Column | Yogita Bhayana: fighting the epidemic of sexual violence in India

Yogita Bhayana fights against sexual violence in India, advocating for a rape-free society amidst alarming statistics and societal indifference.

Yogita Bhayana, 45, is the sutradhaar (narrator) of the endless horror that Indian girls and women relive every day. Her X timeline jumps from one rape to the next, each more brutal, each victim younger, telling a story about this country that most prefer to ignore.

As a social activist and founder of People Against Rape in India (PARI), Bhayana urges women to rise against intimate partner violence and street assaults. In a country where 81 women report rapes daily (National Crime Records Bureau, 2023), most by known men, Bhayana dreams the impossible dream of a rape-free India.

You’ve likely seen videos of police dragging her during a protest at India Gate with the 2017 Unnao gang-rape survivor and her mother. This came after the Delhi High Court suspended former Bharatiya Janata Party MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar’s sentence for raping the then teenager; the Supreme Court soon stayed the order.

Nine years on, the survivor battles fresh trauma, fending off online attacks by Sengar’s daughters and their supporters, who she says exposed her identity. Bhayana’s hands are full shielding and counselling her. “The courts are on our side,” she reassures.

She’s torn about where she should go next. Patna, where a teenage medical aspirant was assaulted and found dead in her hostel? Or Manipur, site of a 2023 ATM abduction, gang rape and torture that resulted in the death of the teenage survivor this month from complications? “I want to go to both places, but if I look in Delhi too, I will find many such cases,” says Bhayana. She says she chases the cases everyone ignores.

I wonder aloud if she ever tires of the relentless advocacy. Of course, she says. “I feel frustrated, exhausted, I don’t feel in the game. I feel like giving up multiple times,” says Bhayana. “I don’t know in which direction to run.”