Is violence against marginalized women so normalized that it doesn’t shock society? Or is the rape culture so deeply rooted that some lives are simply not regarded as justice? These questions follow us when you look at the lack of reaction to the recent incidents of gender -specific violence and murders. In the night of May 23, 2025, a 45-year-old tribe woman from the Turmeric tribe in the Khandwa district of Madhya Pradesh was brutal Condemn From two men from their own community. She bleed to death on May 24, 2025 until noon. The lack of social media demonstration, solidarity post or even a heading shows a worrying indifference. How many women still have to pay before we stop and listen? When Dalit or Adivasi women are raped, what does our collective outrage stop? When will we discard the framework conditions of the selective outrage that this patriarchal society flows into us?
Source: Fii
Rape is a terrible crime regardless of the victim’s identity and can not only be defined by its severity or extremity. But in practice, not all rape victims will be remembered equally. Public attention often collects for those that concern urban, suburban, upper caste or bourgeois persons. If injuries are visibly brutally or in detail, tend to stir a stronger reaction. This creates a dangerous hierarchy in which only the most extreme cases are bothered.
A hierarchy of suffering
This layered neglect cannot simply be understood by gender. In their essay Gendering castUma chakravarti writes that Kaste is not only about hierarchy, but also about the control of a woman’s sexuality. This control takes on a different form for trunk women. While the purity codes upper caste may not apply in the same way, tribal women are instead susceptible to systemic neglect, deletion and lack of justice. They do not fit properly in feminist framework conditions for Savarna or legal mainstream fantasy. Sharmila Reges concept of a “dalit feminist point of view“” Does violence not only help as an event, but as a structure. She argues that sexual violence is shaped by caste and patriarchal ideologies who try to punish women from oppressed communities just because they are visible and mobile.
Not all rape victims are reminded equally. Public attention often collects for those that concern urban, suburban, upper caste or bourgeois persons. If injuries are visibly brutally or in detail, tend to stir a stronger reaction.
The tribal woman in Khandwa had gone to a wedding, and for many this was just enough to hurt against her. Gopal Guru, in Dalit, speak us differently, reminds us that silence is a socially produced action. The way people, the media and even social media have remained silent about the case of Khandwa, illustrates how Guru is called “graded outrage”. This means that not all rape cases are treated equally. If the survivor is adivasi, dalit or other marginalized communities, violence is often ignored or accepted without outrage. Clenshaw’s theory of intersectionality Offers a frame to understand why certain survivors disappear from public memory. The Khandwa victim was not only a woman, but also a tribe that was shaped by overlapping susceptibility systems, since she was also a tribal woman in a castle -stubborn society.
While some incidents of sexual violence against dalit women, such as the case of Hathras, have briefly entered the public conversation, the suffering of Adivasi women often remains completely ignored. The gangrape and the death of the Adivasi woman in Khandwa did not lead to public outrage. This silence reflects how the mainstream society often decides which life and body it is worth being grief.
Source: Fii
Scientists such as Sharmila Regre and Gopal Guru have shown how the judicial system is shaped by interests of the upper caste. It only reacts when violence affects the rooms of the urban privilege. Even the limited support that Dalit women sometimes preserve is not extended to Adivasi women. Her communities are already regarded as far or outside of political imagination, and if atrocities come to this silence against them, it has a step towards further marginalization.
The extinguishing pattern
In the months after the incident with Khandwa, similar cases with adivasi women continue to appear. In Odishas Jajpur district, A 32-year-old tribal woman was enlarged During the hut from goats in a forest on July 1, 2025. Just two weeks earlier in the Keonjhar district, A 17-year-old adivasi girls Was raped and later hanging on a tree. A few weeks before the rape of Khandwa, a tribal woman was reportedly sexually attacked and murdered Near the Water Works Road in Nishat, Srinagar. Although arrests were made and local outrage occurred, the case did not occur in the national feminist discourse.
The Brahmin nature of state institutions shapes how violence is understood, reported and hindered. In these cases, rape is gender -specific and by caste and embedded in a social structure that normalizes violence against the marginalized and at the same time refuses legal recognition.
While liberal and feminists often raise their voices, they rarely confront the box realities that are based on such violence. As a criticism of Dalit and Adivasi activists, feminist and progressive spaces remain deeply formed through Brahminian privileges. The populist slogan “Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao” feels empty when Dalit and Adivasi women are neither protected nor remembrance. If society does not understand that the caste is deeply associated with gender-specific violence, both the state and mainstream feminism will repeatedly ignore the voices of marginalized women.
Remember justice and feminist reaction
The reaction to these cases justifies the exam. Why didn’t they circulate like the cases of RG Kar or Nirbhaya? Is it reserved for outrage for the victims with which society can identify or with whom? Are tribal women too far or too different to cause public grief? Throughout India, several Adivasi women have been raped in recent months, many of them of minors, some of them have been murdered, and yet the outrage is steamed, if at all. It indicates how the perspectives of the dominant boxes shape what is collectively regarded as tragic, and rape is only considered terrible if they threaten ideas of the upper caste of seriousness or security.
Source: Fii
Feminists, especially in academic and activist circles, must treat messages about tribal regions as centrally to understand gender -specific violence in India and not as footnotes. Legal reforms are necessary, but not enough, and institutional justice must be accompanied by cultural justice. Society has to talk about the names that are not in trend and remember that they question the silence that surrounds it.
The Brahminian nature of state institutions Forms how violence is understood, reported and saved. In these cases, rape is gender -specific and by caste and embedded in a social structure that normalizes violence against the marginalized and at the same time refuses legal recognition. Criminal judicial systems such as the death penalty in the Nirbhaya case cannot understand this layered violence.
Dalit feminists have rightly questioned whether existing laws that were hit in Savarna frameworks can ever do fully do justice to Dalite and tribal women. What happens if justice is conveyed by caste and class? In a country in which women are said repeatedly that their victim has to fit into a box to be recognized, the death of a 45-year-old tribal woman in Khandwa reminds us of the costs of invisibility. Do not let society wait for a further death to remember it.