When the Supreme Court hears, on Monday Dec. 29, the CBI’s plea challenging the get-out-of-jail card gifted to the rapist former BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar, the nation hopes the judges will restore justice to his victim and put an end to the long history of free passes being granted to those of his ilk by the judiciary, police, bureaucracy and political class. If India has attained rape infamy globally, it is because of the male-sided skew of these four institutions.

This sad aspect has again been brought to the fore by the Delhi High Court’s order on Dec. 23 suspending, on the basis of a technicality, the life term awarded to Sengar for the rape of a minor girl in Unnao in 2017. In ruling that he is eligible for bail while his appeal against the rape conviction is pending, the judges interpreted that Sengar was an MLA when he committed the crime, but not a “public servant” as defined under Section 21 of the Indian Penal Code. Therefore, he would not attract the more stringent provisions of the Pocso Act, and would deserve bail as he has already served seven years and five months of his sentence.

In ruling so, the judges brushed aside considerations like Sengar’s history of victim intimidation, including his role in the murder of the victim’s father and lawyer. This is a staggering affront to anyone’s sense of justice, and typical of the indulgence shown by the judiciary to rape-accused (but denied to detenus of conscience like Sonam Wangchuk and Umar Khalid). There’s a decades-long list of rape cases in which judges have demonstrated the maleness of their orientation in the form of rulings, bail awards or obiter dicta. The repeated occurrence of this orientation suggests the inference that the male skew of the judiciary is not a bug but a feature, one that it shares with the police, bureaucracy and political class.

One need only sift recent cases to find expressions of this trait, including ones in which the Supreme Court itself felt nudged to intervene. In April 2025, a judge of the Allahabad High Court, granting bail to a man accused of raping a postgraduate student, remarked that the victim "herself invited trouble" and was responsible for the incident. A month earlier, another judge ruled that acts like grabbing a minor girl's breasts and breaking her pyjama strings did not constitute an "attempt to rape" and downgraded the charge to "outraging modesty". In 2023, a Calcutta High Court judge lectured adolescent girls on the need to "control their sexual urges" to avoid becoming rape victims.

Through such rulings and observations, courts have consistently and frequently probed the limits of women’s fortitude, which in effect transmit an ambivalence that other agencies are likely to interpret as licence to favour the accused, as we saw in the Bilkis Banu case when the Gujarat government in 2022 granted remission to 11 convicts sentenced to life for the gang-rape of a woman during the 2002 pogrom in that state. In the Hathras rape case, we have seen how the UP police did their darnedest to drag their feet in the investigation.

It therefore falls to the Supreme Court to draw firm tramlines for the lower courts and close the loopholes through which criminals like Sengar are sought to be smuggled out.