A 31-year-old doctor at Kolkata’s RG Kar Medical College was brutally raped and killed after retiring to a seminar room for rest. Her body, found with multiple injuries, was confirmed to be the victim of sexual assault and homicide.
The case has spotlighted the systemic failures in protecting women in India, even in professional spaces.
This incident is not isolated; it’s part of a disturbing trend. In recent years, reports of rapes have become a daily occurrence, with 2022 seeing an average of 86 reported cases per day. From the gangrape of a Spanish tourist in Jharkhand to the assault of a young girl in Uttar Pradesh, these horrific acts continue to expose the deep-rooted issues of safety and justice for women in the country.
Despite legal reforms following high-profile cases like the 2012 Delhi gangrape, the problem has only grown more pervasive, with sexual violence increasingly characterised by extreme brutality.
In 2020, the country recorded an average of 77 cases per day. This number surged to 87 daily cases in 2021. By 2022, the average slightly decreased to 86 cases per day, but the figures remained significantly higher than those from 2020.
According to data from India’s National Crime Records Bureau, in 2022, there were 31,516 rape cases. Rajasthan led the nation with 5,399 reported rapes, followed by Madhya Pradesh with 3,029 cases,
Maharashtra with 2,904 cases, and Uttar Pradesh
with 3,690 cases. In Delhi, 1,212 rape cases were
recorded in 2022.
The rate of rape (per lakh population) was highest in Uttarakhand at 15, followed by Rajasthan and Chandigarh at 14 each, Haryana at 13, and Delhi and Lakshadweep at 12 each. The national average stood at five.
After the tragic Delhi incident in 2012, erstwhile Finance Minister P Chidambaram in the 2013 Union Budget announced a Nirbhaya Fund to support initiatives protecting dignity and ensuring women’s safety in India. But this remain mostly unused.
Even worse is the extremely slow moving wheel of justice in the country. The conviction rate in crimes against women remained below the average for all criminal cases. Only 23.3 per cent of cases ended in a conviction in 2022 with a pendency of 93 per cent. While the conviction rate for cases of rape/gang rape was 69.4 per cent, it was 17.7 per cent for cases of cruelty by the husband.
Unless, the justice delivery system is effective, no amount of law can help in preventing crime against women. We hardly see aggressive police patrolling, especially in vulnerable areas, police refuses to file FIRs in rape cases, the pace of investigation is agonisingly poor, the preservation of evidence for the forensics analysis is tardy, witnesses turn hostile and at the end, the cases fall off in the courts. These factors embolden the perpetrators further.
More often than not, the main players involved in such crimes are political big wigs, high ranking bureaucrats, police officers and new found socially highly placed and regarded guardians like head of the educational institutions e.g. medical college where basic safety structure of the nation is built.
This rape and murder case is a glaring example of the rot that is setting in in our decaying society.
One thing that one may try to understand that rape is tool used against a woman to silence the voice of dissent.
Surely, she was purview to wrongdoings in the college and could have exposed the perpetrators.
Unfortunately, the icy cold attitude of the most responsible persons of the country – Prime Minister, Home Minister and Health Minister and lastly the President (who’s ironically a woman), is unfortunate, but not surprising.
At the same time, no one from the cabinet or other political leaders of the party running the State administration have shown minimum courage to condemn this ghastly incident, other than some drama being perpetrated by the Chief Minister and her coterie making some sarcastic road show.
This is far worse than social killing, murder or rape as after that no one is there to control.
It is not just about rapes alone. The 2023 National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) annual report has revealed a distressing surge of four per cent in crimes against women in India throughout 2022. This includes cases of cruelty by husbands and relatives, abductions, assaults, and rapes.
While overhauling the police and justice system, our society also needs to change its attitude towards girls and women.
Patriarchy and false sense of machismo are two biggest triggers of violence against women. We need social reforms, which should start from homes and schools.
There is a need for well-designed educational programmes aimed at tackling this patriarchy-driven violence and abuse against women can reduce violent attitudes and even actual rates of crime.
A second strategy involves mobilising men as anti-violence advocates, working in partnership with women and women’s rights groups. We have certainly failed our women. Can we reverse this trend?