Chhattisgarh HC verdict in rape case turns back the clock

The acquittal by the Chhattisgarh High Court of the accused in a 2004 rape case in Dhamtari district, on the ground that penetration is integral to the act, comes as a jarring setback to what has been decades of slow, hard-won progress in India’s rape jurisprudence. The High Court has applied the law as it stood before amendments in 2013, when Section 375 of the Indian Penal Code interpreted rape narrowly. In the aftermath of the horrific December 2012 Delhi gang rape and the nationwide protests it ignited, the recommendations of the Justice J S Verma committee had helped reshape public and legal understanding by foregrounding consent and acknowledging the layered realities of sexual violence. The Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013, formalised it into a more expansive, dignity-centred approach. In its retreat into a narrow formalism that privileges outdated distinctions over lived harm, the Chhattisgarh HC’s ruling risks reviving the hyper-technical scrutiny the reforms were meant to dismantle. The arc of gender justice in the country has not always been even but it has increasingly sought to move away from the hair-splitting technicalities that make survivors vulnerable to narrow-minded scrutiny and moral judgement, especially in institutional setups whose framework remains stubbornly patriarchal. From the repeated judicial censure of invasive medical practices — the per vaginum examination or the two-finger test, for instance, has had a long history of misuse despite its ban by the apex court — to the 2013 reforms’ insistence that a victim’s character or her sexual experience is irrelevant to the prosecution of sexual offences, there has been a discernible — and encouraging — shift in tone, and a recognition that sexual violence wears many faces. If there is a takeaway from this moment, it is that gender justice cannot afford complacency, that legal reform must remain responsive to contemporary realities — be it the need for gender-neutral sexual-violence laws that acknowledge harm beyond binary frameworks or engaging with the contentious question of marital rape. The commitment to justice ultimately rests not on technical fidelity alone, but on a willingness to confront harm in all its complexity.