The posters, just like the women holding them, were taking no prisoners. “Girls don’t need curfews, rapists need consequences,” read one. “Lock your dicks rather than your women at home,” read another.
As hundreds of women walked from the gates of their university campus into the streets of Delhi – where sexual harassment, assault, catcalling and molestation are a constant, daily threat – they shouted together in a chorus of rage and defiance: “We want justice.”
The fury that has erupted on India’s university campuses over the past week has been double-edged. The trigger was a series of brutal rapes that have taken place in Delhi in recent weeks, including the alleged gang-rape of a 17-year-old in a public park close to Delhi University by three men who posed as police officers.
Just a week earlier, another 17-year-old was gang-raped and murdered in Delhi’s Swaroop Nagar neighbourhood after she went to meet friends. The accused allegedly raped her, stabbed her to death and dumped her body in a field, where it was discovered days later half eaten by dogs.
Rapes of an 11-year-old and a six-year-old were reported in the same month. Last month, a 16-year-old was allegedly raped by a bus driver and conductor after she boarded a sleeper bus in Delhi.
Women who have taken part in protests on Delhi university campuses have condemned these alleged violent rapes on minors as disgusting and unforgivable – but they have also been at pains to emphasise that they are not out of the ordinary.
Fourteen years have passed since Delhi’s infamous Nirbhaya rape case, when a woman was gang-raped on a bus and died from her injuries. But while it provoked international outrage and a slew of legislation and government promises, women say nothing has changed; for them, India’s streets, particularly in Delhi, remain as unsafe as ever. According to statistics, a women is raped in India every 20 minutes – though the real scale is believed to be far worse due to chronic under-reporting.
This week, the supreme court said the five successive rape cases “starkly underlined a systematic failure” and it could not help but “draw painful parallels to the Nirbhaya incident of 2012”.
Vaishnavi Dhruw, 21, a history student at Delhi University, was among the female protesters at the “smash the patriarchy” protest march on Wednesday afternoon. “I don’t know a single woman who lives in this city and feels safe,” she said.
While some of the key demands of the protest have been better lighting and policing, Dhruw emphasised that for anything to change, the country required a deep societal shift where men no longer felt they had ownership over women’s bodies.
“We are not marching for safety, we are here to protest for our freedom, for the most basic right to walk in our own streets,” she said. “Again and again, women are told to stay indoors, to not go out at night, to cover ourselves, to protect ourselves. When will society tell men in our country not to rape?”
Much of the anger driving the protests has also been prompted by the response by the authorities to the rapes, which women say once again has only been to police their freedoms. Women in Delhi were told to stay out of parks at night, and classes were temporarily halted at one of Delhi’s most prestigious female colleges. Many hostels where female students stay impose strict curfews preventing them from going out at night.
“Instead of going after criminals, you’re going to tell women to sit at home,” said Aranya Rathore, 25, a student at Delhi University. “A demand for more surveillance is not a solution. In fact, it’s going to curtail our freedom more.”
Female students say a lot of their time is taken up by safety logistics – from wearing modest clothes to reorganising their days to ensure they do not travel alone or at night and always having a trackable live location on their phones. There is widespread awareness that should anything happen, the onus of blame – both within the family home and more widely in society – tends to fall on women. As one poster at Wednesday’s march pointed out, “no one ever asks what the rapist was wearing”.
Yet despite their best efforts, many women said it was almost impossible to avoid harassment. Ananya Wig, a 26-year-old graduate of Delhi University and the founder of Her Huq, a gender equality initiative, said she had experienced harassment both around university campuses and in public spaces.
She recounted an incident where a driver rolled down his car window and began masturbating as she and female friends got off a rickshaw and walked through the college gates. “This wasn’t at night, it was in the middle of the day,” she said. “I’ve always lived in Delhi and the city has not changed.”
The protests have brought into focus a dilemma faced by many Indian women, who are being educated in greater numbers than any time in the country’s history and have better job opportunities than ever before, but still have to navigate the constant debilitating threats to their safety and the conservative pressures from their families.
“I know so many girls, not just 10 years ago but even today, who end up choosing educational institutions and jobs and other employment opportunities depending on how close they are from their home,” said Wig. “Not on the basis of their marks, not on the basis of their aspirations, but simply, ‘OK, the shorter the distance is, the more likely it is that I will be safe’.”
Many of the Delhi University students who took part in the marches said that sexual harassment had become prevalent on campus, and have demanded better accountability mechanisms for reporting assault. The university has not responded.
Devyani Sarkar, 24, who is studying for a master’s in English, said: “Delhi University is one of the most prestigious universities in India right now but there are various cases of women being assaulted by professors, sometimes unfortunately also for grades. It’s despicable, but it’s also a living truth.”
Many on the marches said it was no coincidence that they were taking place in the aftermath of India’s “cockroach” movement, in which hundreds of thousands of young Gen Z Indians took to the streets over education reform.
“My generation is not afraid to stand up and protest. We know that society has to change,” said 17-year-old Subhani. “The days of women being silent is over.”
