By What Right?

There is an image from the Mahabharata that refuses to disappear. Draupadi stands in the Kuru assembly, surrounded by kings, elders, husbands and teachers, after having been wagered and dragged into the court. Her humiliation raises a question that sounds startlingly contemporary: by what right could one person claim ownership over another person’s body, dignity or choices?

That question may be where any serious conversation about violence against women needs to begin. Not with protection or honour, but with entitlement. What gives anyone the belief that another person’s autonomy can be overridden by desire, authority, anger, reputation or power?

The question is ancient. Its forms are not.

Protection is not justice

The popular telling of Draupadi’s humiliation gives us another enduring image: Krishna intervenes and protects her dignity. Yet beneath the miracle lies a harder question. What happened to the men who watched? What happened to the husbands who had allowed Draupadi to become part of the wager, and to the elders who remained silent?

There is also a textual complication: the famous miraculous intervention by Krishna is not found in the Mahabharata’s Critical Edition in the form familiar from many later retellings. Devotional and regional traditions have given the episode a central place in the cultural imagination. The textual history, however, does not diminish the larger question of the assembly and its failure.

We remember the protection. Perhaps we should also remember the failure.

Because protection is not justice. Protection says, “We will save you.” Justice asks who did this, who enabled it, who failed the woman and what accountability follows.

A society in which a woman is safe only because a powerful man chooses to protect her remains a hierarchical society. The deeper question is why a woman should require someone’s protection in order to be treated as an autonomous human being.

The myth of the ideal victim

Few cases exposed this problem more starkly than the Mathura case. Mathura was sexually assaulted at a police station in 1972. The Supreme Court’s judgment in Tukaram v. State of Maharashtra, delivered on 15 September 1978, acquitted the accused after finding that rape had not been proved under the law then applicable. The judgment and its reasoning provoked widespread feminist protest and became an important turning point in India’s women’s movement.

The controversy exposed an enduring idea: that there is such a thing as an ideal victim. A woman who screams, resists, bears visible injuries and reports immediately is more readily believed than one whose response to fear or trauma does not fit that script.

But people do not respond to violence according to a prescribed script. Fear can produce silence; trauma can produce confusion; dependence can complicate resistance and reporting. A survivor should not have to perform the correct version of victimhood to deserve justice.

When power enters the workplace

Almost two decades later, the case of Bhanwari Devi demonstrated that sexual violence could also intersect with professional authority. Bhanwari Devi, a saathin associated with Rajasthan’s Women’s Development Programme, was gang-raped in 1992 after her efforts to prevent a child marriage. Her case became the catalyst for the Supreme Court’s landmark Vishaka judgment in 1997. The Court recognised workplace sexual harassment as a violation of women’s fundamental rights and laid down guidelines in the absence of specific legislation.

The significance went beyond the workplace. Power does not always announce itself as physical violence. It can operate through hierarchy, dependence, fear of professional consequences and the knowledge that saying no to someone powerful may come at a price.

When a woman becomes a battlefield

There is another disturbing dimension to sexual violence: the use of a woman’s body as a means of humiliating or attacking a community.

During the Gujarat violence of 2002, Muslim women were among those subjected to sexual violence. Bilkis Bano, who was pregnant at the time, was gang-raped and several members of her family were killed. Eleven men convicted in the case were released in August 2022 following remission orders issued by the Gujarat government. In January 2024, the Supreme Court quashed those orders, holding that Gujarat was not the competent government to grant the remission and directing the convicts to surrender.

The episode forced another question into the public conversation: what does justice mean when a crime is not merely an attack on an individual but is also used as an instrument of communal violence?

The same disturbing logic became visible in Manipur during the ethnic violence of 2023. Three women were stripped and paraded before a mob; two were allegedly gang-raped. In January 2026, a special CBI court in Guwahati framed charges against six men and ordered the trial to proceed.

In such cases, the woman is not merely attacked. Her body is made into a message to an entire community. That is why sexual violence during conflict cannot be understood only as violence against an individual. It can also become a weapon of humiliation, domination and revenge.

But the woman is not a battlefield. She is not the honour of her religion or caste, nor the territory through which one community communicates its power to another.

Sexual violence is larger than rape

Perhaps our vocabulary of sexual violence has remained too narrow. Rape is only one form of sexual violation. Stalking, sexual harassment, coercion, threats, unwanted sexual contact, exposure, blackmail and the non-consensual circulation of intimate images can all be expressions of power over another person’s sexual autonomy.

The common thread is not necessarily the physical act. It is the belief that another person can be humiliated, intimidated or controlled without her consent.

Acid violence can emerge from rejection, possessiveness, revenge or the refusal to accept a woman’s choice. It can become an attempt not merely to injure her but to permanently mark her body and destroy the face with which she meets the world.

The message is chilling: if I cannot possess you, I will destroy you.

The stranger is not always the monster

We have often imagined sexual violence through the figure of the unknown man in a dark street. Yet some of the most devastating forms of abuse occur within relationships of trust: within families, intimate relationships, neighbourhoods, schools and workplaces.

The stranger is not always the monster, and the home is not automatically a sanctuary.

This is particularly important in cases involving children. The Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012 created a child-specific legal framework covering sexual assault, sexual harassment and pornography and provided for Special Courts. But legislation alone cannot dissolve the culture of silence that surrounds abuse.

When the perpetrator is a family member, the crime can threaten the family’s own mythology about itself. The pressure to preserve reputation can become more powerful than the instinct to protect the child.

When silence becomes a family value

Sometimes patriarchy arrives not through the perpetrator but through the warning that follows: do not tell anyone; what will people say; think about the family’s honour; forget it; adjust.

Women can become carriers of these messages too, not necessarily because they are the architects of the system, but because they may themselves have been conditioned to believe that family reputation rests upon women’s behaviour.

The result is painfully familiar. The family honour survives. The marriage survives. The institution survives. The survivor carries the burden.

The perpetrator commits the violence; the survivor inherits the shame.

That transfer is one of the most enduring mechanisms through which silence reproduces itself.

We have learned to watch

There is another change that deserves attention. We have become accustomed to watching violence.

A rape becomes a headline, another a statistic, another a political argument and another a hashtag. We discuss, condemn and debate, and then move on to the next story.

Repetition can create something more subtle than indifference: familiarity.

The digital age has intensified this phenomenon. The internet did not invent misogyny; it gave it a new delivery system. A woman can now be threatened by people she has never met. A mob that once required physical proximity can assemble within minutes.

For women who speak publicly, rape threats are often used not because the threat is genuinely sexual but because it is disciplinary: stop speaking, know your place, do not be visible.

The medium is new. The instinct is old.

When the woman becomes the suspect

Across these stories, one pattern keeps returning. A woman is attacked and society begins examining her.

What was she wearing? Why was she there? Why did she trust him? Why did she not resist? Why did she not report earlier? Why did she continue working? Why did she remain silent?

The questions multiply until the original question disappears:

Why did he do it?

The perpetrator becomes a subject of explanation; the woman becomes a subject of investigation. The moral burden quietly shifts from the person who committed the act to the person who experienced it.

That is why Mathura still matters. Why Bhanwari Devi matters. Why Draupadi matters. And why every survivor who has been asked “why didn’t you?” matters.

The survivor should not have to behave perfectly for the perpetrator to be wrong.

What civilisation means

Perhaps we have framed the debate incorrectly when we ask whether India is a civilised society, whether the past was safer or whether modernity has made women less secure.

We cannot make reliable comparisons between ancient and modern levels of sexual violence simply by comparing recorded cases. Definitions, reporting practices, legal categories and institutional mechanisms have all changed over time. A rise in recorded cases does not automatically tell us that violence itself has risen by the same proportion.

The more useful question is what happens when power is abused.

Does a family protect its reputation or its daughter? Does an institution protect its image or its employee? Does the police pursue justice or merely procedure? Does the media report the crime or consume the humiliation? Does society ask what happened to the woman, or what the perpetrator believed he was entitled to do?

Civilisation is not proved by the absence of crime. It is tested by how a society responds when power is abused.

By what right?

Perhaps, ultimately, this is not only a story about rape. It is a story about entitlement.

The rapist assumes access to another person’s body. The abusive partner treats another person’s life as his possession. The employer mistakes professional authority for sexual authority. The online harasser treats a woman’s public voice as an invitation to threaten her. The family that silences a survivor places reputation above her suffering.

Different acts, different circumstances, different perpetrators. But underneath them can lie the same dangerous idea: that one person’s desire, anger, status or power gives them a right over another person’s autonomy.

That is why Draupadi’s question continues to resonate.

Not simply: why did this happen to me?

But:

By what right?

The answer should be simple.

None.