December 16, 2012

Some dates fix themselves in memory whether you want them to or not. December 16, 2012, is one of those. A young woman was brutally raped in Delhi and left to die, and the city, then the country, then people far beyond it, refused to look away.

I was there as a photographer. A group of us took our cameras into the protests, not to make anything of it for ourselves, but because it felt like the only honest thing to do with a lens at that moment. First the city came out, then the rest of the country, all genders, all ages, standing in for a sister, a daughter, a friend, a stranger who could have been any of them.

The protests were not gentle, and neither was the response to them. We were pushed back, some of us beaten, some hurt badly. The crowd held anyway. There was a kind of resolve on those streets I have not seen before or since, the sense that people were not going to move until something changed.

Nirbhaya did not survive. The country mourned a daughter it had failed to protect.

One of the photographs I took in those days was later used on the cover of a report on the case by Urvashi Butalia. I was proud that the work traveled, but it was never really about the image. It was about being present, about not turning the camera away from something that needed witnesses.

The legal process ground on for years. It went through the courts, through a suicide in custody, through a juvenile sentence that felt impossibly small, through death sentences, until the four men were finally hanged in 2020. Justice, of a kind, eventually.

Looking back now, more than a decade on, the thing I keep returning to is not the verdict. It is the question that hung over all of it and still does. The year has changed many times over. Has the situation? I photographed those protests believing they were a turning point. I am still not sure they were. And I think holding that uncertainty honestly, rather than pretending the fight is finished, is the least those weeks asked of any of us who were there.