INDIAN WOMEN ARE ON THE STREETS AGAIN. EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED BUT NOTHING HAS CHANGED!By Shilpa Phadke

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INDIAN WOMEN ARE ON THE STREETS AGAIN. EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED BUT NOTHING HAS CHANGED!By Shilpa Phadke

Women are no longer petitioning for safety but claiming their right to public spaces. Yet, the rest of the country seems willfully ignorant.

September has seen an avalanche of reported attacks against women and girls. I use the word “reported” because there is always more violence than is reported at any time and private violence tends to be invisibilised.
I want to write. To say something. I stare at my computer screen. Nothing. I try sitting with a pen and paper but the paper stays blank. What do I even write that someone, perhaps even I, have not said before?
It seems impossible that in 2026 we are still having the same conversations and the context is, if anything, more misogynist than when we started out a three-year project researching women’s access to public space in 2003.
We were not the only ones asking questions about gendered public space. On this journey we met Jasmeen Patheja, student at the Shrishti School of Design working on street sexual harassment, a project titled Blank Noise, a project that became a campaign. With her, we staged an intervention on the streets following the rape perpetrated by a police constable on Marine Drive in 2005.
We also met Kalpana Vishwanath who along with colleagues at Jagori were studying safety in Delhi. We shared journal space with her in one of our early publications in the Review of Women’s Studies for the Economic and Political Weekly in 2007. Before that I’d tried to write about risk for a seminar on Risk Rationality and City Life, and managed to publish it under the title “You Can be Lonely in a Crowd”.
Shilpa Ranade, Sameera Khan and I took over two years to write the manuscript that became the book Why Loiter? Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets, which was published in 2011. Life has a way of happening as you are trying to write. Mostly we’d roll with it but every now and again one of us would turn to the others and say anxiously, “We’d better write this quickly before our data gets old and our ideas date.”
When we first presented our work to feminist scholars and activists, we talked about the right to risk and loiter as citizens. We argued that the only way women could claim space unconditionally was if we claimed it for everyone through the act of loitering, that is hanging out in public space without reason or purpose for pleasure. We were asked why women would want to loiter?
The other question we were asked regularly was how we planned to operationalise loitering. Now 20 years later, loitering has entered a feminist lexicon of access to public space and even people who have never heard of our book use it. As for operationalising it, thanks to Neha Singh and the loitering feminists who read our book and put its ideas into operation, that’s a question we didn’t have to answer.
Earlier this month, I was at a United Nations Women National Consultation on Safe and Inclusive Public Spaces, an event celebrating 15 years of their safe cities initiative of which ironically Delhi was one of the first five cities. In the last decade one has seen a great deal of scholarship, policy advocacy and activism around the question of gendered public spaces, a significant amount of this in South Asia and within South Asia, in India.
For women the language has changed irrevocably. We are no longer petitioning for safety – we are claiming our rights. However, politicians among others, seem to have missed the memo. For many others, loitering, protesting, even just choosing a romantic partner are all offensive things for women to do.
One politician talked about a more decent and elegant way to moral police. Yes. You read that right.
In the face of an establishment that garlands rapists, grants rapists parole after parole, moves classes online when a rape takes place, restricts entry to parks in response to a rape and expresses cultural shock when women use swear words as acts of protest, women are not going to back down.
This is a different moment from 2012 when thousands were out on the streets protesting another rape. That rape was followed by a change in the law, the Criminal Law Amendment Act 2013. We’ve made the arguments, written papers, signed petitions, and been part of advocating for policy change. We’ve protested over and over again. And here we are on the streets again.
In past few days the Why Loiter Campaign (entirely separate from the book) loosely, and I do mean loosely because there were no leaders here just a large group of women collectively taking ownership, orchestrated not one but nearly a dozen walks across Mumbai and some in other cities as well, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Nagpur simply by putting out a social media call.
Angry and determined women joined the group chat in singles and groups taking responsibility for different routes in different parts of Mumbai. A group that just the previous day had been less than 100 people grew to over 800. I’ve been a privileged observer of this group from almost its inception. Each loitering expedition with its attendant pictures and notes brought a thrill. Now the group was buzzing with new voices, voices connecting in camaraderie and allyship, voices raised in rage and friendship.
Women’s rage, often seen as illegitimate even pathological, was spilling all over the group chat and finding resonance and affirmation. In Delhi, university students are protesting as if their lives depend on it and in many ways they do. We are not mad, but we are mad and we have every right to be so. So here we are on the streets again.
For women, all women, the conversation on access to the city has moved in the last two decades. We know that the streets are our right. We know that we belong as much as anyone else. The tragedy is that the rest of the country, especially those who run the institutions that could provide the infrastructure that facilitates women’s access have chosen to wilfully not keep up with this conversation, some even attempting to move it backwards. And so here we are on the streets again.
I wish so hard that our data would get old and not just keep on being endorsed with each new assault and the regressive response to it from the powers that be. I wish so hard that our ideas would date.
Some day. Until then, here we are on the streets again. Someday we will belong there fearlessly, hopefully and endlessly.