Fighting for Feminism, again: India's Capital Is Locking Up Its Parks Instead of Its Predators

I was born in this city; somehow, my default reaction has been aggression. I know what every woman here learns before she has mastered her multiplication tables: the arithmetic of survival. Which roads are lit. Which autos to avoid. How to hold a house key between your knuckles on the walk home. This week, the city that raised me reminded me that the arithmetic has not changed. Only the sums have grown heavier.

On Monday, September 21, a 17-year-old girl was allegedly gang-raped at Aastha Kunj Park, near the Kalkaji temple in southeast Delhi, by three men posing as police officers. The uniform, the one symbol a frightened girl in this city is taught to run towards, became the instrument of her violation. The next day, police shot and caught one suspect metres from the campus of Lady Shri Ram College, about two kilometres away. The college decided to shift to online classes.

This was not an aberration. It was a crescendo.

Earlier, on the evening of September 10, a 16-year-old girl from Swaroop Nagar in outer north Delhi went to meet a friend. Her body was found in a field near Kushak Road on September 13. It was so badly decomposed that forensic experts could not at first determine her sex. She was identified by a tattoo on her arm. Four people, three of them minors, have since been arrested for her alleged rape and murder. Her neighbours walked past posters of an unidentified body for days without knowing she was the girl from their own lane.

Weeks earlier, on the rain-lashed night of August 4, a teenager from Mainpuri in Uttar Pradesh got off at the wrong stop, at Pari Chowk in Greater Noida. She flagged down a sleeper bus for help. The driver and conductor allegedly raped her as the bus kept moving and abandoned her near the Kashmere Gate inter-state bus terminal. A girl. A bus. A Delhi night. If that does not send a chill down your spine, you were not listening in 2012.

On December 16 of that year, a 23-year-old physiotherapy student boarded a private bus near Munirka with a friend. What was done to her in that bus provoked an insurrection of conscience. She died on December 29 in a Singapore hospital, and the country gave her a name she never chose: Nirbhaya, the fearless one. Students braved tear gas and water cannon on Raisina Hill. The Justice Verma Committee was convened, and the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act of 2013 followed. Four of her adult attackers were hanged in Tihar Jail on March 20, 2020, more than seven years after the crime. We called it justice, however belated. We believed the city had been chastened.

It is astonishing, then, that the national capital of the world's largest democracy appears to have learned so little. Worse, when its reflexes were tested again, it reached for the padlock.

This is a grammar of confinement, in which men commit the crime and women serve the sentence. Society supplies the familiar chorus. What was she doing there? Why so late? Who was she meeting? Every such question is a small act of exoneration.

The students understood this at once. On Wednesday, September 23, hundreds of them, mostly young women and several wearing masks, marched through the streets near the crime scene. Their placards declared that their bodies were their own and demanded the freedom to walk at night without fear.

Congress workers and the party's youth and women's wings staged demonstrations of their own. The demands are neither radical nor new: working streetlights, safe public transport and last-mile connectivity, usable public toilets, functioning cameras, visible patrols, and complaint mechanisms that do not humiliate the complainant. Above all, they want accountability for the lapses that make each atrocity possible.

"We are not asking for protection. We are not asking for surveillance. We are not asking for pink booths and increased patrolling by the police," said Aditi Subramanian, a student of Delhi University. "We want infrastructure and changes that enable freedom," she told The Mooknayak. "We feel safe at that march because we were all at that march together."

Are we witnessing the stirrings of something larger? History offers suggestive parallels. In October 1789, the market women of Paris, enraged by the price of bread, marched on Versailles and brought a king back to the capital. A century later, Britain's suffragettes were caricatured as hysterics until their defiance became impossible to ignore. I do not predict revolution. Delhi in 2026 is not Paris in 1789. But the underlying refusal is the same. The women I met this week are not asking the state to protect them by caging them. They are declaring that the city belongs to them too, after sunset included.

Subramanian rejected the idea that this was a plea. "We believe that women feel safe in public spaces when there are more women in public spaces," she said. "[Our march] is a declaration rather than a request for any protection."

Their anger has also arrived at an unusually fraught moment. On Friday, September 25, Jantar Mantar, the capital's historic theatre of dissent, was barricaded as students and activists gathered to demand the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls.

Yet it would be obtuse to miss what connects them. Both ask whether citizens can still trust the institutions built to protect them, whether that is the police uniform or the voter roll. When the uniform becomes a disguise for predators, and the designated site of protest becomes a security cordon, the social contract begins to fray.

The republic is not collapsing. But it is straining, and the strain is visible on the faces of its daughters.

Fourteen years ago, we lit candles at India Gate and told ourselves the flame would not go out. Candles, it turns out, were not enough. Neither were statutes, fast-track courts or gallows. Laws change what a state may punish. They do not, by themselves, change what a society is willing to tolerate. That requires something harder: a city that treats a woman walking alone at night as a citizen exercising her rights, not as a provocation or a liability.

A Delhi that locks its parks at sunset has not made women safer. It has merely made their fear official.

Tonight I will walk home, as I always have, key between my knuckles, eyes on the shadows. I will be thinking of a girl in Kalkaji, a girl in Swaroop Nagar and a girl on a bus in the rain. And I will not ask anyone's permission.

On Friday, September 25, as police barricaded Jantar Mantar and bundled students into buses, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was a short drive away, clapping along at a "Bhajan Clubbing" event marking Deendayal Upadhyaya's 110th birth anniversary.

He later posted a video of the evening with a single word: "Spectacular!" Leadership, it seems, has failed yet again. Barely two months have passed since July 20, when students marching from the same spot towards Parliament met the full force of the Delhi Police, a day many protesters still call a dark day for democracy. Déjà vu, anyone?

Just in case we were not aware: the Delhi Police answers to the Union Home Ministry. The parks now shuttered at dusk belong to the DDA, an arm of the Union government. The Delhi government controls the buses, the streetlights and the last mile. Each has had fourteen years since Nirbhaya to act, and each has chosen to issue advisories rather than accept accountability.

"Hum auratein azaad hain!" (We women are free!)

- Aakriti Dhawan is an independent journalist based in Hamburg, Germany.