India’s Supreme Court has thankfully halted the Delhi High Court's decision to suspend the life imprisonment of Kuldeep Singh Sengar, a convicted rapist found guilty of sexually assaulting a minor in Uttar Pradesh’s Unnao in 2017 and orchestrating her father's custodial death. However, the hollow promise of justice for survivors of sexual violence in India who dare to unmask those who are politically connected stands exposed.
What is worrying is that we are witnessing an increasing pattern of a combination of power, political protection, and legal maneuvering that is creating an institutional framework where the survivor’s trauma matters little in the face of political influence. Sengar was no ordinary man. He was an elected legislator of the Bhartiya Janta Party, a party in power in both Uttar Pradesh and the country.
The legal loophole under the Prevention of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POCSO) that the high court relied on skirted the circumstances of the case, the heinousness of Sengar’s crimes and the endless trauma of the survivor involving rape, a self-immolation bid, her father’s custodial death, and the death of two aunts in a crash widely believed to be a conspiracy.
Unnao Case and Bilkis Bano
The Unnao case is not an aberration and mirrors the Bilkis Bano case, which exposed the prolonged struggle survivors face seeking justice against politically protected perpetrators. During the 2002 Gujarat violence under Narendra Modi, five-months pregnant Bilkis Bano was gang-raped while 14 family members, including her 3-year-old daughter were killed. Eleven men were convicted in 2008 and sentenced to life imprisonment, upheld in 2017. In August 2022, when Gujarat's government released all 11 convicts under a remission policy, they were garlanded and celebrated by a Hindu right-wing group. The Supreme Court intervened months later, returning them to jail.
The underlying dynamic in both cases remains strikingly and chillingly similar. In both instances, a counter-narrative that reframes the convicts as victims of conspiracy rather than perpetrators of violence has taken root.
The scene in Delhi, after the high court verdict last month, during the Unnao survivor's attempt to protest, is telling. While she and her mother were physically prevented from demonstrating, left standing in Delhi's harsh winter pollution, and manhandled by police, Hindu right-wing women organised counter-protests, not in solidarity with a rape survivor, but in defense of her rapist.
They proclaimed Sengar the ‘real victim’, framing his conviction as persecution rather than justice, which is not very different from the rousing reception accorded to the 11 convicts when they were released briefly.
From Kathua to Asa Ram
The Unnao case emerged into public consciousness alongside another horrifying rape and murder of an eight-year-old Muslim girl in Kathua, Jammu and Kashmir in 2018. That case became a flashpoint when Hindu right-wing groups actively shielded the accused, organizing protest marches in their support, marching beneath the national tricolor as if defending rapists was an act of patriotism.
Before we were compelled to endure this horrifying spectacle, thousands of followers of two self-styled godmen with immense political clout, Ram Rahim Singh, and Asa Ram, who were convicted of rapes in 2017 and 2018, respectively, demonstrated on roads and even went on a rampage, proclaiming the two as ‘innocent’. Since their convictions, the two have been frequently released for prolonged periods on parole.
This pattern of leniency toward powerful culprits extends beyond the Hindu right-wing umbrella. In September 2025, the Supreme Court suspended the life sentence of Father Edwin Pigarez, a Catholic priest convicted of repeatedly raping a minor parishioner between 2014 and 2015, granting him bail after nearly ten years in prison.
Inverting the Perpetrator, Victim Relation
These cases reveal a disturbing pattern that is emerging in India's handling of sexual violence cases. Signaling a fundamental loss of our moral compass as a nation, it insidiously and systematically inverts the relationship between perpetrator and survivor, transforming convicted rapists into martyrs while silencing their victims.
While the state’s institutions go soft on the perpetrators, political activism that positions rape convicts as ‘victims’ of stringent laws gives such leniency a measure of legitimacy. This is a pernicious trend that balances the victims and perpetrators of rapes as two equal opponents on the same scale, even as it is widely acknowledged that sexual violence and predatory habits stem from power dynamics – the power that a perpetrator wields over the prey.
It took decades for gender rights movements and anti-sexual abuse movements in India to bring to the centre stage the crucial argument: rape is not a weapon of sex, but one of exercising power in a deeply patriarchal and misogynist society with complex hierarchies where socio-economic status and religious identities deepen the vulnerabilities of some.
The moment of reckoning for this long and silent struggle came in 2012 after the shocking rape and murder of a young woman in a moving bus in Delhi inspired nationwide outrage, compelling not just a speedy trial of the case but also hastening reforms in the legal justice system. The nationwide anger that the Delhi bus gang rape triggered not only resulted in amendments to sexual violence-related laws in 2013 for sensitizing the investigating agencies and the judiciary but also brought conversations around sexual assault, long considered a taboo in a complex country like India, to the public domain.
Dismantling of Small Gains
Over a decade later, reported rapes continue to increase in India, but convictions remain abysmally low. From a little less than 25,000 reported rape cases in India, 31,500 cases were reported in 2022. The conviction rates remain the same, hovering between 26 to 28 percent. Occasionally, some cases trigger massive public outrage but the outrage remains selective, shaped by the identities of the victims. It rarely erupts, if at all, when the victim is from a socially oppressed class and caste. Yet, the 2012 bus gang rape evoked many complex questions and freed the very conversation around rapes from the shackles of stigma.
When judicial interventions and governments begin to trivialize the heinousness of rapes by reducing sentences or freeing convicts, and a political discourse is thrust that the convict is as much a victim and a sufferer, we are a country being pushed into reverse gear.
Bit by bit, case after case, we are regressing into a stage where instead of deepening those conversations and grappling with the uncomfortable truths of the prevalence of rampant sexual abuse in the country and the strikingly low rate of convictions, the society is expending more energy in protecting those accused or convicted of rapes and murders.
This inversion is alarming. It is not just a question about individual cases of injustice, but about a broader cultural and political project that systematically privileges power over vulnerability, and rewrites the narrative of sexual violence, where the perpetrator and victim are seen as two contesting equal combatants, to serve political ends.
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