Warning: This article contains references to sexual abuse.
Delhi, India – “Just you wait – Bua will set you straight, won’t you?” Pia’s father, Madhav, jokes over the phone. He wants me, in my role as her adoptive aunt, to scold little Pia. Unbeknown to him, I shake my head, somewhat taken aback by the expectation.
“Here, talk to Bua,” I hear him say, prodding his eight-year-old daughter. I can hear the child squirming, swatting his hand away, and saying, “Don’t tell on me! Don’t tell Bua!”
Before I can pass along reassurances, Pia is on the phone – honey-tongued and precocious, whispering “Bua” (Aunt).
I play along, asking if she is indeed shrugging off her maths homework before turning to her upcoming birthday celebration.
“Another birthday soon,” I exclaim, “isn’t nine a fun number?”
We land on crayon pencils for her present – and then she asks if I’ve eaten, in the cute, hospitable manner her parents have taught her. She then hands the phone back to her parents.
This time, it’s her mother, Rakhi, on the line.
“She’s growing up, Didi (Sister) – they both are,” she says about her daughters before sharing her worries. “How long will this go on? How long will I be able to keep this from her?”
Inside an eight-by-eight room
We first met eight years ago.
I had been sent on assignment to a tucked-away northwest Delhi gully, where an eight-month-old baby had been raped weeks earlier, on January 28, 2018. Newspapers had reported the crime, and interest was growing, so my editor suggested I follow up and investigate the minutiae of the case.
I found Madhav and Rakhi on floor mats, cradling their older daughter – then two years old – as neighbours, social workers and friends sat on the one bed in their tiny eight-by-eight foot (2.4m) room, their only living space. Gradually, the crowd dispersed with a squeeze of Madhav’s shoulder, a palm grasping Rakhi’s hand for a brief second.
I stayed and we talked and we’ve been in touch ever since. That first meeting has evolved into a years-long comradeship with the family, a bond forged by journalism, chai, crayons and courts.
I already know – as Rakhi raises the issue – that it shouldn’t take this long for justice. That it is getting harder to keep news of the rape trial from Pia and her year-and-a-half-older sister Muskan.
When it happened, Pia was eight months old and living with her toddler sister, a mother who cleaned and cooked in the neighbourhood’s affluent houses and a father who worked on construction sites to earn a day’s wage.
The house hasn’t changed much since 2018.
There’s one room with a bed for the four of them to sleep in, a gas stove on the floor for cooking, and the crockery is stuffed under the bed. There’s a sliver of floor space along the length of the bed, where Madhav often stretches out a flat-woven rug to sit, cross-legged, on summer evenings and enjoy the breeze. The focal point of the room is usually the large television screen mounted on the wall opposite the bed.
Then there’s the open terrace, which divides the house – two floors beneath them and one floor above. A tiny staircase cuts through the terrace, so anyone going up or down must cross the terrace.
Over the years, I’ve seen the adornments on the terrace evolve with the family – from school-age buckle-ballerinas, scuffed from playtime and a second-hand cooler too, when money came in, to racks and shelves for storage and potted plants that Rakhi nurses with pride.
That day in January 2018 was a Sunday, and Madhav and Rakhi left for their respective jobs, entrusting the children to the care of Madhav’s extended family, a common practice. They shared the family home with Madhav's two older brothers, their wives and their children.
A few hours later, when Rakhi returned, she heard loud, relentless screams as she walked up the stairs to her home. She hurried to see what was wrong and was horrified to find Pia lying in a pool of blood and excrement. Muskan was on the terrace.
“I immediately walked out and shouted for Suraj,” Rakhi said, referring to the then-28-year-old son of Madhav’s eldest brother, who lived in the tiny room on the floor above.
Rakhi screamed with desperation, and when Suraj emerged from downstairs, walking past her to his room, she asked: “Suraj, did you enter my room?”
According to Rakhi, Suraj averted his gaze and muttered something about calling his wife. A few minutes later, one of Rakhi’s sisters-in-law appeared, and Suraj slipped away to his room upstairs.
“She’s just had a bowel movement,” the sister-in-law said, but Rakhi knew it was much worse.
Rakhi quickly called her husband and then took her two daughters to the home of a kind, older woman for whom she worked.
“She took one look at Pia and said that I should find a doctor in haste. So, I did,” Rakhi explained.
The doctor at the neighbourhood clinic performed a quick examination and urged Rakhi to go to the police – so she went to Netaji Subhash Place police station.
“It felt like everyone else knew before I could articulate the words – before I could even say the words aloud to someone – that my baby had been raped.”
Under the supervision of Additional Sub Inspector (ASI) Parvati Devi – who would later become Investigating Officer (IO) on the case – a First Information Report (FIR) was filed under Section 6 of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act of 2012, and other relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code. Pia was quickly admitted to the nearby Kalavati Saran Children’s Hospital for inspection and treatment.
It felt like everyone else knew before I could articulate the words – before I could even say the words aloud to someone – that my baby had been raped.
“I knew it was Suraj,” Rakhi insisted that first afternoon we met, and I’ve since asked what made her so sure.
“The way he was ambling in the gully and couldn’t look me in the eye. Also, he was drunk,” she said.
Madhav quietly piped up. In my eight years of knowing them, Rakhi has always been the more garrulous, more rambunctious of the two.
“I don’t blame the alcohol, Didi,” he said. “Everyone drinks – I have too. But how do you do such an abominable thing? When the police later came for him, he said he’d done it, but only under the influence of liquor. You tell me, how can that be an excuse?”
Startling Statistics
- Child rape cases in India nearly doubled between 2016 and 2023, from 19,765 to 40,434.
- The perpetrator is known to the victim in 97% of rape cases in India.
- Nearly 40,000 cases of child rape and penetrative sexual assaults are registered each year.
- But only 3% of those cases lead to a conviction.
Source: National Crime Records Bureau
Rape, outrage (and silence)
Cataclysmic shifts occurred in the days and weeks after the rape. The capital had seen aberrant acts of sexual violence before. In 2012, a 23-year-old physiotherapy student was gang-raped and thrown out of a moving bus.
Nicknamed “Nirbhaya” (fearless), her death led to the passage of a new law: the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013. Despite the public outcry, sexual violence remains a problem. In 2023, the National Crime Records Bureau found Delhi at the top of the list for reported rapes in 19 metropolitan cities.
Immediate, seismic outrage was still how the public reacted to such crimes – and rallies swarmed the capital in response to Pia’s assault, spilling over into nearby towns. The Delhi Commission for Women launched a Rape Roko (“Stop Rape”) campaign – and my newsroom took to calling Pia “Chhutki” (little one).
The news quickly spread beyond India. The BBC reported on Pia’s “three-hour operation” and her “cries in the hospital”. Al Jazeera reported that Pia had to be put “on life support” with life-threatening injuries. The New York Times wrote of the “anguish and outcry” over Pia’s case in the capital.
Suraj confessed to the rape the same day the FIR was filed and was taken into custody, the police said.
Swati Maliwal, then chair of the Delhi Commission for Women, tweeted: “The worst has happened. An 8-month-old baby has been brutally raped…Going to the hospital to meet her. Am totally numb. Terrified to face her”.
She would later tell Al Jazeera that she felt a visceral reaction to Pia’s rape, as if she herself had been violated.
A few weeks after first meeting Rakhi and Madhav, I met the family in the corridors of AIIMS Hospital in New Delhi, where Pia was transferred following a Supreme Court directive. There, Pia had two additional operations, in addition to the emergency three-hour operation at Kalavati.
Legal help was also building. A Supreme Court bench, headed by then-Chief Justice of India Dipak Mishra, heard a petition for compensation for Pia and urged AIIMS Hospital to provide free medical treatment. [The Delhi Legal Services Authority eventually paid an
interim sum of 75,000 rupees ($788) to the family, even as a plea in the top court continued to seek compensation worth 1,000,000 rupees ($10,514) for the family].
Maliwal also sent the family a personal cheque for 50,000 rupees ($526), and a couple of media outlets successfully crowdfunded to help cover the initial expenses.
Eventually, Pia was brought home swaddled in gauze and bandages, and she’s been kept in the dark ever since about what happened to her.
Suraj has remained in judicial custody since his arrest. He has only appeared in court when explicitly required by the judge, owing to the strict mandate of maintaining a child-friendly atmosphere in a POCSO courtroom.
Since 2018, however, the once-large circle of support that encompassed Pia’s family has dissipated; the rallies and marches are just distant echoes as their story fades from public memory. While the city and the world have moved on to other crises, Rakhi, Madhav, Pia and Muskan remain in the same old one-room home – a microcosm of a rape they can never leave behind.
Courts, YouTube and broken time
“This is the app, Didi, the one I was telling you about.”
One Sunday, over a customary lunch, Madhav thrust his smartphone at me and waited patiently as I scrolled the page. It’s called “eCourts Services”, and when I entered the case number, as prompted, I was greeted by a flurry of details, presented neatly in a table, and in order of the earliest to the most recent court hearings.
The family's first hearing was on March 12, 2018, over eight years ago, back when Madhav and Rakhi were both testifying and insisting to prosecutors that they would be present every day in court. That eventually changed when someone on the legal team chided them for subjecting their tiny kids to the rigours of court and the arduous bus journey between Rohini District Court and home.
“What are we to do, Didi?” Madhav would ask. “It’s not like we can leave them at home anymore.”
Madhav was showing me all the information he could now find online.
It’s not like we can leave them at home anymore.
“A relative who works in court told me it was helpful – and then, once I’d downloaded it, I looked up how to use it on YouTube,” he said.
This was a relief because, for many years, the rigmarole of the hospital, police and courtroom could easily befuddle the family, leaving them out of the loop.
I remember how it started – with a dizzying flood of medical and legal info that threatened to swallow them whole.
The FIR and the doctors at AIIMS, for example, both noted that the rape had caused a perineal tear in Pia’s body – a laceration between the vaginal opening and anus that caused her to pass stool and urine from the same opening.
In early operations, a team of doctors managed to seal it and craft a temporary, “artificial” perforation in her lower abdomen that helped eight-month-old Pia urinate and defecate. That temporary perforation was sealed months later.
If Rakhi felt the weight of tending to the gauze and bandages that swathed her baby – dressings she had to clean and redo several times a day – she never said so.
Instead, she showed her anger through her steadfast presence in court, packing both of her young children into her arms and heading to the courtroom, whether they had been summoned or not. I would go with them and sit on a wooden bench outside the POCSO courtroom with the parents, watching Pia and Muskan pirouette in their frocks.
Under India’s federal structure of government, the central government – through the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act of 2000 – mandates each state’s Child Welfare Committee appoint a non-governmental organisation or a social worker to protect a child’s interests in court. The NGO, in turn, appoints a lawyer to advise the family during the trial.
Accordingly, Pia was represented not only by a public prosecution team – I’ve seen that team shift over the years with administrative transfers and postings – but also by the HAQ Centre for Child Rights, the NGO, and a legal team it invited. Yet, through all of the government’s tactics, public prosecutor Raj Kataria – who's no longer on the prosecutor’s team – often said Rakhi was the driving force behind the case’s early progress.
“If Pia’s mother hadn’t been the way she is,” Kataria said, “then I might not have been able to take the case to where it is today. Every mother should be like that woman: She doesn’t give up – even when the rest of the family live in the same house and exert pressure on them to retract their statements”.
That family pressure hasn’t always been overt, but it has taken shape during conversations that began with arguments over common staircases. These evolved into demands that the couple “take back” the allegations so as not to besmirch the family name.
At times, it has been more insidious – like when Rakhi said she was told that she should have been at home instead of away at work if she wanted to protect her baby.
“(My sisters-in-law) asked me why I felt the need to make money, when Madhav also worked: Did he not make enough?”
Consequently, Rakhi has not left home for work since that day in 2018. I have asked whether she missed it, but her answer was always the same: How can she, when the kids are so young and might be left alone?
That misplaced sense of internalised shame has found expression in other forms of public resistance. A couple of months ago, for example, Rakhi called to ask if I could help her set up a YouTube channel.
Those channels are really taking off, she told me, noting how they spout social messages while providing light entertainment. She said she might start uploading videos of the girls singing, dancing and drawing before moving on to tougher subjects like rape.
She believed this would help drive awareness, much like the media does. She has missed meeting regularly with reporters – and answering their questions about Pia’s future.
I told her I would help, but before I could do so, I was sent a link from Rakhi and Madhav to follow their channel. A week later, during a routine visit, the parents complained that the channel had already been shut down.
Pia had gone “live” on her own a few times while her parents were in the room but not onscreen. After a few warnings about YouTube violations and unabated livestreaming (the platform safeguards against minors being live without adults also being in the frame), their channel was shut down.
I suggested that next time they accompany Pia onscreen as a workaround.
Imperfect survivors in an inadequate system
Rakhi and Madhav's resistance also spills out through phone calls – made persistently to whomever they deem to be “figures of authority”.
ASI Parvati, for instance, was the investigating officer on the case when the FIR was filed in 2018. Rakhi, Madhav and the kids seemed to take to her instantly, and she was their go-to for updates until she was transferred out of Netaji Subhash Police Station four years ago.
Eventually, the police officer had to gently point out to them that she had been transferred, that the investigation had concluded and that they might get more real-time news from their lawyers.
Still, until ASI Parvati moved away, she was at every event Rakhi and Madhav hosted, usually children’s birthday parties.
Parvati said she regretted not seeing the family more over the last four years. Nodding to their long wait for a legal outcome, she said she was sure they would see justice served.
“I’m sure there will be punishment – probably taking into account the fact that the accused has also already spent over seven years in custody,” she said.
As an IO, ASI Parvati will be the last police witness to testify and should, based on common practice, be the last prosecution witness to be cross-examined. The state’s trial against Suraj for the alleged rape of Pia continues: hearings are held every three months or so, with medical and police witnesses currently testifying.
If found guilty of committing penetrative sexual assault against a child under the age of 16, Suraj
might face a minimum term of 20 years in prison and up to a maximum of life (minus time served), as well as a fine to cover Pia’s medical expenses and rehabilitation.
Pia’s parents no longer attend court, as they are no longer needed for testimony. Instead, they check in with the prosecution team after each court day.
Ashish Kumar, director of Legal Interventions at HAQ, the NGO assisting the family in the trial, said Parvati missed her last court summons. But given other recent holdups in the trial, he thinks she will be summoned again later.
“Police made mistakes in evidence collection that have been brought up by the defence,” he said.
“Those errors have set us back. The IO will probably have to be summoned later, once these holdups have been addressed.”
The POCSO mandates that each state government, in consultation with the chief justice of that state’s high court, designate “Special Courts” for speedy trials. Each district must have at least one Court of Session designated as a Special Court to try cases “in camera” – in closed chambers that protect the identity and dignity of children.
Among other provisions, it dictates the creation of a child-friendly atmosphere. The other significant mandate, under Section 35 (2), Chapter VIII of the POCSO Act, is that the Special Court “complete the trial, as far as possible, within a period of one year from the date of taking cognisance of the offence.”
In Pia’s case, that clearly has not happened.
Kumar blames the “pendency” of cases, the delay in processing cases that have been opened.
“Even if you push for an earlier date, judges often record that, due to heavy pendency, they are not inclined to give short (early) dates,” he said.
Delays due to “judicial insensitivity”, he said, are also common, referring to the use of victim-blaming language in court or the trivialisation of sexual violence.
“As an advocate working in matters of juvenile justice, I have children who have been in custody for years while cases drag on. Where is the sensitivity that there needs to be?” he asked, pointing out that the reason for creating the special courts was to ensure speedier justice and a child-friendly atmosphere.
“If we run them like regular criminal courts, then they have failed their purpose,” he added.
This is also a valid concern for the accused. Suraj, the accused in Pia’s rape case, has remained in custody for eight years without a conviction.
Like ASI (now retired) Parvati once did, Kumar and his small team of legal consultants receive frequent phone calls and WhatsApp messages from Rakhi and Madhav.
Mostly, the communications refer to arguments with their downstairs neighbours – extended family members and proponents of Suraj’s innocence. Over the past eight years, their relatives have maintained that the case has tainted their family honour and that, by continuing to pursue a trial against a family member instead of negotiating an out-of-court settlement, Rakhi and Madhav have irrevocably severed familial ties.
More recently, there have been fights over which family members can stake a claim to the joint property. A parallel civil dispute has played out in court between the family over the sharing of space. Raj Kataria, the former public prosecutor, said that led to the POCSO court dictating that the local police station set up closed-circuit television cameras at Rakhi and Madhav’s home entrances.
The couple is often found cross-legged and intensely staring at the giant surveillance screen that transmits grainy images of the gully outside. They scrutinise passing figures with something resembling paranoia. I’ve watched them toggle the television monitor, at the tap of a remote, between “regular” cable and their court-mandated CCTV.
The family fights have continued, resulting in regular calls to the police.
“The (Station House Officer) asks me what to do," said Kumar. "Sometimes, the fights are about the family switching off the downstairs water motor at 2am, causing [Rakhi and Madhav’s] taps to run dry,” he says. “There isn’t much more we can do, beyond urging them to move out.”
Authorities have sent social workers out to the couple, offering to help them look for another home in the neighbourhood.
“The property is divided by floors, and their entry and exits overlap – of course, there’s going to be tension,” Kumar said.
But Rakhi and Madhav have never agreed to move.
No way home
In April 2025, while I was out of town, I received frantic phone calls from Madhav, followed by WhatsApp messages asking me to call him back. When I rang, I was told that Suraj had received bail for exactly six hours, as mandated by the court, to attend his sister’s wedding.
Paralysed by fear, Madhav and Rakhi were teetering between leaving and staying put. Ultimately, they decided to stay at home.
The lawyers told me that Suraj’s bail application had been approved for the very specific purpose of attending the wedding. All of his previous bail applications had been denied. This approval meant he would be in geographical proximity to Pia but under stringent police surveillance.
Suraj’s bail condition also stated that he could only be present at the wedding venue, a neighbourhood park, and that he could not go to the house. The prosecution had also secured police protection for Pia and her family.
After Kumar told me of the repeated calls to authorities, I was reminded of this wedding day, a day of terror for Rakhi and Madhav, when they locked themselves at home and studied their CCTV feed.
So, when I spoke with them next, I asked the same question I’ve been asking for years, the same question their confidants have been asking: Do you want to move?
The answer has varied. Some days, Madhav has said he’d like to move.
“The children are growing older, and they might figure things out. Already, we see Pia attempting to eavesdrop when she thinks we can’t see her,” he has acknowledged.
I’ve seen it, too. Trapped in the confines of their eight-by-eight room and resorting to vague euphemisms about rape, family and the trial, Rakhi and Madhav barter confidences as Pia and Muskan clatter in the background. Eventually, a little lone figure breaks free, inching closer towards the sound of her name – and her parents fall silent.
Other times, the answer’s different, hardened: “This is our home too – how can we just leave? How can we leave before we see justice served, from the very spot where our lives were first taken from us?” Rakhi has argued.
So, they seesaw between seeing this eight-by-eight as their home and dreaming of somewhere new.
As the family pores over bank transcripts and court documents in their cramped quarters, Rakhi and Madhav’s heads bent together over the years, the complexity of their situation is undeniable: Pia and Muskan might be growing up, and Suraj remains in jail as an interminable trial drags on, but for Rakhi and Madhav, time remains frozen in January 2018.
As for telling Pia what happened to her? Her parents simply say, “Not right now.”
The names of the survivor and her family have been changed to protect their privacy.
<small>Source: Al Jazeera</small>
