No history of gender justice laws in India can be written without drawing a direct, scarred line from the brutal assault on Bhanwari Devi in 1992 to the gut-wrenching tragedy of the 2012 Delhi gang rape and murder. Not as isolated crimes, but as eruptions of women’s long-endured trauma into public and legal arenas.

The story of Vishakha v. State of Rajasthan (1997) begins not in the hushed halls of the Supreme Court, but in a village in Rajasthan, where Bhanwari Devi, a grassroots worker with the Women Development Programme, dared to challenge age-old patriarchal traditions by trying to prevent the child marriage of a one-year-old girl in her village. As punishment, she was brutally gang-raped by five Gujjar landlords.

What followed was a chilling display of apathy and systemic failure. The police refused to file an FIR, Bhanwari Devi’s medical report was incomplete, and the court acquitted the accused, casting doubt on her husband’s testimony and asserting that upper caste men wouldn’t rape a lower caste woman.

The verdict struck a match to years of simmering feminist anger. The 1980s and 90s were the decades of dowry deaths, bride burnings and misogyny. Women across India were fighting........

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