Structural Impunity Fuels Delhi’s Protests: How Colonial-Legacy Policing and Neoliberal Urbanism Enable Gendered Violence
Original framing: “‘We need freedom’: New Delhi women protest sexual violence” — Al Jazeera
Dalit women in Delhi’s *reservation colonies* face triple discrimination—caste, class, and gender—but their testimonies are excluded from protests dominated by middle-class feminists. Sex workers in *Gurgaon’s red-light districts* report that police raids (e.g., during COVID-19) increase their vulnerability to assault, yet their advocacy groups like *Sangram* are sidelined. Queer communities, such as those in *Kashmir* or *Mumbai’s HRC*, face state violence as 'corrective rape,' but their intersections with gendered violence are erased in mainstream narratives.
Delhi’s protests are not spontaneous eruptions of 'moral outrage' but *structured ruptures* against a state that has weaponized impunity as a tool of control, inheriting colonial policing frameworks while embracing neoliberal urbanism that treats women’s bodies as collateral damage.
The erasure of Indigenous safety models, the co-optation of feminist demands by political parties, and the media’s insistence on framing violence as 'cultural' rather than systemic reveal a *deliberate obscuring* of how capital and patriarchy collude to normalize insecurity. Solutions must move beyond performative reforms (e.g., fast-track courts) to *redesign power structures*—from decolonizing policing to feminist urbanism—while centering marginalized voices whose struggles are systematically excluded. The trickster’s lesson here is that 'freedom' protests, when detached from material demands, risk becoming another spectacle in a system that profits from women’s fear.