For Women, Cities Shrink After Every Atrocity. The Men Who Shrink Them Walk Free

After the Kalkaji rape, Delhi asks women to stay home. Why predators still expect impunity from the law and courts?

Students of Lady Shri Ram College taking out a protest march over the alleged gang-rape near Delhi's Kalkaji Temple.

(Photo: The Quint)

In September 2026, one of the finest colleges this country built for women moved its classes online for a day. Not because Lady Shri Ram College wished to shut its women away, but because they no longer felt safe making the short walk to it.

A 17-year-old had been allegedly raped in a park two kilometres off, and one of the accused shot by police near the college's back gate. By Thursday, it had reopened. That the women stayed home is not the scandal. The scandal is that, in the capital of India in 2026, staying home was the rational choice.

The girl had gone to the Kalkaji temple with a friend and entered the adjoining park at dusk. Police say three men claiming to be policemen separated her from her friend, and one threatened her with a firearm and a knife before assaulting her.

Investigators say the park had no CCTV at its gates, poor lighting, unmanned entrances, a broken boundary wall. The danger was not mysterious. It was infrastructural, and known. The fear that emptied the college was not hysteria—it was arithmetic.

This is the Indian bargain, struck with grim consistency. After every atrocity the response bends towards the women—where they may go, when, with whom, in what clothing—imposed as moral policing when the mood is righteous, absorbed as fear when it is not. Either way a woman's city shrinks while the men who shrank it walk on. We do not cage the crime. We cage the women—or leave them to cage themselves.

Spectacle is Not Deterrence

Kalkaji is not an aberration; it is a fortnight. Within the same stretch, a 10-year-old was assaulted in Sadar Bazar and a 16-year-old gang-raped on a sleeper bus, with more cases involving minors surfacing within days. In Jamui, two Class 10 students were molested, then filmed—Bihar police have booked around 120 accounts for circulating a video that exposed the girl's identity. The assault is one crime. The country that shares the video is another.

Set this beside the arithmetic. India reports around 86 rapes a day—one every 17 minutes—and only what reaches a police station. The NARI 2025 index found 40 percent of women surveyed across 31 cities called their city unsafe. Delhi, which records the worst rate of crimes against women of any major Indian city, sits near the bottom.

I was among the millions traumatised by the 2012 Delhi bus gang-rape. It was meant to be the turning point. More than a decade on, nothing has moved but the address. We have simply stopped being shocked.

After Nirbhaya, we convened our finest legal minds—a former Chief Justice, Justice Leila Seth, Gopal Subramanium. The Verma Committee examined the very measures we are shouting for now, and rejected both the death penalty and chemical castration. Not out of tenderness towards rapists, but because rape is an expression of power, not appetite; spectacle is not deterrence; and the laws we had were enough, if only we implemented them.

We did not.

A Crime of Power Rather Than Desire

So, the same two words return after every case: castration and encounter. Other countries—South Korea, Poland, Russia, Estonia, Indonesia—chemically castrate such offenders, some by court order, some by consent; but the evidence it deters is thin, and it does nothing about a crime of power rather than desire.

As for the encounter, we have already staged it: in this very case, one accused allegedly fired at police and was shot in the leg before capture. Operation Langda, delivered before the outrage even peaked. Ask honestly whether the girl is safer tonight for a bullet the next man will never hear about.

Two weeks ago, my mother and I were in Seoul, without a word of Korean between us. The taxi driver was unsure of our exact drop-off location. He simply called the police. An officer came on the line, told us she had given the driver our destination, and said to call her back if we needed any further help. In a country whose language we could not speak, a stranger in uniform was the one who made us feel safe.

At home, we have learned to fear the uniform. In the Kalkaji park, the three men's first tool was not a weapon but a word—police—because they knew a girl and her friend would believe it, and comply. There, the police reassure lost foreigners; here, predators borrow the badge, and we have stopped expecting the difference to hold.

This is the hollow centre: we no longer trust the police, and we no longer trust the courts. The conviction rate for rape was 27.8 per cent in 2022; roughly 95 per cent of crimes-against-women cases lie pending, the courts clearing about one in 20.

A man weighing whether to follow a girl into a park is not calculating castration statutes. He is betting, correctly, that nothing will happen to him. That bet—the certainty of impunity—is the permission slip, and no penalty however savage on paper, revokes it.

Justice must not only be done; it must be seen to be done, or it deters no one.

A verdict a decade later, after the case has left public memory, is not justice—it is paperwork. And our proportion is inverted: in Jamui the victim's face reached a hundred phones within days, while a convicted rapist's name slips into a backlog. Reverse it.

South Korea names its sex offenders; we shield theirs and shame the girl. We agonise over the accused's rights—his bail, his comfort—and spare none for the woman rebuilding her life while he waits on bail. Certainty needs no cruelty—only investigations that do not leak a child's identity, forensic capacity, courts that finish, and police who patrol the park, not the woman's hemline.

Cage Your Failure, Not the Women

I know how early this begins. As a schoolgirl at one of Delhi's private schools, I sat in my biology lab while the technician masturbated a few feet from me. I was too young to have the word for it; I had only the feeling, and it stayed. Decades on, I felt safer lost in an alien city than I do at home.

Delhi already makes its inhabitants ration their breathing and expects women to ration their movement too. Choke on the air, or take your chances in the park.

And where are the women we sent to power—in Parliament, Cabinet, running ministries, reading these headlines as we do? Across party lines, the ritual never varies: anguish, a report demanded, a candle, a fast-track promise, nothing that touches the machinery.

We find time to debate whether the BRICS Summit banquet should be vegetarian or not while a 17-year-old cannot cross a park safely at dusk. Presence in public office is not protection; silence from those best placed to end this menace, is complicity.

Enough is enough. The measure of a Viksit Bharat is not a new expressway or the size of the GDP. It is whether a girl can cross a park at seven in the evening and come home. Right now, she cannot, and our answer is to keep her out of the park, or leave her too afraid to enter it. Stop caging the women. Cage the failure that keeps letting the perpetrators walk.

(The author is a former Director, NITI Aayog and Senior Fellow, Pahle India Foundation. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author's own. The Quint does not endorse or is responsible for them.)