Where Are India’s Gisèle Pelicots?

In 2024, Gisèle Pelicot became a new feminist icon. Her response in the face of inhuman brutality has been a source of strength and solidarity to women across the globe. Her actions, her unflinching demand for justice, her honest vulnerability and her gumption of speaking to women at large has left a mark in the hearts of many. “Shame must change sides”, she says. What does that phrase mean to us in India?  

Gisèle Pelicot is the survivor of an ongoing French mass rape case where a 71-year-old man drugged his wife aged 72 and raped her, while also inviting dozens of other men to do the same. He watched or filmed these men, over the course of a decade.  

Also reported in October 2024 was the case of a cop in the UK who drugged and raped his wife. He, too, had other men rape her during parties. She was later found dead in a hotel room. This cop was also on a rape task force of the UK police.  

These incidents have sparked a discourse amongst women online about how many husbands drug and rape their wives, an act of marital rape that is illegal in many countries. India is not one of them.  

In India, different shades of support comes from different quarters of Indian men regrading marital rape. Online trolls will pledge to boycott marriage if marital rape is outlawed, some even go as far as to sacrifice their underwears by burning them to protest the court hearings on changing the laws on the matter. More troubling is the nature of the support from a much larger group of Indian men on this issue: the silent and complicit kind of support, where they simply don’t value the bodily autonomy of their wives enough to even bother to comment on signing a document which allows them to violate the ones they may claim to love and cherish.

Gisèle Pelicot’s husband drugged her over a decade and invited men to rape her along with him. In India, men need not even take the effort to drug their wives to rape them. They simply can. Drugged or not, it is a married man’s right to rape their wife.  

Indian women are watching the marvel that is Gisèle Pelicot as she holds each and every one of her rapists accountable, naming them, allowing the video tapes of her rapes to be shown in court, just so that shame can change sides. She is making it very clear that it is not her shame, it is the rapist's shame. But, while we watch her do this, we cannot help but notice the glaring flaw in our own legal system which will never allow us to do what Pelicot has done. In India, the shame lies with us because we cannot even file an FIR to the cause that our husbands have raped us.  

While women like Bhanwari Devi, Soni Sori, and many more Indian women have fought long, hard battles against their own mass rapes, these were only possible because the perpetrators were not their husbands. Where do India’s Gisèle Pelicots go to seek justice? Where is the court that will hear them? 

Her statement ‘Shame must change sides' has many meanings to those who are listening. To French and English women, it is a message of solidarity to be free of shame for something that was done to them; to not become smaller from the shame inflicted by assault. For Indian women, I believe, it is more.

It is a way to place the shame rightfully on their husbands, and prospective husbands, sons and any man who marries while merrily enjoying the right to rape his wife. ​​There are many women in India who will have to marry due to a threat to life or physical violence, lack of economic resources, and threat of social isolation/abandonment; however there is a small number of women who are not in that situation and who can question if they want to be associated with an institution that makes them sex slaves to their husbands.  

The sentiment that many Indian men, from Twitter trolls to high court judges, have made clear is that they want to safeguard this right. They want to legally be able to rape their wives. Clearly in India men don’t feel shame for this.  

However, for women, it’s time to truly consider whether marriage is really the ‘happily ever after’ we were taught it was. Or, is it a waiver to be raped?