Weeks after being elected back to power on the strength of the women’s vote, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s shocking act of forcibly removing a woman’s face covering highlighted deeply embedded misogyny.
The assault—there is no other way to describe it—happened during a government event while the woman was being handed an appointment letter as a doctor of alternative medicine (Ayush) in Patna. In the video that has since gone viral, you can see Nitish Kumar holding the letter. He gestures to the Muslim woman to remove her veil but before she can react, he leans forward and yanks it off. The men around him laugh.
Nothing can be more shocking than the assault itself. Touching a woman without her consent, leave alone stripping away a piece of her clothing, is a crime under India’s laws. But there were many who rushed to the chief minister’s defence. Among them was the executive editor of TV9 Network Nabila Jamal, who tweeted that what she saw was a “father figure trying, albeit clumsily, to tell a young doctor that she doesn’t need to hide her face, she belongs there with dignity and equal standing”.
A day later, Union Minister Giriraj Singh also leapt to Kumar’s defence, saying he had done nothing wrong and that the woman should have shown her face. In addition to displaying his own misogyny, hardly a secret, Singh misses the point. The issue is consent. Worse, the chief minister’s action can become a dangerous signal for vigilante mobs to run amok on the street.
Nitish Kumar bucked incumbency at his fourth election with the massive support of his state’s women voters. Just weeks before the polls, he had taken care to deposit 10,000 into the bank accounts of 14.1 million women. Now, his legacy of two decades of women empowerment schemes, including the famous free bicycles for secondary schoolgirls, is under threat with the question: Scratch below the surface, and do you see yet another misogynist with a canny knack of using women to win elections?
The misogyny cuts across party lines and individuals. In the state elections following September 2023, when the bill to earmark 33% reservation for women in Parliament and the assemblies was passed nearly unanimously, no party has fielded close to that many women.
This year in Delhi, the number of women elected to the 70-member assembly fell to its lowest in a decade to just five, or 7%. Bihar saw a marginal increase of 29 women in the 243-seat assembly, which at 12% is still a long way off from 33%.
The more things change…
…the more they remained the same in 2025. How is it that 20 years after passing a law against domestic violence, one in three women is still subjected to it? The National Family Health Survey-5 found that among 83% of women who had faced sexual violence, their husbands were the perpetrators.
Despite the evidence, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta told the Supreme Court that the government was opposed to criminalising marital rape for fear that it would destroy the institution of marriage. To Congress MP Shashi Tharoor goes the credit for moving a private member’s bill seeking to remove the exception in rape law that says non-consensual sex between a husband and his wife, provided she is over 18 years old, cannot be termed rape. The case is pending in the Supreme Court.
We have normalized violence against women to such an extent that the 6,156 women killed for dowry barely make it to newspaper headlines. When Nikki Bhati was set aflame in the presence of her son in August, her in-laws insisted on their ‘right’ to cremate her as custom demanded. Her father agreed.
If battling the old problems wasn’t tough enough, UN Women this year during its 16 days of activism against gender-based violence put the spotlight on newer forms of technologically assisted violence. This includes stalking, deepfakes, doxxing and revenge porn (or to use its more accurate term, non-consensual intimate image-sharing, or NCII). Globally, one in four female journalists and one in three women parliamentarians have reported online violence, UN Women says.
Online violence against women often counts on social notions of shame to silence victims. But, this year, one young and exceptionally brave lawyer went to court for better protections against NCII. By the end of the year, the Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology had issued a comprehensive nine-page document, including information on where and how to lodge a complaint, the removal of images within 24 hours, and the use of technology to ensure it is not re-uploaded.
[More on Meity’s SOP on curtailing NCII, here]
Another area stubbornly resistant to change is women’s workforce participation. Data from the Periodic Labor Force Survey does show an upward movement at 33.7% for July-September 2025. But, point out economists, this is largely due to ‘own account’ increases; a rise in small and marginal women-headed enterprises (pickle-making at home, for instance) that yield little to no money.
When it comes to formal employment, women’s representation has stalled at 18%, says Udaiti Foundation. More than half of NSE-listed companies hire less than 10% women. The data was backed by McKinsey & Co.’s annual Women in the Workplace report for 2025Women employed by the private sector in India hold only 17% of C-Suite roles,
I first started writing about women’s workforce participation in 2017. The reason that held women back from paid work remains the same, no mystery really. It’s the burden of unpaid care work at home, which includes cooking, cleaning, caring for children, the elderly, the sick and those with special needs. Time-use surveys showed that this year, women spent an average of 289 minutes a day on this work; in 88 minutes. If you’re already spending close to five hours a day working (without pay) in the house, then where is the time to work (for pay) outside it?
But there is hope. Along with policy change, implementation is critical. The McKinsey report found that companies that practice flexibility, mentorship and provide care support have stronger gender outcomes than those that don’t.
And we still rise
Not gender, not bias, not being treated second-class, Indian women are rare to go and nowhere was this more evident than on the field. Led by Harmanpreet Kaur, the women cricket team’s decisive World Cup win in November signaled strength and self-belief. From diverse background, the players displayed a sisterhood that acknowledged the role and sacrifices of a previous generation.
A generation ago, the sight of girls playing sport might have been an anomaly. Shafali Verma had to cut her hair and enter a tournament masquerading as her brother since girls didn’t play cricket in Rohtak back then. But Harmanpreet Kaur and Jemimah Rodrigues grew up wielding a bat and ball. If Harmanpreet’s father bought her a boy’s suit emblazoned with the words Good Batting on the day she was born, Rodrigues’ dad set up a girls team at her school so that they could all play.
There were many challengers. Women lawyers went to the Supreme Court demanding change from the near total male-dominance of the Bar Council of India, which has since 1961 failed to elect a woman to its 20-member executive committee. In the State Bar Councils, just six of 441 elected representatives are women.
The Supreme Court agreed with the women petitioners, Yogamaya MG and Shehla Chaudhary and directed one-third of seats, including at least one office-bearer post, to be earmarked for women in the upcoming Bar Council elections early next year.
As the year came to an end, a court in Ernakulam delivered its disturbing verdict in the 2017 case of the kidnapping and sexual assault of a leading actress. The crime was filmed for private viewing later, and it was the woman’s case that Malayalam actor Dileep had ordered the hit job on her as revenge since she had told his then wife about his extramarital affair.
The court found six of the accused men guilty of sexual assault, but in the same case could find no evidence that the conspiracy had been hatched by Dileep. The state government has said it will file an appeal against the verdict.
She may not have received full justice yet, but by breaking her silence, waiving her right to anonymity in 2022 and speaking about her journey from victim to survivor, the woman is already a change-hero.
It was her determination to get justice that led to an unprecedented uproar within a section of the Malayalam film industry. The Women in Cinema Collective was formed then, and it was the collective that put pressure on the state government to order a commission of inquiry headed by a retired judge. Released last year, the Hema Committee report revealed systemic and rampant sexual harassment and the dominance of the industry by a mafia of powerful men. None of this would have been possible without the courage of the actress to speak up.
In a year tough for gender rights globally, from America to Argentina and from Hungary to Gaza and Sudan, where ongoing conflict continues to extract a disproportionate price from women and children, every fight mattered. Every raised fist became a symbol of hope and resistance. Women and girls will not be held back. This much was clear.
