BehanVox: Crime, Punishment, And Power Of Kerala Actor Assault Case
This week in BehanVox: Bhopal's women lead the 41-year-long campaign for justice, Donald Trump targets female journalists, and more
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The long line of injustices plaguing the sexual assault case against Malayalam superstar Dileep should have warned us of the verdict to come. The delays in the trial, the rejection of the survivor’s and prosecution’s appeal to replace a visibly unsympathetic judge, the 300 defence lawyers lined up to put the survivor through relentless hours of retelling of her trauma, the resignation of the two special public prosecutors, the skewed power balance, the accessibility of the video record of the crime – it should have added up. But we remained hopeful because the trial had brought women of the Kerala film industry together in a pathbreaking collective, because the survivor who waived her right to privacy remained unwavering, because the brightest and youngest names in the industry never gave up on supporting her or speaking up for her and because we thought Nibhaya has changed the landscape for women. And simply because the alternative was too awful to contemplate.
But on Monday, at noon, Dileep walked free, the court having acquitted him of all the criminal charges in the rape case. He had been added as the eighth accused in the case, and booked for criminal conspiracy, intimidation and destruction of evidence. On Monday, the trial court concluded that the conspiracy charge against Dileep cannot be sustained while it convicted six others on all the charges against them.
If anyone needed proof that this will likely head downhill from here, it came soon after. The first thing the actor did as he emerged to fawning fans was to accuse his former wife Manju Warrier of instigating the criminal conspiracy against him.
The Newsminute that has been following the story with admirable rigour and tenacity ran, the same day, ran a bonechilling investigative piece on the many conversations the reporter had with the main accused who recorded the assault. The crime, he said, coldly remorseless, was nothing to fuss about because it was all in a day’s work. “Abducting someone is not a big deal. It’s like picking up a chicken from the street. There’s no real risk,” he had said with grinning. Clearly, he knew our courts better than we did.
And now the Ernakulam court sentenced Pulsar Suni and five others in case have been sentenced to 20 years of rigorous imprisonment each, the minimum sentence prescribed for gang rape. The Special Judge Honey M Varghese said the circumstances didn’t call for ”maximum sentence”, considering that all six accused were below 40 years old and only one had criminal antecedents.
Story So Far
The women came from working class families, marginalised communities and slums and India’s worst industrial disaster had flung them into even greater precarity by killing or sickening their loved ones, forcing them into the workplace. But for 41 years, Bhopal’s women have kept up their campaign for justice for the victims, survivors, and multiple generations of families hit by the catastrophic gas leak.
In the first part of our series to mark the 41st year of the tragedy, we had reported on how the decades have done little to ease the lives of the survivors. Whether it was the contaminated water, the abysmal compensation or livelihoods, the night of the gas disaster never quite ended for many. In the second part, Bhanupriya Rao explores the remarkable role women played in spearheading and sustaining the search for answers and accountability in the intervening decades.
Till December 2, 1984, Rasheeda Bee had never even heard the name Union Carbide. That night, she had just finished rolling beedis, her daily home-based work, and was preparing to sleep when she saw what she describes as “insanon ka sailaab (a sea of people)” running in terror.
Clutching her toddler, with her husband beside her, she fled. They had barely covered half a mile when they collapsed. Her eyes were swollen and her chest was burning.“Maut us din haseen lag rahi thi (death seemed welcome that day),” she says. When she regained consciousness, half her family of 37 were gone. Bhopal lay shrouded in death—human bodies, animals, even fish floating lifeless in the lakes. “Jo us din bache, woh aaj tak til til ke mar rahe hain (those who survived have been dying slowly since then),” she said.
Thereafter, the name of Union Carbide and its successor Dow chemicals, shaped her days and nights and fueled her lifelong fight for accountability. Her unwavering motto all these years has been ‘Bhopal ko insaaf’. It is not just Rasheeda. Nasreen, Leela Bai, Savitri Devi, Reena Devi, Batti Bai, Sakina, Shumaira — and countless other women — and their determination have kept Bhopal’s fight for justice, accountability, medical care and fair compensation alive.
Their struggle has never been around a single issue. It is simultaneously a battle for labour rights for women workers. It was a multipronged agitation with the women devising new strategies to grab the attention of an apathetic administration. They collected data, held public demonstration, travelled the globe, kept night vigils, hosted mock dinners that served up ‘sevin tar souffle’ and ‘sludge mouse’ to shame those who declared the city’s water ‘safe’ and trudged the whole 450km to Delhi several times to draw the country’s attention. And over time, these women, along with economic and caregiving roles, also rose to lead a transnational struggle for ‘all Bhopals everywhere’.
Just last week, Bhopal police filed a case against protestors for burning an effigy of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Ladai badhti jaa rahi hai (the fight hasn’t ended yet), as Rasheeda Bee says. Speaking to the women, for us at BehanBox, has been an unforgettable lesson in solidarity and perseverance.
Read our story here.
Talking Point
Coming Home: “I’m tired from inside. The worst part is that despite showing all the documents, no one listened to us.” It took Sunali Khatun, 26, a six-month long struggle to be returned to India from Bangladesh last Friday, along with her eight-year-old son. A domestic worker, Sunali along with her minor son Sabir Sheikh and husband Danish Sheikh, had been picked up from Rohini in Delhi on the suspicion of being illegal Bangladeshi immigrants. The trauma suffered by the family included being pushed across the border, hungry and terrified, and then being held in a jail for entering Bangladesh illegally. But uncertainty still hangs over the fate of the remaining deportees, especially the family of 33-year-old Sweety Bibi who are still stuck in Bangladesh. As Behanbox reported earlier, hundreds of Bengali-speaking migrant workers — mostly Muslims from West Bengal and Assam — have been detained in police “verification” drives following a May 2, 2025 Ministry of Home Affairs directive.
‘Masculine’ Leadership: The tech bro community is wasting little time in casting off what remains of its tattered claims to building a better world. Palantir’s billionaire co-founder Joe Lonsdale, has called for the return of public hangings in order to demonstrate “masculine leadership”. If he is ‘in charge’, he says, there will be quick trials followed by a hanging of an offender after three crimes. “Our society needs balance. It’s time to bring back masculine leadership to protect our most vulnerable,” says Lonsdale.
‘Quiet, Quiet’: “Piggy”, “nasty,” “obnoxious”, “stupid”, “ugly”, “incapable” – these are only a few of the insults President Trump has been heaping on women reporters who dare to question him on his policies. It is not that men are spared either but with women the recriminations are patently sexist. The White House maintains that “this has nothing to do with gender”.
Brazil Protests: On Sunday last, thousands of women across Brazil’s cities rallied against gender-based violence in the country. They called for an end to femicide, rape and misogyny. The most recent such crime had been the killing of an administrative worker in a Rio de Janeiro school in Rio de Janeiro by a male colleague along with another employee because he found the idea of working under a female boss “unacceptable”. AP reports that more than one in three women in Brazil was a victim of sexual or gender-based violence, per a 2025 report by the think tank Brazilian Forum on Public Safety, the highest number since records began in 2017.
All Of Us: The French insult, “sales connes (stupid bitches)” is now being worn as a badge of pride by feminists in France. This came after First Lady Brigitte Macron was filmed last Sunday using the sexist slur to describe protesters at a Paris theatre who tried to disrupt a show by an alleged rapist.
BehanVox Recommends
Mother Mary Comes To Me: At BehanBox, we had been waiting for that one review of the book to come along that we could recommend to our readers. And here it comes. From Supriya Nair, whose reading of the book and the writing is wonderfully mellifluous.
Seeing the Sangh: The Caravan and Sciences Po researchers have mapped the complex web of the Rashtriya Swayam Sewak Sangh and its affiliates. If we had any doubts about the spread of the Sangh tentacles, this map should set them free.
Abortion in Monaco: Once again, a gaggle of men decide women’s reproductive rights–this time the monarchy and church work wonderfully well together in Monaco, that haven of the rich and super fast, to arrive in real modern times. So women in Monaco seeking abortions cross over to neighbouring France.
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