Delhi is alive with protests again, but something about this one feels very different to me. When students were out on the streets earlier this year protesting the NEET paper leak and the government’s abuse and exploitation of the education system, I actually had some hope and enthusiasm about what a sustained student movement could do; they stayed at Jantar Mantar for weeks, and eventually Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned. It was one of their main demands and it felt like history being made. This time, watching students and women protest has been deeply disheartening.

Not only do I feel a lack of solidarity in the outrage against this violence against women, I am also revolted by the contempt there is for women speaking out, from aunties around the world choking on their own misogyny as they victim-blame, to the bad actors who had infiltrated the protests, to the police officials and even CJP volunteers who were reported to grope and harass female protestors. Online, the meme-fication of it all has really stripped the concern away from women’s safety to the ever-boiling cauldron of gender wars that fuels these digital spheres — none of it screams ‘we care about what happens to you’.

And with the protests around CEC Gyanesh Kumar and the electoral-roll controversy, crucial as it is, taking over Jantar Mantar and much of the political conversation, it is hard not to feel like the problems of gender disparity are being sidelined again, as they often are because this monster is ancient and too big to fight, unlike other tangible ‘real world’ issues. Personally, it has been hard to feel optimistic that somebody is actually going to listen to us and do something about it.

But protests have worked before. There is a long enough history of women taking to the streets over violence and injustice, pushing, organising and refusing to let the government brush the issue aside until something actually changed — laws, legal protections, even the way the state was required to deal with these crimes.

In the late 1970s, a lot of young brides were being burned to death in their marital homes over dowry demands, with their deaths routinely passed off as kitchen accidents. In Delhi alone, police recorded nearly 200 women burned to death in 1978, and the death of 24-year-old Tarvinder Kaur the following year became one of the cases that pushed the issue into public view. Women’s groups like Mahila Dakshata Samiti and Stree Sangharsh started organising marches, street plays and demonstrations outside the homes of women killed over dowry, while groups across the country documented these deaths and demanded that the government stop treating them as “family tragedies”. The protests grew into a wider anti-dowry campaign, with organisations coming together under the Dahej Virodhi Chetna Manch and pushing for changes to the law, and in 1983, Section 498A was added to the IPC, making cruelty by a husband or his family a criminal offence, including dowry-related harassment; in 1984, the Dowry Prohibition Act was strengthened; and in 1986, Section 304B created the specific offence of “dowry death”, making it possible to prosecute husbands and in-laws when a woman died under suspicious circumstances within seven years of marriage after dowry-related harassment.

In 1992, Bhanwari Devi, a government worker in Rajasthan, tried to stop the child marriage of a nine-month-old girl in her village and was gang-raped by five men from the dominant Gujjar community as retaliation. The case was badly mishandled from the start, and when a trial court acquitted the accused in 1995, women’s groups took to the streets in Jaipur, demanding that the case be transferred to the CBI and that Bhanwari be compensated. The protest was met with a lathi charge, but the organisations involved kept pushing, and several women’s groups eventually came together under the name Vishaka to take the fight to the Supreme Court. In 1997, the Court ruled that sexual harassment at the workplace violated women’s fundamental rights and laid down the Vishaka Guidelines, requiring workplaces to prevent sexual harassment and set up mechanisms to deal with complaints. 

By the early 2000s, women’s groups had spent years pointing out the obvious: violence inside the home was still violence, even if the person beating, threatening or sexually abusing you happened to be your husband or a member of your family. A draft law prepared by the Lawyers Collective in 1994 was taken around the country, but when the government introduced its own Domestic Violence Bill in 2001, women’s organisations found it inadequate and began campaigning against it, holding meetings, press conferences and public discussions and sending memorandums to the government. The campaign grew into a national effort, with Action India collecting 2.5 lakh signatures across eight states demanding a stronger law. After years of this pressure, Parliament finally passed the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act in 2005, giving women legal protection against physical, sexual, verbal, emotional, and economic abuse and allowing courts to issue protection and residence orders.

On December 16, 2012, 23-year-old physiotherapy student intern, Jyoti Singh, widely known as ‘Nirbhaya’, was gang-raped by six men on a moving bus in Delhi and brutally assaulted before being dumped on the roadside. She died thirteen days later, and in the days between the attack and her death, thousands of students, women’s groups and ordinary people poured into the streets, protesting at India Gate, Jantar Mantar and across Delhi, demanding justice and stronger laws for sexual violence. The protests spread across the country, with people facing barricades, water cannons and tear gas as the government scrambled to respond. On December 23, the Justice J.S. Verma Committee was set up to recommend changes to criminal law, and after receiving tens of thousands of submissions, it submitted its report barely a month later. The government then brought in an ordinance in February 2013, followed by the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act in March, which expanded the law around sexual offences and introduced specific offences for stalking, voyeurism and acid attacks, among other changes. 

And yet here we are, more than a decade later, still feeling like nothing has changed. “I don’t think I wanna raise a daughter in this country. If the nation had learned anything from the Nirbhaya case, I wouldn’t be out here. It happened when I was seven. I’m 21 now,” said a protester to the BBC. We're still incapable of having real conversation about systems of oppresion without having idiotic "pro-patriarchy" marches. We continue to nurture rape culture by letting men get away with violence, letting convicted rapists roam free and even occupy positions of power. Every day there is another news story about somebody being raped somewhere in this country. It happens so often that we have almost desensitized ourselves to the reality of it.

I don’t know what it was about those protests that turned outrage into action. Maybe it was the tenacity of organisations and communities coming together. Maybe it was the absense of social media that could dilute or muddy momentum. Or maybe it was a government that actually gave a fuck about its citizens besides sustaining its own power. And it is probably one of the reasons protests against this regime have kept popping over the years — from the anti-CAA movement and the farmers’ protests to the wrestlers protesting sexual harassment, the Agnipath protests, the outrage over Manipur, the NEET paper-leak protests and now the protests against the Election Commission and its voter-roll revisions — we’ve seen nothing but silence, manipulation, and a lack of accountability. One could hope that, at some point, the frustration finally boils over into something that forces real change.

The fight against gendered violence is going to be an endless one as well, and we cannot let it die down or let it become another thing we scroll past; the dissent, outrage, and disruptions that get their attention have to be unrelenting, which sounds exhausting, but I don’t know what else gets us there.

Here's more from Homegrown:

We Shall By Morning Inherit The Earth: A Brief History Of Student Protests In India

South Asia's Caste Systems Mirror The Global Architecture Of Institutional Murder

The History Of Maoism In Bastar: How An Insurgency Took Root In India’s Heartland