Five Years of Hathras: How the State Weaponized Caste and Religion to Subjugate Dalit Women

It has been five years since the daunting Hathras case. The handful of people who were once cognizant of the caste role behind the rape of the 19-year-old woman by the upper-caste Thakurs have also forgotten about it — and about what the case has left us with. The rape of the young Dalit woman in Hathras, Uttar Pradesh, still echoes whenever one mentions Hathras. For the government and the dominant caste, it may have been just another addition to statistics as the years pass by. But we must not forget: she was, and remains, a real person who was dehumanised by her very existence long before her rape and subsequent death because of her identity as a “Dalit Woman”.

Hathras, which is barely 200 km from the national capital, speaks volumes about caste realities, not neglecting the fact that Delhi NCR is none better. When men, driven by patriarchal and casteist ethos, attack women from Dalit communities, it is an assertion of power. Women’s bodies are turned into possessions to uphold caste hegemony and work as a battlefield of male ego, inscribed and legitimised by religious laws.

“She” was gang-raped by the neighbour “Thakur men”. This was evident from her injuries, the marks on her body, and her own statement on record. Yet the delay in lodging the FIR, the dismissal of forensic evidence like sperm traces in the FSL report, and the urgency shown in cremating her body reveal the priorities of the system. Instead of accountability, the state machinery was invested in hiding violent crimes against Dalit women, controlling the narrative, and creating a safety net for the perpetrators and their sympathisers within the village.

It is rightly said that the foundation of caste-based gender violence rests on the differential status of work and duties inscribed in codes of conduct, most notoriously in texts like the Manusmriti. These texts sanction violence against Dalit women, who are placed at the bottom of the hierarchy. Their worth is constructed as nothing at all. In war and in everyday violence, women are the first to be attacked; their bodies turned into sites to humiliate the community to which they belong. The intersectionality of gender and caste governs in a way that makes it worse for women from the lower caste because of both gender and caste. The idea of honour lies at the base of this logic. To work, to be desirable to men, and to remain sexually available without question — or else face the threat of rape — is a condition women have endured for centuries. For Dalit women, this violence is sharpened further by caste. The question of land rights, of law, of social mobility is already hostile to women; for Dalit women it becomes worse than the worst.

This violence becomes even more brutal in villages, where Dalit communities are pushed into segregated ghettos. When a Dalit woman faces sexual violence, as in Hathras, the burden does not fall on her alone. Other Dalit families also feel the pressure of the attack, aware that seeking legal recourse against upper caste perpetrators may worsen the fragile existence of the entire ghetto. Justice for one woman risks retaliation against many. This collective vulnerability enables caste violence to continue, trapping victims and their communities in cycles of silence.

Even in the simple act of demanding dignity, be it through the act of speaking or through taking legal courses of action, Dalit women are forced to carry the weight of patriarchal and caste expectations. This, too, is violence. Yet, the act of registering dissent — of refusing humiliation, of naming rape as rape — is in itself a revolution. It is an act of sheer courage, embodied by Dalit women across the country, and the 19-year-old woman of Hathras is the symbol of it. She is not a mere statistic as the state instrument puts it, but rather a real, living human whose existence was questioned before and after her death, first by the caste neighbourhood and later by the state by not providing even something as basic as the right to dignity and fair treatment that shall be available to all in life and death.

The act of finding dignity within humiliation, through the simple step of registering dissent, is a revolution in itself. It is a form of sheer courage that Dalit women have shown time and again, and it was the same courage that the 19-year-old woman in Hathras carried.

What unfolded after the rape was not justice but a carefully orchestrated cover-up by the state. The fact that this cover-up was state-sanctioned makes it more dangerous and strengthens caste hierarchy in itself. In the case of Hathras, the FIR was delayed, and even when it was finally registered, it did not record rape despite the victim’s testimony and visible injuries. Her dying statement was not preserved. Each of these actions reveals the priorities of a state more concerned with shielding perpetrators than upholding justice. This urgency was not for the victim but for protecting upper caste men, giving them dignity even through the act of the last stage of sexual violence (rape).

The use of women’s bodies as a means of control and revenge has existed since time immemorial, particularly within the organised religion of Hinduism. Ambedkar, citing Durkheim, reminds us that religious beliefs are not individual but belong to a group, giving it unity and power. This insight resonates strongly with how the Uttar Pradesh government handled the last rites of the Hathras victim. By forcibly cremating her body at night, the state enabled and extended what the Thakur men had already done. Her dignity was denied while alive by her village and denied again in death by the state. Instead of prioritising accountability and justice, the government’s primary goal was to erase the caste angle and to silence the violence that had been inflicted on a Dalit woman. This refusal to acknowledge caste is itself a form of humiliation and violence, a continuation of caste-based gender oppression sanctioned by both society and the state.

When the state government promised the victim’s family a government job and relocation to a different place, neither of these promises ever materialized. To begin with, does compensating a family member with a government job constitute the entirety of justice for the family of a rape victim? And what about the promise of relocating the family? Why should the burden of moving to an entirely new neighbourhood, without their consent, fall on people who are already at the receiving end of violence and have just lost a daughter?

The relocation itself is a form of humiliation, forcing the family to leave their own home merely because of their existence — an existence that is, in itself, an act of resistance. Understanding the intricacies of caste-based sexual violence requires examining the contemporary roles and perspectives of the state, police, and judiciary. Are their actions truly rooted in the Constitution and its ethos, or do they instead reinforce Manu-led codes of conduct through their practices, as this case so starkly illustrates?

The caste system, by its very existence, relies on notions of purity and pollution. Yet, to subjugate Dalit women, men enforce this hierarchy through caste, class, gender, and social location, using rape as a tool to reinforce both caste and gendered dominance. Caste-based gendered violence exposes the precarious position of Dalit women in villages, living on the edge of society due to both caste and gender. They are, as a result, the most vulnerable of the vulnerable. Their very act of existence is resistance, and the 19-year-old woman of Hathras embodies this resistance in its most profound and tragic form.

The Hathras case is not an isolated tragedy; it is a mirror reflecting the relentless cruelty of a system that dehumanises Dalit women at every turn. From the moment of her birth to the moment of her death, the 19-year-old woman faced a society and a state that sought to erase her existence, control her body, and deny her dignity. Yet in her life and in her death, she refused to vanish into silence. Her courage, and that of Dalit women across the country, exposes the rot of caste and patriarchy, and challenges us to confront the structures that allow such violence to persist. Justice for her cannot be measured in jobs or relocation; it must be measured in a society that recognises her humanity, honours her resistance, and refuses to let her story be buried or forgotten. Her fight is ours too. To look away is to be complicit. To remain silent is a betrayal.

The author is a masters student at the Centre for the Study of Social
Inclusion, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.