Solidarity, Democracy, and the Unfinished Question of Women's Freedom

When we, as women and girls, think of a just society, we see the hurdles. We see the fault lines, fault lines of citizenship, of equality, of justice. We see the violence. And we see ourselves: aching, getting angry, feeling helpless about the brutal things happening around us.

It is necessary to equip ourselves for understanding the changing face of violence, for mapping where structures of oppression have mutated, for asking honestly where the women's movement has arrived, what ground it has held, what ground it has lost, and what remains stubbornly unfinished. In short, it is about pausing to look, to examine, to ask honestly: where have we reached? Moreover, to think seriously about solidarity, the most powerful political resource we have.

We all know that violence against women is not something rare or extreme. Sadly, it has become part of everyday life. It is there in workplaces where harassment is normalised, in homes, in the trafficking of women, in language that trivialises assault, in art that aestheticises humiliation or objectifies women. All of it chips away, day after day, at the safety, dignity, and freedom of women. It is everywhere and relentless.

The numbers are stark. According to the National Family Health Survey (2019–21), nearly one in three women between the ages of 18 and 49 reported experiencing physical violence since the age of fifteen. Six per cent reported sexual violence. And yet only a small fraction, about fourteen per cent, ever sought help. That silence is not accidental. It tells us something about fear, about stigma, about how little faith many women have in systems - in police, in courts, meant to protect them. In 2022 alone, over 4.45 lakh cases were registered as crimes against women in India — roughly 1,200 every single day. And we know that official numbers never capture the full story. They are just the tip of the iceberg.

With this, I want to mention two specific cases, not because they are exceptional, but precisely because they are not. Because they reveal something structural, something that keeps surfacing no matter how much those in power would prefer it to stay buried.

The first is the Khairlanji massacre in September 2006. In a village in Bhandara district, Maharashtra, four members of a Dalit family were attacked by a mob of so-called upper-caste villagers. Surekha and her daughter Priyanka were stripped, paraded, gang-raped, and killed. The men were beaten to death. The bodies were thrown into a canal. The police initially recorded the deaths as accidental drownings. It took weeks of sustained protest before the case was acknowledged for what it was.

The second is Hathras, September 2020. A nineteen-year-old Dalit woman was allegedly gang-raped by so-called upper-caste men in Hathras district, Uttar Pradesh. She held on for two weeks before dying in a Delhi hospital. What came next was its own kind of violence. In the early hours of the morning, without the family's consent, without allowing them to see her, hold her, or grieve, the Uttar Pradesh police cremated her body. The state government denied that rape had occurred. Roads to the village were barricaded. Journalists and opposition politicians were physically prevented from reaching the family.

Together, these two cases, separated by fourteen years, are joined by an unbroken logic we cannot ignore. Marginalised women's bodies have been made into sites where patriarchy, caste power, and state authority meet, reinforce each other, and act in concert. This is a material and political reality.

Women Question and Question of Whose Women

The women's movement has always had to confront a crucial question: when we say "women," who do we mean? This question has concrete political consequences for whose suffering is centred, whose demands shape movement agendas, and whether solidarity is conditional or unconditional.

We are aware that the mainstream women's movement in India, as in many parts of the world, has struggled to fully reckon with caste, class, and community as axes that fracture the category "women" from within. The demand for legal reform, for representation, for liberation, all of these are necessary. None of them is sufficient if they are built on silence about caste, poverty, and structural marginalisation.

A Dalit woman living in rural Maharashtra does not experience patriarchy in the same way as an upper-caste urban professional woman. This is not a competition in suffering; it is an attempt to understand how power works. A movement that cannot read power in its full complexity will repeatedly fail the women who need it most.

Khairlanji exposed this failure with particular sharpness. The response from mainstream feminist organisations was slow, hesitant, and in some cases absent. It was Dalit women's organisations, Ambedkarite movements, and grassroots activists who pressed the case with urgency.

Hathras, fourteen years later, generated more visible solidarity. But the questions it raised, about whose pain moves people to the streets, and how quickly, remain alive and uncomfortable.

The women's question, then, is inseparable from the caste question, the class question, and the question of who gets to be a full citizen. Democracy, in its formal sense, promises equality before the law. But the law does not encounter all citizens in the same way. The woman from Hathras, whose body was cremated in the middle of the night before her family could hold her, was a citizen. The Constitution guaranteed her dignity. What happened was its opposite. We must confront the gap between constitutional promise and lived reality and ask how we challenge it.

Democracy's Fault Lines: Structural Violence of the System

We live at a time when democratic values themselves are in danger globally and within India. Institutions designed to check power are under pressure. Civil society organisations face legal scrutiny and state crackdowns. Journalists covering atrocities face intimidation. Activists are charged under laws designed for sedition and terror. The space to speak, organise, and dissent has narrowed.

But violence against women, particularly marginalised women, has not reduced. If anything, it has become more brazen. There is a particular kind of confidence with which power acts when it believes it will not be held accountable.

This brings us to a troubling reality: fifteen Members of Parliament and 135 Members of Legislative Assemblies in India have declared in their election affidavits that they have cases related to crimes against women registered against them. And they debate legislation on women's safety. Some sit on committees that shape policy on sexual violence. The structural irony is direct and disturbing. The very people entrusted to legislate justice for women are, in documented cases, accused of perpetrating violence against them.

This is not merely individual hypocrisy. It points to something systemic: the way electoral democracy, as currently constituted, can create incentives for impunity rather than accountability. Caste and community networks protect accused men. Institutional loyalty overrides legal obligation. The woman who files a complaint often finds herself more exposed, more surveilled, more at risk than before she spoke. The system does not merely fail to protect her; it can actively punish her for seeking protection.

Where Have We Reached?

Twenty years after Khairlanji, five years after Hathras, it is necessary to ask: what has changed?

The Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act exists. The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act exists. The amendments to the rape law following the 2012 Delhi gang rape tightened definitions and increased penalties. Representation of women in local governance has expanded significantly in several states. Movements like #MeToo opened conversations that were previously sealed in silence.

And yet conviction rates in rape cases remain abysmally low. Institutional barriers to reporting remain steep, particularly for Dalit and Adivasi women, for whom the police are often not a resource but a threat. Atrocities under the Prevention of Atrocities Act continue. The intersections of caste and gender violence have not been adequately addressed by a legal framework that still tends to treat caste atrocity and sexual violence as separate rather than interlocking crimes.

The landscape, then, is one of real but partial gains — of laws that exist but are selectively enforced, of a public discourse that has expanded but not always deepened, and of a political environment that, in many cases, has grown more hostile to the most vulnerable.

Solidarity - Channelling Ourselves

What does it mean, then, to speak of solidarity? Not solidarity as sentiment, as the feeling of connection that comes from shared outrage on social media or the warmth of a conference room. Solidarity, I mean here, as political practice, as sustained commitment that costs something and changes something.

Solidarity in this context requires several things simultaneously. And this is why we should build solidarity and equip ourselves. It is about talking about how solidarity requires institutional presence and persistence. The women's movement has won real things- laws, precedents, cultural shifts that have genuinely altered what is permissible. The question is how these gains can be defended, especially in political climates that are hostile to them.

How can we imagine and materialise solidarity in a democracy that is not merely procedural but lived? A democracy in which a Dalit woman's body can be cremated in secret by state officials is not a democracy that has resolved the women's question. It is a democracy that has not yet fully decided whether all women are fully human before the law.

The act of coming together, of sharing analysis; it is itself a political act, to understand how the faces of violence shift, how new legal and technological tools both enable and threaten women's lives, how global and local currents interact.

But more than this, it is also necessary to recommit to solidarity that is not selective, to a democracy we are still building, to a women's movement that is honest about its fault lines because it is serious about crossing them.

This is about understanding what remains at stake. The unfinished question of women's freedom is also always the unfinished question of democracy itself. We are here because we have not given up on either.