| Dear Reader, As 2025 draws to an end, an old wound has been reopened by a recent Delhi High Court verdict. It was almost exactly five years ago that former BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar, accused of raping a minor in Uttar Pradesh’s Unnao in 2017, was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison by a trial court in Delhi. This week, on December 23, the Delhi High Court suspended his sentence, noting that Sengar was not a “public servant” as defined by the Indian Penal Code, and therefore the stringent provisions of POCSO under which he was sentenced wouldn’t apply. The High Court’s strict textual reading sits uneasily with the spirit of a law that was designed to protect the most vulnerable. The CBI has moved the Supreme Court to stay the suspension, but optics matter — and here, they resurrect memories of how political power was used, over and over, to subvert the due processes of law. They remind us of how the police refused to name Sengar, a four-time MLA, in the FIR, until the survivor threatened to immolate herself outside the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister’s residence and drew national attention to her plight. They remind us of the assault on her father, the fabrication of a case against him and his death in police custody. Every step forward in the case came at the cost of great personal trauma for the survivor, including a car crash, which left her and her lawyer critically injured and killed her two aunts. It forced the Supreme Court to move the hearings from Allahabad High Court to a trial court in Delhi where finally, in 2019, Sengar was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. It was a hard-won moment of accountability that this week’s High Court ruling now threatens to undo. Looking back at the year, however, this case stops looking like an anomaly; it appears part of a larger, bleak pattern. Earlier this month, in the 2017 abduction and sexual assault of a Malayalam film actor, a Kerala court convicted the main accused and several others, but acquitted actor Dileep, a powerful film industry figure who had been accused of conspiring in the crime. After the verdict, the survivor, whose fight for justice had dragged on for eight years, spoke of her realisation that “not every citizen in this country is treated equally before the law”. Then there was Balasore in Odisha, where a student at the Fakir Mohan Autonomous College died after setting herself on fire when the institution failed to act on her sexual harassment complaints against a professor. She had done everything that women who are harassed are told they should be doing: She spoke up, repeatedly and publicly. She went to her college’s POSH committee. She had even gone to the police. That she took the final desperate step is an indictment of a system where complaints become mere words on paper and the despair of victims becomes an afterthought. The fight for justice in such cases was and remains punishing for women. The courtroom is just one battlefield, with hostile cross-examinations and endless adjournments that stretch trauma over years. But the invisible pressure exerted by money, fame and power is felt long before these cases ever get to the court. In a country of deep inequalities and entrenched hierarchies, accessing justice and seeing the process through demands the kind of resilience that few can sustain. Which is why when verdicts go against survivors, the loss ripples outward, reinforcing the fear that silence may be safer. And yet, look closely and another story emerges. This is a story of stubborn hope. The Unnao survivor has said she will continue to fight. So has the survivor of the 2017 Kerala sexual assault. Their persistence belongs to a longer arc that began in December 2012, after the Delhi gangrape broke a long, suffocating silence around sexual violence. Since then, there has been no return to the old charade of pretending that such crimes are aberrations best whispered about and forgotten. That those who have power will always get away at the cost of those who have none. The MeToo movement of 2018 widened that rupture, giving language to experiences long normalised as the price of being a woman in public life. In Kerala, women in the Malayalam film industry took that spirit further. In the aftermath of the sexual assault of one of their colleagues, convinced that the powerful Association of Malayalam Movie Artists (AMMA) was brushing systemic sexism under the carpet, they walked out and formed the Women in Cinema Collective. Their pressure led to the Kerala government forming the Justice Hema Committee, whose report — a bombshell of testimonies about exploitation and abuse — forced the state to confront what many had known but few had acknowledged. True, action since then has been halting, and accountability remains incomplete. But cracks in the old edifice are visible. For the first time in its history, AMMA is led by women. The Hema Committee’s report too emboldened many women to come forward and speak up about their ordeals, perhaps permanently shattering the omerta on abusive practices within the film industry. In every survivor who refuses to back down and insists on naming the problem, in every young woman who grows up knowing that her anger has a vocabulary and her pain a politics, we see this story of hope. And while the road ahead is long and uneven, those who walk on it carry the promise that justice, however delayed, is still worth demanding. See you in the new year Pooja Pillai Recommended Reading |
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