51Karuna Nundy is i ghting to
criminalize marital rape in India
By Astha Rajvanshi/Delhi
WORLDIN 2017, KARUNA NUNDY WROTE AN OPEN LETTER TO INDIAN WOMEN, LAYING
out the protections in the country’s constitution if they are raped, assaulted, seek-
ing an abortion, or demanding fair treatment from an employer. “I write to you
today so you will know your power,” she wrote. “The State must enforce your
basic rights, but you are in charge of your l ourishing. Promise me you’ll back
yourself when nobody else will.”
“I was thinking about my niece, my friend, my cousin, my client,” recalls the
45-year-old lawyer at the Supreme Court of India, sitting on her leafy green bal-
cony in South Delhi in March. “What I wanted to say to them is that they deserve
to be who they are, without having to i t into a box.”
Her readers seemed to take that message to heart. A month after the letter was
published in Vogue India, a 26-year-old woman in Delhi found Nundy’s number
online and called her. She told Nundy she had been raped by her husband every
night since their arranged marriage two years earlier. “In India, people don’t see
it as rape if you’re married,” she tells TIME over the phone i ve years on, request-
ing anonymity to speak freely about her experiences. Facing immense pressure
from her family to make things work, she felt she had two options: “Either to
just end my life, or to revolt, something I’d never done before.”
The woman didn’t want to report her husband to the police or go to the courts,
but she wanted to get out. Nundy agreed to help her. At the local police sta-
tion, Nundy i led an ai davit stating the woman had left home of her own ac-
cord and did not want to be contacted by her family, in case they approached
the police to search for her. Then she
accompanied the woman to the air-
port to ensure she got on a l ight out
of the city. “I couldn’t believe Ka-
runa Nundy listened to my story and
helped me,” the woman says. “I felt
like a bird i nally freed from her cage.”
For Nundy, the experience made one
thing clear: “The institution of marriage
should not include the license to rape.”
Right now, the law would disagree.
Marital rape isn’t a crime in India, one of
three dozen countries—including Ban-
gladesh, Iran, Nigeria, and Libya—where
it’s still legal for a man to have noncon-
sensual sex with his wife. This is despite
a national survey published by the gov-
ernment in 2018 that found that 86%
of the female sexual violence survivors
surveyed had been assaulted by their
former or current husband. The current
laws criminalize any form of sexual as-
sault and domestic violence but prevent
the crime from being called “rape” if it’s
between a husband and wife—thereby
reducing both severity and sentencing.
“To me, it’s one of the problems in
the law that goes to the heart of the
worst patriarchy,” Nundy said in court
in January. “If you’re legally not allowed
to sexually assault, slap, molest, or killA CRUSADE
FOR JUSTICE
PHOTOGRAPH BY
PRARTHNA SINGH FOR TIMENUNDY,
PHOTOGRAPHED
OUTSIDE THE
SUPREME COURT OF
INDIA, ON MARCH 3