnecessary” comments. They then hold up India’s laws, claiming, “The Constitution guarantees equality to all citizens of India. As a democracy, we have a time-tested record of providing justice to all sections of our society.” However, with 90 reported cases of rape a day, and likely many more unreported, it’s clear that those laws are not enough.
The Unfulfilled Promises
Even when an internal government committee consulted with women’s groups, survivors, civil society, experts, and other stakeholders, it compiled a 644-page report with concrete recommendations. This report, known as the “Verma Committee report,” proposed legal, police, educational, and social reforms to effectively address gender-based violence. However, its recommendations have largely gone unimplemented.
Why? Do India’s leaders simply fail to see the depths to which systems dehumanize and overlook women, or do they find it easier just not to look?
New or amended laws cannot be a substitute for cultural reckoning – they alone do not, as the Verma Committee report writes, “make transformative processes in society which will not only make society more secure, but give equality to women, respect them, give them secure spaces.”
Perhaps this is the problem. Truly transformative processes must confront tradition; they must confront the way things have always been. A transformed society for women requires a hard look at accepted cultural and social contexts, including embedded caste, religious, and gender discrimination. But even where a woman is 17 times more likely to face sexual violence from her husband than others, marital rape is still legal, and the government has argued that criminalizing marital rape would violate the “sanctity of marriage.” In other words, tradition is not for changing. And so the law must be enough.
Women in India: The Path to Freedom
It seems that the path to a true and full freedom first requires an unfiltered and honest look in the mirror from India’s leaders. A willingness to engage with difficult truths.
Truths like: it is not freedom to hold back social transformation by being unquestioningly chained to tradition. It is not freedom to uphold the purported “sanctity of marriage” over the right of a woman to live in her own body without fear of violation. Its not freedom when a woman cannot take a nap in her place of work without fear of sexual violence. It is not freedom when a girl is raped while attempting to report a rape. Its not freedom when rape and murder is covered up and instead called suicide. It is not freedom when a woman’s voice is ignored and her story disbelieved. It is not freedom to be told to drop a case because a woman’s rapist has power.
This is not freedom. And the law is not enough.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own. They do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of the South Asia Times.
