THIRTEEN years ago, a young woman was gang-raped on a moving bus in Delhi, assaulted with a rod, and left to die. The case became a generational reckoning. Mass protests. New laws. The death penalty, eventually, for four of her attackers. The world watched India promise itself it would never let this happen again.

It happened again — and again. Last month, in a village in Bihar’s Begusarai district, a mother of four was gang-raped in her own home, assaulted with objects, one of which — a bullet casing — she carried to the hospital herself as evidence because no one else seemed inclined to look for it. According to the BBC, her husband said police initially refused to file a complaint. A private clinic turned her away. It took days, and her own collapsing body, before anyone treated what had happened to her as the emergency it was.

I confess to a kind of foolishness. I had let myself believe that executing the culprits in 2020 meant something had shifted — that fear, finally, had been instilled where it needed to be. It hadn’t. More than 30,000 rape cases are still recorded in India every year. Most go unreported. The ones that surface do so not because the system worked, but........

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