In India’s courts in 2025, being an educated woman is to provide evidence against yourself. You will be judged for the dual crimes of consuming alcohol and trusting a male friend. When that friend just happens to sexually assault you—what else is a man supposed to do in such a situation? – the court will pronounce you responsible for your actions and say that you “invited trouble”. Because you, as an educated woman, are “competent enough to understand the morality” of your actions, as Justice Sanjay Kumar Singh of the Allahabad High Court helpfully explained a few days ago.
This holds equally true even if you are not an educated woman. For the sake of argument, let’s say you are a child, 11 years old, minding your business. The men who grabbed your breasts, broke your pyjama string, and attempted to drag you into a culvert before a passerby saved you, weren’t really trying to rape you. The fact that they didn’t actually commit the assault and “no other act is attributed to them to further their alleged desire to commit rape on the victim” is enough to absolve them. Please, you might be a traumatised minor, but get with the programme—Justice Ram Manohar Narayan Mishra of the Allahabad High Court has standards to maintain.
Oh, and also, if you’ve been sexually assaulted multiple times by a man who also circulated your intimate photos online, you should marry him. What do you mean that’s bizarre, it makes perfect sense! After all, as Justice Krishan Pahal of the Allahabad HC said, “a person’s right to life and liberty, guaranteed by Article 21 of the Constitution, cannot be taken away”. No no, not your life and liberty as the victim, we meant the life of your rapist. As you know, marriage solves everything, especially when it binds you legally to your abuser.
You might wonder, is this a twisted thought experiment? Are you in a dystopian novel? Sadly, there’s no such relief from reality. These are actual judgments from Indian courts in the first quarter of 2025. And you can die at the ramparts of judicial misogyny, but your autonomy will be interpreted as culpability, and your trauma as inconvenience.
The Allahabad High Court is a particularly egregious epicentre of institutional misogyny, but similar volcanoes are erupting across India’s legal landscape. If you stood in front of a map of India and threw a dart with your eyes closed, you’d hit a place that has pronounced a problematic patriarchal judgment.
Take the headlines from just the last few months. Earlier this year, a Chhattisgarh High Court judge, Justice Narendra Kumar Vyas, released a 40-year-old man who was convicted of rape and unnatural sex with his wife. The woman had died within hours of the alleged assault and had made a dying declaration against her husband. In 2024, the Supreme Court had to set aside an order from the Calcutta High Court, asking adolescent girls to “control their sexual urges as in the eyes of the society she is the loser when she gives in to enjoy the sexual pleasure of hardly two minutes.” The judgment was being pronounced in the case of kidnapping and sexual assault of a minor.
When courts suggest mediation and compromise in rape cases, as the Madras High Court did in 2015 before withdrawing the suggestion after public outcry, they let us know that sexual violation is a dispute to be negotiated—not a crime to be punished. When no less than Sharad Aravind Bobde, who during his term as the Chief Justice of India, suggested that rapists marry their victims and questioned whether sex between a married couple can ever be considered rape, he lent institutional weight to the marital rape exception.
Also read: Dear Indian women, leave your fundamental rights at the wedding altar
Institutional gaslighting
Perhaps nowhere is judicial patriarchy more alive than in India’s stubborn refusal to criminalise marital rape. In 2024, the Union Government told the Supreme Court that criminalising marital rape would be “excessively harsh” and could “destroy the institution of marriage”, women be damned. The government’s position was reinforced by courts that were hesitant to intervene in the state-sanctioned violation of women’s rights.
What’s particularly chilling is the legal contortion required to defend this exception. The government acknowledges that a woman’s consent isn’t “obliterated” by marriage yet argues that labelling non-consensual sex within marriage as “rape” would be too harsh. In other words, a violation is recognised but deliberately left unpunished. This, in the face of glaring evidence from the government’s own data that indicates 83 per cent of married women have experienced sexual violence from their husbands.
Another pillar upholding this edifice to judicial misogyny is the persistent narrative around the “misuse” of protective laws like Section 498A of the IPC (now Sections 85/86 of the BNS), which addresses cruelty against married women. First forged in the cauldrons of Men’s Rights Activists on X, this version has gained such traction that it now drowns out the lived reality of millions of women.
When courts refer to Section 498A as a “weapon rather than a shield” or employ terms like “legal terrorism”, they fundamentally reframe the power dynamics at play. The actual statistical reality—that domestic violence remains vastly underreported, with only a fraction of cases ever reaching the courts—gets buried beneath anecdotal accounts and selective citation of acquittal rates.
All of these judgments and observations, Indian women should know, are a form of institutional gaslighting. Our fundamental rights are actually conditional privileges that can be revoked any minute—when we drink alcohol, or trust men, or get married. The true violence of these judgments lies not just in their immediate impact on individual survivors, but in the precedents they set. Each ruling that blames a victim, each minimisation of assault contributes to a judicial culture that undermines women’s right to safety, dignity, and justice.
Is there a substantive difference between the opinions espoused by Indian courts and misogynists on X? In fact, this judicial pattern is far more insidious than the rape and death threats issued to Indian women on social media every day. Draped in the language of reason, law, and impartiality, it offers a patina of legitimacy to disturbingly misogynistic views.
When our judiciary fails to recognise this impossible choice—between conformity and autonomy—it becomes an instrument of the injustice it is meant to address. This regression is an insult to the slow-moving, hard-won progress that feminist legal advocacy has fought for, over decades. And while judges’ opinions are a reflection of the society they occupy, some of these observations are hard to read as individual bias, and not a collective resistance to women’s full personhood under law.
The Indian Constitution once promised women equal citizenship. In 2025, we know that that’s not entirely true. We only have the freedom to be autonomous… so long as the patriarchy permits.
Karanjeet Kaur is a journalist, former editor of Arré, and a partner at TWO Design. She tweets @Kaju_Katri. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)
Classic media has twisted the news in such a way that it seems that the court acquitted the accused in the 11 yr old girl case. But the judge said to try them in aggravated sexual assault. The law is similar in other parts of the world where attempts to has to be proved both by intention and preparation beyond initiation stage, otherwise it becomes case of sexual assault. However, in india femi mob can coerce the court to change order.
Indian women they want marital rape to be illegal like westerner countries but want harsh punishment like middle east countries where marital rape is not illegal. Even there death is hiven only for rape and murder. The prison sentences usually start from 8 years. Also in those countries a false complaint is punishable by several years in jail. They want the best of all worlds. Moreover in india we have special provision of rape in promise of marriage which is not present anywhere. Moreover, the mandatory minimum sentencing in india for rape is the severest among many parts of the world which has led to more victims being killed after rape after the nirbhaya incident. Moreover the higher the punishment, the more burden of proof it requires which has led to reduced convictions
The courts can decide whether the alleged rape happened or not. My bigger worry is — did the woman share the bill for the drinks, food, and the taxi fare when she went to the guy’s place, in this case the alleged rapist?
Because every penny is earned with hard work. If the woman didn’t split the bill on that date, that also needs to be discussed. It should be looked at as a kind of financial rape
This was a brilliant and impactful read. I’d love to see an even deeper dive into this subject from you. There’s so much more to unpack, and your voice is powerful enough to carry it. Please consider writing a more detailed follow-up.
Ms. Kaur would never write on the riots scorching Bengal. On the murderous mobs of Muslims terrorising Hindus in Murshidabad and Malda.
Nor would she speak up on behalf of the hundreds of Hindu women who were violated by the Muslim mobs in Bengal.