We must build feminist spaces rooted not just in ideological loyalty, but also in accountability and care. Survivors must be heard without fear of being gaslit. This requires confronting power even within our own movements, our caste and class biases, and rejecting both right-wing co-option and left-liberal cowardice.

By Anuradha Banerji

Groundxero | May 30, 2025

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Recently, a survivor came forward on Instagram to share a painful account of abuse—emotional, physical, and sexual—at the hands of a well-known progressive independent journalist. While the independent media outlet has stated that it will  investigate as per applicable laws, what happened next is telling of the political times we live in. Despite the survivor’s clear plea not to vilify Kashmiri Muslim men or their communities, the right-wing online machinery seized the account. But this wasn’t done out of concern for justice. Instead, it served two clear political goals: to discredit the media outset’s critical journalism in these authoritarian times, and to reinforce the harmful myth of “love jihad”. The survivor’s voice got buried in this cacophony. Yes, the progressive ecosystem must do better, sexual violence in these spaces is not a fluke. There has to be acknowledgement, support and redressal. But while we hold the progressive spaces accountable, we cannot let the right wing hijack the conversation.

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By now, the playbook is familiar. A woman from a left-leaning or progressive space dares to speak out about sexual harassment or assault. Within hours, her story is not only all over social media — it has been seized, distorted, and amplified by the Indian right-wing ecosystem. What begins as a survivor’s search for justice swiftly mutates into a grotesque political weapon, aimed not at justice for the woman, but at discrediting the entire Left, feminist movements, progressive spaces and in fact progressive thought itself. Meanwhile, the ruling party and its affiliates — whose own ranks overflow with allegations of sexual misconduct — remain untouched, unbothered, and immune to the same scrutiny.

By weaponizing these stories, the right wing discourages women from speaking out. Survivors fear that their pain will be used as ammunition in a war they did not ask to fight. That their trauma will become a talking point for the right, stripped of nuance, stripped of consent. They worry that seeking accountability will become a tool for fascists to attack the very values the survivors believe in — justice, equality, and solidarity.

And they’re not wrong to worry.

We’ve seen this play out time and again — in the targeting of student activists, in the smearing of NGOs, in the maligning of entire protest movements — how the right-wing machinery goes into an overdrive.

This is the bind survivors face: silence invites internal censure, and speech becomes a weapon for right-wing smear campaigns. The politics of credibility are cruelly stacked.

When misogyny meets state complicity

Despite feminist struggles for decades, sexual violence lurks in every nook and corner of the society — in our homes, in our friend circles, in the places we work and study, on the streets, in boardrooms, in progressive spaces like democratic groups and NGOs, in the higher echelons of state machinery, and is in fact deeply embedded in the bedrock of the state  power itself.

Sexual violence and access to justice have been sites of contestation historically, no matter which party ruled at the centre; however since 2014, the state has systematically rolled back the hard-won gains of feminist movements.

From dismantling autonomous bodies like Gender Senstive Committee Against Sexual Harassment (2017) in universities to not just creating the bogey of regressive ideas like “love jihad” but using that to arrest and target interfaith couples, the state has sought to replace feminist justice with patriarchal control. Progressive voices are branded as  “anti-national,” and women who speak out are trolled, threatened, or silenced. Laws are manipulated to surveil, not support. Labor protections have been diluted, and gender justice sidelined in favour of cultural nationalism.

Behind the rhetorical tokenism of “Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao” lies a political ecosystem that actively cultivates misogyny, punishes feminist dissent, and protects the perpetrators of gendered violence—especially when they are ideologically aligned with the regime.

Survivors and victims of rape and assault increasingly encounter a hostile legal and political apparatus—evident in the Unnao (2017), Kathua (2018) and Hathras (2020) cases, where BJP leaders defended the accused or attempted to discredit the survivors. The state has also fostered a climate where misogyny thrives online. Right-wing troll armies routinely target outspoken women journalists, activists, and students with rape threats and communal slurs. Instead of curbing this hate, leaders from the right wing parties amplify it, encourage it, applaud it —directly or through strategic silence.

Consider the case of Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, the powerful BJP MP and former Wrestling Federation chief, who was accused by multiple women wrestlers in 2023 of sustained sexual harassment. It took months of protest, hunger strikes, and global attention before even the appearance of action was taken. The party stood by him for far too long. The Prime Minister remained conspicuously silent. And now, the court has quashed the case citing “lack of evidence.” In a deeply familiar and enraging pattern, the burden of proof was placed squarely on the shoulders of the survivors, as if their courage to come forward, their detailed testimonies which could have dire effect on their careers, and the public protests of national-level athletes were not enough.

But what does “lack of evidence” mean in cases of sexual violence—especially when the accused is a powerful, politically protected, and male?

It means that the law still demands wounds that bleed and witnesses that testify, despite knowing sexual violence is often committed in private, by those who wield power precisely because they can ensure silence. It means that trauma, shame, institutional indifference, and fear are not considered legitimate obstacles to immediate reporting or perfect recollection. It means that the voices of complainants—especially those from marginalized groups—must pass impossible tests of consistency, purity, and credibility, while the accused enjoys the benefit of the doubt.

When the court says there is no evidence, it’s not merely making a legal observation—it is making a political statement: that even when women protest at Jantar Mantar, when they risk their careers, reputations, and personal safety to speak out, their words will still be dismissed. That the system will always find a way to protect its own.

“We fought for dignity,” one of the wrestlers had said during their protest. The court, and the state, have now confirmed that dignity is reserved for men who serve power.

In one of the most harrowing cases of the 2002 Gujarat pogrom, Bilkis Bano—a pregnant Muslim woman—was gangraped by a mob, and 14 members of her family, including her 3-year-old daughter, were brutally murdered. The perpetrators were affiliated with right-wing Hindu nationalist groups. Though they were convicted, the Gujarat government controversially granted them early release in 2022. Shockingly, the rapists were welcomed with garlands, sweets, and public celebration by their supporters—an act that laid bare the deep impunity and communal bias within the system. Bilkis’s trauma was not just denied justice—it was mocked in full public view.

A more recent example was the trolling of Himashi Narwal (2025). After losing her husband, an army commander killed in the Pahalgam attack, she displayed extraordinary courage and compassion. In her moment of profound grief, she urged people not to use her personal tragedy to vilify Kashmiris or Muslims. Instead of respect, she was met with a torrent of online abuse from right-wing trolls who accused her of being anti-national. Her appeal for humanity and restraint disrupted the dominant narrative of communal scapegoating—and for that, she was targeted.

The right wing tolerates women’s pain only when it serves their agenda. Empathy, when principled, is punished.

National Human Rights Commission: The Quiet Enabler

India’s National Human Rights Commission (NHRC)—established to safeguard rights—has, in practice, become a selective and compromised institution. It has repeatedly failed to intervene meaningfully in cases of sexual and physical violence by state actors, particularly during conflict, custody, and protest situations as pointed out by  democratic groups.

This is not just a national failure. In 2023, the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions (GANHRI) downgraded NHRC’s status from ‘A’ to ‘B’, citing its lack of independence, weak engagement with civil society, and questionable appointments—especially of former police and bureaucrats with poor rights records. With this downgrade, NHRC lost its voting rights at the UN Human Rights Council, exposing its international credibility crisis.

Given this history, NHRC’s rare interventions on sexual violence—especially those that conveniently echo state narratives—must be viewed with skepticism. In the recent case involving the progressive journalist, the NHRC’s intervention is deeply disingenuous—raising absurd and intimidating queries clearly aimed at only harassing and discrediting the progressive media outlet.

The dangerous trend of co-opting liberal language to disguise misogyny

Bell hooks, in her seminal work, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981), warns against the commodification of feminist rhetoric by dominant systems, emphasizing that such co-optation strips feminism of its radical critique of systemic power.

This tactic — of selectively using feminist language to undermine progressive spaces while remaining committed to patriarchal, casteist hierarchies — is not new. It echoes colonial-era “civilising missions” where white men claimed to save brown women from brown men, all while denying them rights and autonomy. Today, it is the Hindu nationalist state playing saviour.

They have long mastered the deceitful  art of weaponizing women’s pain—not to seek justice, but to consolidate power. Across contexts and geographies, women’s trauma has been invoked selectively to justify violence, stoke communal tensions, and delegitimize political opposition. In India, the trope of the “dishonoured Hindu woman” has been central to the Hindutva narrative, used to justify anti-Muslim violence from Partition to Gujarat 2002. The trauma of women is championed only when it aligns with majoritarian agendas; it is silenced or erased when inconvenient—such as in cases of custodial sexual violence and the use of sexual violence as a tool of state repression  in places like Kashmir, Chhattisgarh, or Manipur; Adivasi women subjected to sexual violence by security forces in Bastar; Muslim women targeted during communal violence in Muzaffarnagar and Gujarat, or being auctioned online; Dalit women whose cases rarely even make headlines unless activists force the issue. And it has invisibilized the violence against queer persons altogether. The right wing has no words, no outrage, and no concern for them. Their pain does not serve its politics.

A Call for Accountability

Yes, the progressive ecosystem must do better. Few betrayals cut as deep as sexual violence within progressive spaces. These incidents are not a fluke, but a symptom of a larger unwillingness to confront power, even among those who claim to dismantle it.

Democratic movements and other progressive spaces must take seriously the voices of survivors within their ranks. They must also invest in a culture of consent and accountability that goes beyond platitudes. It means centering the voices of survivors, not just when there is an incident, but as a core part of how the movement operates. Most importantly, there must be a willingness to lose people. Protecting the integrity of a movement means being ready to let go of influential figures when they cause harm — no matter how charismatic, well-connected, or beloved they are. A movement that cannot hold itself accountable will eventually implode under the weight of its own contradictions. 

Where do we go then?

In a society where people get their information from social media, where the right wing has set up factories of hate and misinformation, it is no surprise that there is hardly any critical voice or reasoning that counters this propaganda; for the strands of critical thoughts that do exist, they get silenced or shadow banned.

For critical thinking to exist and thrive, there needs to be time and space to read and engage, but in a neoliberal economy where between work, home and the precarity of life in general, there is no time to rest; where even our free time has been turned into a market commodity, our intellectual lives are being slowly choked into non-existence. Especially with the crackdown on academics, universities, activist spaces and movements that promote and nurture progressive thinking, dialogue and debate; and the court’s ruling in favour of the state rather than standing up to them to uphold the constitutional values, has a dire and chilling effect. It’s no surprise then that fewer people are challenging the discourse fed to them, and even fewer are having the courage to write or talk about them. As some recent judgements have shown, if the state decides to attack you, even the court won’t stand in your corner, no matter how unfair, misguided and outright ludicrous the charges are. You are on your own.

Where, then, must the survivor go, when both silence and speech feel like betrayal? In progressive spaces, survivors are too often met with defensiveness, denial, or minimisation—especially when the accused holds political or cultural capital. When they do speak, the right wing co-opts their pain to wage campaigns of hate, erasing their agency and weaponizing their trauma against communities already under siege. Caught between impunity and appropriation, the survivor is doubly punished.

We must build feminist spaces rooted not just in ideological loyalty, but also in accountability and care. Survivors must be heard without fear of being gaslit. This requires confronting power even within our own movements, our caste and class biases, and rejecting both right-wing co-option and left-liberal cowardice. Only when we centre survivors—not the reputations of men or institutions—can we begin to make room for truth, healing, and justice.

 [Anuradha is a feminist activist and an independent researcher]