At the police station, she was initially ignored. The police did not file a First Information Report (FIR) immediately; they questioned her character and the veracity of her story. It was only after the intervention of women’s rights organizations that the FIR was registered 52 hours after the incident.
The judgment explicitly stated: "A woman used to having sexual intercourse with her husband cannot feel pain while having sex with a stranger."
In 1992, Bhanwari Devi was 35 years old. As part of her job with the WDP, she was tasked with grassroots social engineering: convincing villagers to abandon the practice of child marriage. The Rajasthan government had launched a campaign against the ritual of Bal Vivah , which was rampant in the rural pockets of Jaipur district. bhanwari devi
The petitioners argued that the 1992 Bhateri gang rape was not an isolated crime of passion. It was a form of used to punish a woman for stepping outside her prescribed social role—a saathin (a government worker) doing her job.
What is less known is that the directly cites the Vishakha case in its preamble. The legal architecture that allowed protests to demand "capital punishment for rapists" was built on the foundation laid by Bhanwari’s PIL. At the police station, she was initially ignored
There are two prominent Indian women known as . Each became a central figure in landmark legal and criminal cases that significantly impacted Indian society and politics. 1. Bhanwari Devi (Social Worker and Activist) Bhanwari Devi
At the time of Bhanwari Devi’s rape, India had no specific law against sexual harassment at the workplace. The Indian Penal Code only covered rape and outraging modesty, but it did not address the systemic power dynamics of harassment. The Supreme Court of India took up the PIL (titled Vishakha & Ors v. State of Rajasthan ), using Bhanwari Devi’s case as the foundational fact. The judgment explicitly stated: "A woman used to
Yet, on November 28, 1995, the trial judge acquitted all five men. The reasoning was stunning in its patriarchal audacity. The judge argued that since Bhanwari Devi was a sathin who moved freely among men for her work, she was not "chaste." More infamously, the judge reasoned that a high-caste Gujjar man would not “lower himself” to rape a Dalit woman because she was untouchable. The judgment stated: “It is unbelievable that an upper-caste person would touch a lower-caste woman… It is difficult to believe that they would like to pollute their mouth by kissing a lower-caste woman.”