On the night of May 11, 2026, a 30-year-old factory worker in Delhi asked a stranger at a bus stop what time it was. That small, simple act – a woman, tired after her shift, trying to get to her home – was enough for two men to drag her into a sleeper bus, repeatedly rape and dismember her while the vehicle was passing through the streets of Rani Bagh.
Following her medical examination, the survivor – a married mother of three – reportedly refused to remain hospitalized for long. She wanted to go home. His children needed him.
Read it again. She had just been gang raped. His injuries were described as serious. And his first instinct was not degradation, not sadness, not anger. It was: My kids need to be fed.
This is not a story about his strength, although that is clearly extraordinary. It’s a story of what we’ve done to women like her – silently, for generations – before any bus driver ever looked at her. We have trained women of her class so well to self-efface that even her trauma will have to wait until her obligations are in line. Factory Shift was for the world. Cooking was for the family. Apparently her body was for everyone else but her.
The driver and conductor have been arrested. We are once again reminded of the 2012 Delhi gang rape. We need to stop. Not because the comparison is wrong – it’s painful, quite rightly so. Thirteen years after the 2012 gang rape that sparked sweeping reforms in India’s sexual harassment laws, another alleged rape inside a moving bus in Delhi has raised fresh questions over women’s safety in the national capital. Same city. Same manner. The same hunters – men tasked with taking the women to safety. The only difference is that this woman survived. And she’s a factory worker, not a student, which means she’ll probably receive a degree of resentment.
That disparity is a story worth telling in itself.
In India alone, 29,536 cases of rape were reported in 2024. According to the NCRB 2021 report, 31,677 rape cases were reported – an average of 86 every day. The situation peaked in 2016 with about 39,000 cases. In 2018, NCRB data recorded 33,356 rape cases – one every 16 minutes. And approximately 89% of rapes are committed by persons known to the victim.
These are only the reported cases. Most go unreported – due to shame, family pressure, distrust of the police and, in cases involving known criminals, the social cost of speaking out.
The conviction rate between 2018 and 2022 has been 27-28%. For comparison, Britain’s conviction rate is more than 60%, according to figures from the Crown Prosecution Service. Of the approximately 2.76 lakh cases that required hearing between 2017 and 2022, only a third were completed. And if you are a Dalit woman, the conviction rate drops to less than 2%, according to the 2022 civil society presentation at the UN Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review.
India did this work after 2012. Justice Verma Committee presented historic recommendations. The Criminal Law (Amendment) Act 2013 was passed. Minimum sentences were increased. Fast track court was announced. Nirbhaya Fund was created. As of March 2025, 802 One Stop Centers are operational across India.
These matters at the margins. But they have taken no steps towards impunity – because we have created a law of punishment ignoring the basic structure of justice. Harsh sentences can actually have adverse effects: where police investigations are shoddy and evidentiary requirements are not met, judges become reluctant to convict. We raised the stakes without improving the game. The Nirbhaya Fund continues to be criticized for underutilization, with only a fraction of the allocated resources reaching the intended beneficiaries.
We mistake law for change. They are not the same thing.
Here’s the question we honestly refuse to ask: Amidst each headline-grabbing case, what action have any of us taken consistently?
Protested after December 2012. We changed the laws. We named a fund. Then we went back to our lives. Since then, more than 30,000 rape cases have been reported every year in India continuously for more than a decade. Eighty-six a day. That is not news. That is not anger. That’s background noise.
What about consent and bodily autonomy has been mainstreamed in the school curriculum? What has changed in how survivors are received at police stations? What has changed in the stories we tell boys about what it means to be a man? Have we spent all our time ’empowering’ girls without teaching boys how to be strong girls and women? What have we actually done, consistently – in our homes, classrooms and workplaces?
The honest answer for most of us is nothing. Or very little. We participated in a candle march. We changed a profile picture. We signed a petition. The outrage is real. There is no commitment.
We are a country that wakes up and then goes back to sleep when rape is on the front page.
Before we discuss these two individuals, we must hold one fact constant: approximately 89% of rapes in India are committed by individuals known to the victim. Husband. Relative. Neighbour. Colleague. Men with homes, income and social standing. Men who are not anonymous, not unemployed, not lost in a city far from home. Major rape in India is not the stranger on the dark street – it is the person at the dinner table.
This matters because any theory of causality that centers poverty or migration as the primary driver is not only empirically wrong, but also dangerous. This lets most criminals off the hook. The implication is that only prosperity and inertia will solve the problem. They won’t.
So, what does it explain – across all categories, across all classes, in all contexts?
The belief that women should be controlled. That female autonomy is an excitement. The single woman, the woman who refuses, the woman who earns, the woman who steps outside the boundaries drawn for herself, she is a woman who demands something. This ideology is not the property of the poor or the migrants or the uneducated. It is distributed throughout our society – reproduced in homes, movies, classrooms, and temples, the way we raise boys to expect service and girls to provide it.
In this specific case, the structural context adds something. The bus was registered from Bihar. The accused are a driver and conductor – informal economy workers, far from home, in one of the world’s most anonymous cities. According to the government’s own periodic labor force survey, urban youth unemployment in India was projected to hit 13.6% in 2025 – a figure that hides millions of people in low-dignified, purposeless work without any stability or social accountability.
These people left their villages and moved towards the city in the hope of something better. The city gave them a bus to travel in the dark with no one watching.
The city did not teach them their rights. But it also gave them something arguably more dangerous: complete unaccountability. No family is watching. No community knows his or her name. A moving bus with the curtains drawn is as close to a consequence-free space as our society produces. They did this because they believed – correctly, as it turned out – that no one was watching and no one would be able to stop them.
This is why the solution cannot begin and end with policing. It must start in the homes and classrooms where boys learn – or don’t learn – that women are full human beings, not resources to be managed and punished if they resist.
Three things, in particular, require sustained commitment rather than periodic urgency.
First, to complete the trial in a timely manner with public accountability. The Supreme Court should establish a tracked, publicly reported dashboard of the fast-track court’s performance in sexual assault cases. No other case would fester for a decade. Delay in justice in rape cases is not just a denial of justice – it is in itself a form of ongoing violence.
Second, mandatory police reform is linked to state funding. States must demonstrate specific, measurable improvements in the quality of rape investigations – forensic standards, survivor-sensitive protocols, first-responder training – as a precondition for central funding under women safety schemes. The current system funnels money to states while systemic failures continue unchallenged.
Third, we must eliminate contextual discretion. Gender-based violence is a public health and education crisis, not just a law and order problem. It means consistent, non-glamorous work: equitable distribution of domestic labor in our own homes; Compulsory, age-appropriate consent education in every school; Bystander intervention as a social norm rather than an act of extraordinary courage.
The woman from Rani Bagh was dragged into the bus in a residential area. Maybe someone might have seen it. We go through harassment every day. Selective attention, selective sadness, the decision to appear only when the story is big enough – this is also a form of collusion.
The survivor of the May 11 incident did not hold any press conference. She went home.
That work – which returned to duty immediately after the disaster – is both a testament to extraordinary resilience and an indictment of us as a society. He hoped there would be no room to scatter. There is no system that can stop him. There is no community that says: You don’t have to cook tonight. Tonight, we’ll take it for you.
We have created a society in which women must earn the right to suffer in an accurate, visible, empathetic way – and yet, support is temporary, justice unlikely, and hope for a return to duty immediate.
A working mother was gang-raped in a moving bus in Delhi. When it was over, he thought of his children.
We all should think about that.
(Views expressed are personal)
This article is written by Urvashi Prasad, Senior Fellow, Pahal India Foundation and former Director, NITI Aayog, New Delhi.
