Being a woman in the heartland of ‘Viksit Bharat’ |
In the last week of December 2025, a chilling video surfaced from Satna, Madhya Pradesh. Rape-accused Ashok Singh, a BJP councillor’s husband, is heard telling a woman: “What will happen to me? Nothing will happen. Complain wherever you want.”
The woman, who filed a complaint after six months, says he recorded the rape and used the footage to blackmail her into silence. She threatened to expose him when he approached her again on 20 December. And she did. The police have now filed a case, but Singh has not been arrested. This brazen culture of impunity is the troubling new trend in the ninth most dangerous country for women. India.
Where 88 rapes are reported daily (the actual number is at least three times that) and people in power not only perpetrate acts of violence on the bodies of women, but openly brag about them. When Unnao rape-accused Kuldeep Singh Sengar’s jail sentence was suspended by the Delhi High Court on 23 December 2025, the public erupted. Streets and social media were flooded with slogans: ‘Activists in jail, rapists on bail’.
The rape survivor, who was brave enough to call out her rapist in 2017, did what she has been doing for years: fought back. Women activists joined her in staging a protest in the bitter Delhi cold, and were removed by the police. The survivor approached LoP Rahul Gandhi and, with both media and people rallying around, a vacation bench of the Supreme Court stayed the order on 29 December.
Sengar stays in jail, pending further hearings. But, as the survivor’s lawyer advocate Mehmood Pracha put it, “We have got a moment to breathe, but that is not a victory.” The Unnao rape case was not a routine prosecution. The offence was registered only after sustained public protests by the victim, including an immolation attempt outside the chief minister’s residence in Lucknow.
Sengar was arrested in 2018 only after the intervention of the........