MUZAFFARNAGAR, UTTAR PRADESH — Nearly ten years after communal violence swept through Muzaffarnagar and neighbouring Shamli in western Uttar Pradesh, a trial court delivered a verdict that brought criminal accountability in one of the sexual-violence cases arising from the riots. On May 9, 2023, a Muzaffarnagar court convicted Maheshvir and Sikander of gang-raping a Muslim woman during the violence and sentenced each to 20 years of rigorous imprisonment. A third accused, Kuldeep, had died during the course of the trial. The conviction followed a legal struggle that began in September 2013 and was repeatedly delayed, eventually requiring intervention by the Supreme Court to bring the case to a conclusion (Indian Express, 2023a; PTI, 2023).
For the woman at the centre of the case, however, the story was never simply about the eventual sentence. It was about surviving an act of sexual violence during communal unrest, rebuilding a family life after displacement, confronting years of legal delay and pressure, and continuing with a criminal case at a time when several other women who had reported sexual violence during the riots were no longer pursuing their allegations in the same way. Contemporary reporting and court proceedings show that this was not a straightforward story of complainants simply changing their minds. The survivors faced fear, threats, social pressure, financial difficulties and concerns about their own safety and the safety of family members, circumstances that became central to understanding why so many cases did not reach the same endpoint (Supreme Court of India, 2014; Amnesty International, 2017).
September 2013: Flight, violence and the sugarcane field
The assault occurred on September 8, 2013, amid the communal violence that had engulfed parts of Muzaffarnagar and Shamli. The riots followed clashes between Hindu and Muslim groups and ultimately left more than 60 people dead and more than 50,000 displaced, according to contemporary reporting (Indian Express, 2023a; ThePrint, 2023a).
The survivor was at home with her infant son while her husband was away. As violence spread and Muslim families began fleeing their homes, she escaped with the child and sought refuge in a sugarcane field. According to her account, three men from the locality found her there. The men were known to her family, and she later told journalists that they had been familiar to her husband because they had dealt with him in the course of his work as a tailor (Iyer, 2022; The Guardian, 2023).
The prosecution case was that the men took the woman into the field and sexually assaulted her while threatening her with a weapon and threatening the life of her infant son. The details were later examined in court through her testimony. In its judgment, the trial court said the accused had raped a “helpless woman” who was attempting to flee the riot-affected area with her child to save her life. The court found her account to be of “sterling quality” and said it found no material contradiction concerning the incident (Indian Express, 2023a; LiveLaw, 2023).
For the survivor, the immediate aftermath was not the beginning of a conventional criminal investigation. She and her family were among those displaced by the violence, and they eventually took shelter in a relief camp. She initially struggled to speak openly about the sexual assault. Later reporting described how she and her husband confronted the stigma attached to rape, the fear of retaliation and the practical problem of seeking police action while already living in the aftermath of communal violence (Iyer, 2022; The Guardian, 2023).
From a written complaint to the Supreme Court
The survivor eventually sent a written complaint concerning the assault to the authorities in October 2013. The First Information Report in the case was registered on February 18, 2014, nearly five months after the alleged crime (Indian Express, 2023a).
That delay became one of the most important elements in the subsequent history of the case. By then, several women had come forward alleging sexual violence during the riots. In 2014, a group of survivors approached the Supreme Court seeking action and protection. The court took note of allegations concerning the failure of the authorities to adequately address the complaints and issued directions intended to safeguard the women and facilitate proper investigation and prosecution (Supreme Court of India, 2014).
The Supreme Court’s intervention was significant because it transformed the issue from a collection of local complaints into a matter demanding institutional scrutiny at the highest level. The court directed that the criminal cases be dealt with through fast-track proceedings and that the survivors receive protection. Yet the judicial directions did not immediately produce the swift justice that had been envisioned. The eventual case continued through years of investigation, procedural challenges and adjournments (Supreme Court of India, 2014; Iyer, 2022).
The gap between judicial direction and actual completion became one of the defining characteristics of the survivor’s ordeal. By 2022, when Scroll published a detailed reconstruction of her case, she had spent almost nine years waiting for a final verdict. Her case had survived while other rape complaints from the riots had largely fallen away from the criminal process (Iyer, 2022).
When the other cases disappeared
This is the part of the story that requires the greatest care. It is tempting to say that the survivor was simply “the only woman who persisted” while the others “gave up.” Contemporary reporting, however, provides a much more complicated account.
At least seven women had approached the authorities in connection with alleged rape during the Muzaffarnagar violence. Over time, several cases were withdrawn or failed to produce convictions. Reports documented instances in which women became hostile witnesses, altered or withdrew allegations, or stepped away from the process after facing serious pressure. Amnesty International’s reporting on the aftermath described threats and harassment directed at survivors and their families and raised concerns about inadequate protection and the wider failure to create conditions in which the women could safely pursue justice (Amnesty International, 2017).
News reports also described allegations that some women or their relatives were threatened, that compromises were encouraged and that social and economic pressure made continued litigation extremely difficult. The significance of these accounts is not that every reported allegation was independently adjudicated as fact. Rather, they demonstrate why it is misleading to present the collapse of the other cases simply as voluntary abandonment. The legal system was operating in a setting in which the complainants were themselves vulnerable, displaced and dependent on the protection of the very institutions whose response they were challenging (Amnesty International, 2017; The Quint, 2017).
The contrast with the survivor whose case eventually resulted in conviction was therefore striking. She remained engaged with the process even as the number of women still pursuing their cases diminished. By the time her trial approached its conclusion, she was effectively carrying a case that had become exceptional precisely because it had survived the pressures that had overwhelmed so many others (Iyer, 2022).
Ten years of delay
The passage of time was extraordinary. The survivor submitted her complaint in 2013; the FIR was registered in February 2014; and the case still had not produced a verdict almost nine years later. According to reporting by The Guardian, the charge sheet against the accused took another four years to process, while it took a further three years, until November 2021, for police to interview seven prosecution witnesses. The three accused had been released on bail in 2014, and their lawyers obtained numerous adjournments in the Allahabad High Court (The Guardian, 2023).
The case was also affected by legal proceedings initiated by the survivor herself. Concerned about threats and harassment, she sought a transfer of the trial. The COVID-19 pandemic then introduced another substantial interruption into an already delayed case. Her husband reportedly feared that the matter could continue for another decade before a verdict was delivered (The Guardian, 2023).
The consequences were not confined to the courtroom. The survivor told reporters that she had been unable to live normally while the case continued and that people repeatedly encouraged her to withdraw it. Indian Express reported that she had stopped working during the prolonged legal struggle and that her husband had also lost his job. The family had effectively paid an economic price for continuing to pursue justice (Sinha, 2023).
In another indication of the social cost of the proceedings, ThePrint reported that the survivor experienced ostracism within the community and that other families restricted their children from interacting with hers. She described a life in which the consequences of the crime extended beyond the original assault and into relationships, employment, mobility and the upbringing of her children (Mandhani, 2023a).
The courtroom became the next battlefield
By early 2023, the survivor’s patience with further delay had reached its limit. She again approached the Supreme Court seeking an expedited trial. On March 13, the apex court directed that the matter be taken up on priority and that the trial proceed on a day-to-day basis. The order, coming after years of delay, produced a remarkable acceleration in the proceedings (Indian Express, 2023a; Sinha, 2023).
The case then moved towards judgment within weeks. The speed with which the final stage was completed demonstrated the difference that active judicial supervision could make. A criminal case that had remained unresolved for years was suddenly moving through the courtroom on a daily basis.
Yet the trial itself brought another form of pressure. Lawyers for the survivor told journalists that the defence questioned her about intimate aspects of her personal and sexual life and raised questions concerning her marriage that they considered irrelevant to the central allegation. Such questioning was particularly significant because sexual-assault proceedings often place a complainant’s credibility under intense scrutiny, and the survivor had already spent years defending the decision to pursue the case (Indian Express, 2023b; Mandhani, 2023b).
The fact that she remained in the witness box despite those circumstances became part of the larger meaning of the case. Her persistence did not imply that she was without fear. On the contrary, she repeatedly described being frightened. What distinguished her was her decision to continue despite that fear.
May 9, 2023: The verdict
On May 9, 2023, the trial court convicted Maheshvir and Sikander. The court sentenced each to 20 years of rigorous imprisonment and imposed fines of Rs 15,000 each. Kuldeep, the third accused named in the chargesheet, had died during the trial (PTI, 2023; LiveLaw, 2023).
The judgment held particular importance because the court explicitly evaluated the survivor’s testimony and found it credible. The 89-page judgment described the testimony as being of “sterling quality” and found no contradiction that undermined her account of the rape. The court concluded that the two surviving accused had committed the crime against a woman who was fleeing the violence with her young son (Indian Express, 2023a).
The conviction was widely described as the first conviction for a gang rape associated with the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots. That fact gave the case significance beyond the individual prosecution. It represented one of the few occasions in which an allegation of sexual violence committed during the riots had resulted in a completed criminal conviction after trial (The Guardian, 2023; Al Jazeera, 2023).
For the survivor, the verdict was a moment of relief, but not an uncomplicated one. In interviews after the judgment, she said she was glad the two men were behind bars, but she continued to fear the families of the convicts. She said that she did not believe she could safely return to her village and remained worried about the safety of her children (Indian Express, 2023b; PTI, 2023).
That detail is perhaps the most revealing measure of what “justice” meant in this case. A conviction had been obtained, but the survivor’s life had not returned to what it had been before September 2013. Her family remained displaced. The fear generated by the original violence had not entirely disappeared. The legal victory therefore coexisted with continuing insecurity (Al Jazeera, 2023; Indian Express, 2023b).
The survivor’s persistence was not simply personal courage
The tendency to describe the case as a story of individual courage is understandable, but incomplete. The survivor’s ability to continue depended on legal assistance, Supreme Court intervention, persistent representation and the willingness of journalists and rights organisations to keep examining the fate of the riot cases. Her lawyers, including senior advocate Vrinda Grover, repeatedly challenged delay and sought judicial intervention when the ordinary process failed to produce a timely conclusion (Indian Express, 2023a; Mandhani, 2023b).
The institutional lesson is therefore as important as the personal one. Survivors cannot reasonably be expected to fight indefinitely against intimidation, economic hardship and legal delay without meaningful state protection. The fact that one woman managed to continue for almost ten years does not mean that the system worked well. In some respects, her extraordinary persistence exposes how much endurance was required to obtain a result that should ordinarily follow from a functioning investigation and trial process.
Her case also illustrates why communal violence creates particularly difficult conditions for prosecuting sexual crimes. The survivor is not only a witness to an individual offence; she may also be a displaced person, a member of a threatened minority community, a parent responsible for children and someone required to confront people who remain socially or geographically close to her. The ordinary vulnerabilities associated with sexual violence can become compounded by collective violence and displacement (Amnesty International, 2017).
One survivor remained when the system was losing others
The most powerful fact in the case is therefore also the simplest: she remained.
She remained when the FIR took months to be registered. She remained while the case took years to progress. She remained despite pressure to compromise. She remained when the other cases no longer moved along the same path. She returned to court after repeated postponements. And when the delay became intolerable, she went again to the Supreme Court.
The 2023 judgment did not return the decade that had been taken from her. It did not restore the home she had lost or remove the fear that still shaped where her family could live. Nor did it provide an answer for the other women whose cases had collapsed without conviction.
But it established one vital legal fact: after examining the evidence, a court found her testimony credible and held two accused men criminally responsible. That outcome matters not because it makes the preceding ten years disappear, but because it demonstrates that prolonged delay does not necessarily destroy a survivor’s claim and that a case can still reach a judicial determination when the complainant continues to pursue it.
Justice after a decade
The Muzaffarnagar riots remain remembered for deaths, displacement and the communal divisions they produced. Less visible, but equally enduring, are the legal cases and private lives that continued long after the violence itself subsided. For this survivor, the violence ended in September 2013, but its consequences continued through a decade of court appearances, fear and uncertainty.
The 20-year sentences handed down in May 2023 were therefore more than a measure of punishment. They were the end point of a process in which the survivor repeatedly had to insist that the case remain alive. Her experience suggests that justice in cases of sexual violence is measured not only by conviction and sentence, but by whether institutions can protect survivors, investigate promptly, prevent intimidation and ensure that delay does not itself become another form of injustice.
She had once run through a sugarcane field with her infant child because violence had made her home unsafe. Ten years later, she had secured a courtroom judgment against two of the men she said had attacked her. The distance between those two moments is the real measure of her ordeal.
Her story is not simply that she was the only woman who persisted. It is that, despite circumstances that had caused other cases to falter, she continued to insist that what had happened to her deserved to be heard, tested and judged.
And, after nearly a decade, it was.
References
Al Jazeera. (2023, June 1). “Fight not over”: India rape survivor in fear as attackers jailed. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/6/1/fight-not-over-india-rape-survivor-in-fear-as-attackers-jailed
Amnesty International. (2017). India: Justice denied to Muzaffarnagar rape survivors. Amnesty International. [Contemporary reporting on the findings and concerns surrounding the riot-related rape cases.]
Indian Express. (2023a, May 10). Two get 20-year jail for rape during Muzaffarnagar riots. https://indianexpress.com/article/india/two-get-20-year-jail-for-rape-during-muzaffarnagar-riots-8600796/
Indian Express. (2023b, May 13). Muzaffarnagar rape: “Can’t return to my village, I fear for my kids”. https://indianexpress.com/article/india/muzaffarnagar-rape-cant-return-to-my-village-i-fear-for-my-kids-8606546/
Iyer, A. (2022, June 24). Nine years after Muzaffarnagar riots, the only woman who pursued rape charges still awaits justice. Scroll.in. https://scroll.in/article/1026696/scroll_in
LiveLaw. (2023, May 9). Muzaffarnagar riots: UP court convicts two in a case of gang rape, awarded 20-year rigorous imprisonment. https://www.livelaw.in/news-updates/2013-muzaffarnagar-riots-up-court-convicts-gang-rape-228299
Mandhani, A. (2023a, May 11). “They wouldn’t let their children near me” — Muzaffarnagar rape survivor recalls 10-yr legal battle, ostracism. ThePrint. https://theprint.in/india/they-wouldnt-let-their-children-near-me-muzaffarnagar-rape-survivor-recalls-10-yr-legal-battle-ostracism/1567230/
Mandhani, A. (2023b, May 12). Muzaffarnagar rape survivor braved “delay, inappropriate questions” in 10-yr legal battle, “never lost hope”. ThePrint. https://theprint.in/india/muzaffarnagar-rape-survivor-braved-delay-inappropriate-questions-in-10-yr-legal-battle-never-lost-hope/1569463/
Press Trust of India. (2023, May 9). Two get 20 years in jail for gang-raping woman during 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots. ThePrint. https://theprint.in/india/two-get-20-years-in-jail-for-gang-raping-woman-during-2013-muzaffarnagar-riots/1563987/
Sinha, J. (2023, May 11). “Darr lagta tha… par main nahi maani”: Muzaffarnagar rape victim’s 10-year fight ends in victory. Indian Express. https://indianexpress.com/article/india/muzaffarnagar-riots-i-was-scared-all-the-time-people-said-drop-the-case-i-did-not-relent-8602886/
Supreme Court of India. (2014). Proceedings concerning petitions by victims of sexual violence arising from the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots. Indian Kanoon. https://indiankanoon.org/docfragment/167681331/
The Guardian. (2023, June 5). “Now I am happy”: A woman’s 10-year fight for justice against gang-rapists. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2023/jun/05/india-woman-10-year-fight-for-justice-against-gang-rapists