Enough with your don’ts. Fix the system instead, say angry Indian women demanding safety

NEW DELHI/BENGALURU – Siri Fort Road is one of Delhi’s most upscale and quiet neighbourhoods, lined by a leafy park, cafes, educational establishments and some of the city’s most expensive homes.

On the afternoon of Sept 25, this posh idyll was shaken by sloganeering from hundreds of college-going women chanting “Tod ke rakh do woh samaaj, naari jisme bandhi hai aaj!” (Smash the society that shackles women today).

Several such protest marches have happened in Delhi, following the rape of a 17-year-old schoolgirl on Sept 21 by three men at a public park near an all-women’s college and the Lotus Temple, one of the city’s best-known tourist landmarks.

All three accused have been arrested, but this has not dulled the harsh spotlight this recent rape case, one of many such recent sexual assaults nationwide, has cast on women’s safety in Delhi and beyond.

Today, angry young Indian women are shouting louder and more creatively to say that not only have the authorities failed to protect them, but society has let them down too.

“We want safety and we want reassurance from the government that these kinds of heinous crimes do not happen again,” said Mitali Pandita, a 20-year-old political science undergraduate at the University of Delhi, as she protested at the rally on Sept 25.

Placards such as “Dear System Do Your ****ing Job” and “Don’t Tell Me How to Dress, Tell Them Not to Rape” signalled the seething anger among protesters over the government’s failure to prevent recurring cases of sexual assault and societal attempts to victim-blame.

“It’s okay, you can’t give us clean air; you can’t give us clean roads and water. Just give us safety; that’s basic, dude,” added Pandita.

Also protesting that day was Ravisha Kushwaha, a 19-year-old undergraduate history student who marched holding a banner that read “History Repeats Itself If You Stay Silent”, a reference to the infamous “Nirbhaya” gang rape that shocked Delhi nearly 14 years ago.

On Dec 16, 2012, a 23-year-old physiotherapy student was beaten, gang-raped and tortured in a moving private bus in the city in which she was travelling with her male friend.

Better known by her pseudonym Nirbhaya, or the “fearless one” because of Indian laws that prohibit naming rape survivors, she died on Dec 29, 2012, in Singapore, where she had been airlifted for treatment.

“It has been 14 years since then, but we are still at square one,” Kushwaha told The Straits Times.

In August 2026, another gang-rape case in the National Capital Region of Delhi revived the ghastly “Nirbhaya” memories when a 16-year-old girl was allegedly gang-raped on a moving bus by its driver and conductor. The accused have been arrested.

The following month, a 17-year-old was also gang-raped and murdered by a group of four teenagers who later dumped her body in a field in North-west Delhi’s Swaroop Nagar. All four alleged perpetrators have been arrested.

These “series of deeply disturbing” crimes prompted the country’s top court on Sept 29 to pull up the Delhi government and its police for the “systemic failure” to guarantee basic safety, while observing that public places such as parks cannot become “zones of high risk” to citizens. The court also ordered an immediate audit of vulnerable public spaces in the city.

Among the protesters’ many demands are better law enforcement and stricter punishment for convicted perpetrators of sexual assault, to serve as a deterrent. They are also demanding enhanced camera surveillance and better street lighting at secluded spots in the city.

Despite stricter anti-rape laws introduced since 2012 and efforts to improve policing, most women do not feel safer, said Saumya Singh, a 19-year-old journalism student. “This (sexual assault) happens every day in every place we can think of. We are not safe in our homes, we are not safe in our colleges, we are not safe on the roads.”

Nationwide, 29,536 cases of rape were reported in 2024, down from nearly 32,000 in 2021 – but this still means an average of 84 cases a day, or three every hour. In addition, the number of rape victims under the age of 18 has risen sharply, from 10,934 in 2015 to 43,675 in 2024.

The country’s conviction rate of less than 30% for rape cases is low, and only 2% of cases sent to trial led to a conviction in the same year, highlighting systemic delays in justice delivery. Pending trial cases have piled up over the years – they stand at more than 185,000.

At times, even resources meant to address concerns around women’s safety have not been put to full use. Not a single rupee has yet been spent on several projects cleared under the Nirbhaya Fund – a dedicated financial corpus set up by the government to enhance women’s security – while about 16% of the 79.9 billion rupees (S$1.06 billion) set aside under this fund since 2013-2014 remains unutilised.

The pressure of feeling unsafe goes beyond physical assault, as women endure street harassment, verbal and online abuse containing sexual innuendoes, and must constantly look over their shoulders when in public, especially after dark.

“We have to always be on a call or just text our parents that we are out, and we have to let them know that, okay, we have reached now,” said Pandita, a student at the Lady Shri Ram (LSR) College who moved to Delhi from the northern Indian city of Jammu to study in 2024. She wore a mask to the protest because she feared someone could identify her and attack her later.

Anger has also mounted among protesting women after LSR College, the institution located near the park where the minor was gang-raped in Delhi, suspended in-person classes temporarily on Sept 22 and 23. Regular classes resumed following protests.

Critics saw the move as an attempt to keep women away from public spaces rather than deal with the problem at hand. “We have come a long way from our hometowns to study here, not to just stay indoors,” said an angry Pandita.

Other than Delhi, protests against sexual assaults also hit Lovely Professional University, a private institution in Punjab, following reports of a woman allegedly raped on campus last week, prompting the authorities to shut down the university for 10 days from Sept 28.

“It is sad that even after all these decades, the system does not work for women without protests,” Uma Chakravarti, a historian and film-maker who has led several women’s movements in India, told ST.

But however large or loud, protests alone will not cut it any more, said Mumbai-based lawyer Naksi Timbadia, 22, who posts on Instagram against “rape culture” and runs a feminist reading circle called Her Autonomy in eight Indian cities.

She said that young women like her must push back harder, while also talking about consent, freedom, feminism and building solidarity online and offline on a daily basis.

“Injustice is systemic, so feminism and resistance have entered our day-to-day life,” she told ST, adding that she “refuses to carry the shame or police myself in order to be safe”.

This means owning bodily autonomy, that is, speaking about consent on dates and wearing what she wants, such as a bikini on an Indian beach despite some men staring at her. It also involves occupying public spaces when and where women are discouraged, including walking with friends in the city at night, reading in the park or being “not too timid” online.

Timbadia filed a police complaint in 2025 against a man who threatened on Instagram to track her down and throw acid on her face – despite the Mumbai police advising her to “let it go”. She also filed four other police complaints against men harassing her and her friends on the street and on the local train.

When she attends her trials, she now posts videos of the crumbling local courts, documenting the hostile judicial infrastructure that exhausts women pursuing sexual assault cases: “Do I go to work or study or spend hours attending hearings that are cancelled last minute, in spit-stained buildings with unusable women’s restrooms, standing just 10 feet away from my perpetrator?”

Chakravarti, the historian, noted that over the decades, women’s resistance in India has evolved from battling sexual violence cases to claiming “the inherent right to say no”. The 85-year-old’s documentary on feminist movements in India, Voh Subah Hami Se Aayegi (That Dawn That We Will Bring), captures this shift.

“With sex culturally seen only as a function of reproduction or marriage, rape and sexual violence were considered wrong only in certain circumstances, coded by marriage, caste, age, social standing and clothes worn. From there, Indian feminists have powerfully managed to conceptualise revolutionary ideas of bodily autonomy and sexual consent, and successfully put them into law,” said Chakravarti.

She admitted that translating these ideas into everyday acceptance was a harder fight, which is why protests for women’s safety continued.

“Sexual mores have liberalised in part of Indian society. But most people, especially men, have not internalised consent or a woman’s agency,” she said.

So, the long struggle continues, albeit in new forms.

While India’s Olympic wrestlers protested in Delhi against a politician for sexually harassing them for years, digital-native college students are regularly calling out misogyny and celebrating their freedom online.

As Timbadia said: “Patriarchy has repackaged itself, so feminism also has to.”