The woman India forgot: 50 years after her rape changed law, ‘Mathura’ lives in hunger, silence

Gadchiroli: More than five decades after her rape inside a Maharashtra police station sparked protests across India and forced the rewriting of the country's sexual assault laws, the woman known to the world only as ‘Mathura' now lives alone in a half-collapsed hut in a forgotten village in eastern Maharashtra. Fifty years before Nirbhaya's name became a rallying cry for reform, it was Mathura's horror that forced India to confront its legal and moral blind spots. It took TOI several days — mostly by word-of-mouth tracing — to find her in a remote village 150km from Nagpur, where she lives unknown, undernourished, and mostly unvisited. She is 72 now, paralysed on her left side, her voice often trailing into fragments. There is little food in the house, no fire in the stove, and scant memory of what her name once meant to a country that demanded justice in her name. Her name never appeared in the judgment that freed her rapists — she was referred to only as the place she belonged to. Ten days before stepping down as Chief Justice of India B R Gavai stood at a podium in New Delhi and invoked that judgment, delivered more than four decades ago, as one of the "darkest moments in the institution's history". The 1979 Supreme Court verdict acquitting two policemen — constable Ganpat and head constable Tukaram — who had raped the 14-year-old Mathura inside a police station, he said, was "a moment of institutional embarrassment and lasting shame".In the history of India's legal system, few individual cases have changed the law the way Mathura's did. On March 26, 1972, she had walked into the Desaiganj police station in Gadchiroli district with her brother and employer from Wadsa, where she worked as a domestic help. She was illiterate, not even past puberty, and she never expected to leave the police station as a victim of custodial rape. The trial court convicted the two cops, but Bombay HC acquitted one. When the case reached Supreme Court, the bench overturned the conviction of both, reasoning that the girl had not raised an alarm, shown signs of struggle, or sustained injuries — and so must have given consent.The outrage that followed was not confined to courtrooms. Her trauma ripped open a legal conversation India had long avoided. Women poured into the streets of Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Nagpur. For the first time, the country confronted the legal vacuum around custodial sexual violence, and in 1983, Parliament amended the Indian Penal Code. The Criminal Law (Amendment) Act introduced Sections 376(A-D), defined custodial rape, reversed the burden of proof in such cases, mandated in-camera trials, protected survivors' identities, and imposed stricter punishment.But talk to Mathura about it and she gives a tired smile. Asked about the night that changed Indian legal history, she looked away for a few seconds and said, in Marathi: "Ata kay karnar? Baas, sagla sampla aahe. (What can be done now? Everything is over)." Then she added, almost mechanically, "Ghara madhe anna cha kan naahi, khane ko kuch naahi." (No grains or vegetables at home. Nothing to eat.)She no longer lives in Wadsa Desaiganj, the epicentre of her ordeal, but about 100km away, in a nondescript hamlet surrounded by scrub forest. Her house — if it can be called that — is a one-room structure of salvaged tin sheets, old tarpaulin, and uneven bamboo poles. The roof lets in wind. The door barely shuts. She lies on a wobbly charpai all day. The left side of her body hasn't worked since a paralytic attack a few years ago.When she spoke of the stroke, she had a sinking look, as though that was the moment she lost the final scraps of agency. She can't cook anymore. She doesn't remember when she last bought vegetables. She tried to skirt references to her past, and only spoke about her starving days and cold nights. A worn-out passbook, last updated in Feb 2022, shows a balance of Rs 2,050 in her bank account. Her Aadhaar card is missing. She does not know how to get a new one. Her fingerprints, worn and wrinkled with age, fail to register on biometric machines. There have been no govt remittances since Jan. She survives on inconsistent rations from the local depot, if and when they arrive.India runs several social welfare schemes for the elderly and destitute — the National Social Assistance Programme, Atal Pension Yojana, Ayushman Bharat, and Pradhan Mantri Vaya Vandana Yojana among them. But all of them require digital verification — Aadhaar, bank linkage, mobile OTPs, and physical visits to distant offices. She has none of these. She cannot read, walk, or travel. She does not own a phone. Her fingerprints no longer register. Without a working biometric, she has been locked out of India's digital welfare state."She doesn't have a smartphone. She can't walk. She can't read or write. She has no one to take her anywhere," said Yeshwant Ninawe, a local villager. "Her thumbprint doesn't work anymore. That alone disqualifies her from digital India." Before 1983, there was no category called "custodial rape". It was Mathura's case that gave crimes of such nature this legal articulation. There was no burden on the accused to prove innocence. There were no protections for a survivor's identity. Today, those safeguards exist — but the woman who triggered their creation has been left behind."She never begs," Ninawe added. "But she doesn't know how she survives. Activists and social workers come, take pictures, promise to return. No one does. She didn't get compensation. Not a single rupee. Nothing ever stayed in her life except shame. Everything was temporary — except humiliation."One of Mathura's sons works in Nagpur as a labourer. The other is jobless. They visit sporadically, but she neither expects nor demands anything from them. She no longer sees the law or the state as something that will intervene. For her, survival is day-to-day. Memory is a burden. Mobility is no longer possible.Chandrapur district collector Vinay Gowda, when informed about her situation, said, "We conduct regular follow-ups for schemes and budgetary sanctions. We have systems like Aaple Sarkar Seva Kendra and volunteers at gram panchayat level. I will ensure that her case is looked into personally."That assurance, like others before it, may or may not reach her. In the past, similar promises were made — and not kept. Mathura's story, however, refuses to disappear. When the judgment was delivered in 1979, SC had cited the absence of resistance, the lack of injury, the presumed consent. But what it failed to grasp was what CJI Gavai finally acknowledged — that fear is not compliance, and silence is not permission.In the 1970s, the firebrand Seema Sakhare — one of India's earliest women's rights activists — marched through Nagpur holding up signs that read: "Mathura is every woman." She called Mathura "a symbol of every oppressed voice that fights without speaking." It is time, Ninawe said, to remind ourselves of Mathura again.

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