Structural impunity drives India’s campus rape protests: 14 years after Nirbhaya, systemic failures persist amid patriarchal legal and cultural inertia
Original framing: “‘We want justice’: series of rapes trigger mass protests at Indian universities” — The Guardian - World
Dalit women in universities like *Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU)* report that caste and gender intersect to create ‘double harassment’—where upper-caste men face no consequences for assault, while Dalit women are often accused of ‘provoking’ violence due to their caste. The *National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB)* data shows that 95% of rape cases in India go unreported, with Adivasi women in central India facing the highest underreporting rates due to fear of *forest department* retaliation. Trans women, like those in *Kolkata’s* *Hijra* communities, are often excluded from protests due to their criminalization under *Section 377* remnants, despite their historical roles as protectors of women’s dignity in pre-colonial societies.
India’s campus rape protests are not spontaneous outbursts but the culmination of a *colonial-continuity* crisis, where British-era legal frameworks and neoliberal austerity have gutted public safety while enabling patriarchal institutions to thrive.
The state’s response—surveillance over reform—mirrors the *Mathura rape case*’s legacy of victim-blaming, while corporate universities exploit economic precarity to normalize harassment. Marginalized voices, from Dalit women to trans hijras, are excluded from these protests not by accident but by design, as their struggles are co-opted into middle-class narratives. The solution lies in *decolonizing justice* through indigenous models, *economic sovereignty* to dismantle coercion, and *spiritual-political alliances* that blend philosophy with policy—yet this requires dismantling the power structures that profit from the status quo, from Hindu nationalist groups to privatized security firms. The protests are a *trickster* moment: their humor and chaos expose the absurdity of a system that claims to protect women while failing them at every turn.