On June 23rd, 2025, The US State Department issued a level-2 warning to India, urging travellers to enforce an increased degree of caution. The advisory explicitly recommended against women travelling alone in the country, also emphasising that “rape is one of the fastest growing crimes in India”. The US, definitely, is no benchmark for its valuation of women and their safety — and the MEA responded saying that the advisory level has been at 2 for several years. However – the advisory is not unfounded. The following are news headlines from only the last week (second week of July 2025)
- 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.”
- Drugged, filmed, threatened: Lucknow mall supervisor arrested for raping, assaulting 20-year-old
- Days after horrific murder, woman assaulted on suspicion of practising black magic in Bihar’s Purnea
- Harassed over dowry, Kerala woman kills infant daughter, then self
- 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.
- She Set Herself on Fire to Be Heard: Odisha student’s death is a wake-up call
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.
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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:
- Cruelty by Husband or his relatives (Sec. 498 A IPC, section 85 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita): 140019 incidences, 144593 victims
- Kidnapping & Abduction of Women (Total): 85310 incidences, 88273 victims
- Assault on Women with Intent to Outrage her Modesty (Sec. 354 IPC, Section 74 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita): 83344 incidences, 85300 victims
- Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (Girl Child Victims only): 62095 incidences, 63116 victims
- 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.