Opinion India@75, Looking at 100: From Mathura to Manipur: The journey for gender justice

The catalyst for the campaign was the Supreme Court judgment in the Mathura rape case where a 16-year-old, illiterate, tribal girl was raped by two policemen in the police station (Tukaram v State of Maharashtra, 1979). The young girl who had eloped with her boyfriend was viewed as a woman of loose moral character. Since there were no marks of injury, the presumption was that she had consented. The Bombay High Court (Nagpur Bench) set aside the sessions court, ruling that a quiet acquiescence is not consent. The SC, however, overruled this decision, upheld the ruling of the sessions court, and acquitted the policemen.

The anti-rape campaign received wide media publicity and in 1983, resulted in the first amendment to the rape laws that were unchanged since the IPC was formulated. A minimum mandatory punishment of seven years was stipulated for general rapes and 10 years for aggravated rapes such as gang rapes, custodial rapes, rape of children under 12 years, pregnant women, etc.

In subsequent years, there were several more amendments but the most significant change was the enactment in 2012 of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, which placed sexual violation of all children under 18, male or female, within its scope. It widened the definition, from its restrictive parameters of peno-vaginal penetration, termed it “sexual assault” and categorised it as penetrative, aggravated penetrative, and non-penetrative. It incorporated child-friendly procedures for reporting, investigation, recording of evidence, and trial. Failure to report the crime and even consensual sex with minors became an offence.

After the gruesome Delhi gang rape and murder case in 2012, which resulted in widespread protests, the rape law was further amended and the wider definition of sexual assault under POCSO was incorporated into Section 376 of the IPC. There have been several cases of police rape, rapes of Dalit women, rapes of women from minority communities, rapes during conflict times, etc, that have been highlighted as markers of the campaign. In the cases of Rameeza Bi (Hyderabad) and Maya Tyagi (Uttar Pradesh), the husbands were killed by the police and the women were raped. In 1989, in Suman Rani’s case, the SC reduced the sentence from the mandatory 10-year minimum to five years due to “the character and conduct of the victim” because there was delay in filing the FIR. In the Bhanwari Devi gang rape case of 1992, the trial court acquitted the accused on the grounds that an upper-caste man would not have touched a lower-caste woman. But as a corollary, in 1997 the Vishaka guidelines were formulated and made into the 2013 enactment ‘Sexual Harassment of Women at the Workplace (Prevention, Protection and Redressal) Act’. In the Khairlanji massacre of 2006, four members of a Dalit family were killed and the mother and daughter were brutally gang raped in Bhandara, Maharashtra. This case ended in conviction but the sessions court did not accept the plea that it was an offence under the Atrocities Act and treated it as a routine rape and murder case.

In the 2018 Kathua case, an eight-year-old girl from a nomadic Muslim community was raped and murdered. While eight men were arrested, protests were held in their support sparking widespread outrage. This case led to the 2019 amendment in the POCSO Act prescribing the death penalty for rape of minor girls under 12 years. In 2020, we witnessed the Hathras case wherein the youth belonging to an upper caste community raped and attempted to murder a young Dalit woman. The girl did not receive timely medical care and eventually, when she died, the police attempted to burn her body without letting her family perform the last rites.

Fresh in our minds, is the rape and sexual assault that continues to occur during the ongoing ethnic conflict in Manipur. Women of both ethnic groups have become soft targets for sexual assault. A leaked video clipping causing the entire nation to hang its head in shame has finally compelled the Prime Minister of the country to make a statement after he had kept silent for over 75 days.

It is an irony that this article concludes with this negative image. We have moved far from the context of the retrospectively simple Mathura case and are now tackling far more complex, systemic issues, including caste-based atrocities where raping women becomes a weapon to shame communities during communal and ethnic violence. This begs the question: What is the fate of Indian women as we approach a century of nationhood?

The writer is a women’s rights lawyer and legal academician. This article is part of an ongoing series, which began on August 15, by women who have made a mark across sectors