Joint statement by Project for a Revolutionary Marxist International Sri Lanka and Socialist India
Warning: the content within refers to harrowing cases of sexual assault, and could be potentially triggering.
Rage is boiling over across South Asia as women refuse to be silent in the face of repeated horrific acts of sexual violence. Last Monday, doctors at the Anuradhapura Teaching Hospital in Sri Lanka’s North Central Province walked off the job upon learning that one of their female colleagues had been raped at knifepoint after finishing her night shift.
The attack was not just an individual crime—it was a brutal reminder of the systemic insecurity faced by working women, including those in the medical profession, who are expected to serve society in what are supposed to be places of care and healing, but are too often exposed to the same dangers of harassment and violence that pervade society at large. By Wednesday, the doctors’ action had ignited a countrywide 24h-strike to show solidarity with the victim and demand greater workplace safety.
The echoes of last year’s uprising in India are unmistakable. When a young trainee doctor was brutally raped and murdered in a hospital in Kolkata, mass fury erupted into strikes by medical workers and waves of protests and vigils across the country. Only a few days after that case, a nurse in Uttarakhand endured a similar fate. Such atrocities are disturbingly common, even though many of them never reach national headlines.
In both Sri Lanka and India, these harrowing crimes were indeed no isolated incidents, but breaking points of a deeply entrenched reality of gendered violence enabled, normalised and excused by a system that is failing millions of women and girls every day.
The fact that endemic gender-based violence and the mass anger against it transcend national borders was further underscored by the parallel explosion of protests in Bangladesh, where an 8-year-old girl’s rape and subsequent death triggered mass outrage. For over a week widespread demonstrations and student boycotts have been rocking the country.
There again, the spark of this movement is not a standalone case, but the reflection of a common and terrifying occurrence. Since the protests begun, already several other rape cases involving minor victims have come to light, exposing just how deep the rot runs. According to the Law and Arbitration Center’s data, 3,438 child rape cases have been registered in Bangladesh in the past eight years —and this almost certainly just scratches the surface, as many such cases go unreported due to social stigma, fear of retaliation, and lack of faith in the justice system.
A systemic problem
Across South Asia, women and girls are forced to live in fear, both inside and outside of their homes. From domestic abuse and honor killings to workplace harassment, gangrapes and public assaults, no space is truly safe. As if this was not enough, when sexual violence occurs, it is not just the act itself that terrorizes—it is the near certainty that the state will respond with indifference at best, and complicity at worst, whether through obstructing justice or shielding perpetrators —when it is not engaged in the abuse itself.
In Sri Lanka, the perpetrator in the Anuradhapura case is an ex-soldier —a fact that carries chilling significance in a country where the state institutions, and the military in particular, have a long and well-documented history of systematic rape and sexual abuse, particularly targeting Tamil women. Decades of war crimes, enforced disappearances, and gendered atrocities in the North and East have entrenched a culture of impunity, where perpetrators of sexual violence—especially those tied to the state—are rarely, if ever, held accountable.
A similar pattern exists across the region: from Adivasi women routinely abused by paramilitaries in India’s so-called “counterinsurgency” zones, to female protesters subjected to gender-based harassment and violence by security forces during Bangladesh’s uprising last year, women are being taught in the cruelest terms that the State is not a solution, but an integral part of the problem.
While governments may occasionally pay lip service to women’s rights, they have consistently failed to address the deep-rooted misogyny that permeates their legal systems, law enforcement, and political and military institutions. Worse still, they often serve as direct perpetrators of violence, reinforcing patriarchal dominance through force and repression. In India-occupied Kashmir, for example, since 1990 Indian troops have gang-raped over 10,000 women, using sexual violence as a weapon of terror for decades.
This epidemic of violence is also shaped by caste, ethnic and religious oppression, which intersects with gender to produce particularly brutal forms of subjugation. Dalit women in India, for example, face disproportionately high rates of sexual violence, most often at the hands of dominant-caste men who see such brutality as a means of asserting their social superiority. According to the National Crime Records Bureau, Dalit women are raped at more than twice the rate of non-Dalit women, yet the vast majority of cases go unpunished due to the casteist bias of police and the judiciary. Likewise, in Bangladesh, the indigenous Jumma women of the Chittagong Hill Tracts have long been targeted for sexual violence by both the military and Bengali settlers in what human rights groups have described as a campaign of ethnic and gendered terror.
‘Liberty from rape and oppression’
The ongoing waves of protests, strikes, and student mobilizations show that women are refusing to accept the status quo, and in doing so, they are forging new forms of collective resistance. When workers walk off the job, when students shut down universities, when entire communities take to the streets, their latent collective power is being asserted against both the rapists and perpetrators of gender-based violence, and the institutions that have failed the survivors. But a fundamental question remains: how do we break the cycle where we are forced to return to the streets after every horrific act of violence? How do we make ‘liberty from rape and oppression’—as chanted by the students in Dhaka—not just a slogan, but a reality?
The challenge is to deepen and expand these struggles—to move beyond reactive moments of outrage, and forge a movement eventually strong and organised enough to dismantle once and for all the system that breeds this violence.
The political sea-changes in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka last year, with the coming to power of new governments following the overthrow of the Hasina and Rajapaksa dictatorships, have shown that even seemingly dramatic “changes of guard” at the top will amount to little without relentless mass struggle, pressure and organization from below —and as long as there isn’t a fundamental break with the capitalist and imperialist system within which these new governments continue to operate.
For example, in Sri Lanka, the worsening economic crisis has pushed thousands of women into desperate situations, with many turning to online sex work simply to survive. As living costs skyrocket and job opportunities shrink, the burden falls heaviest on those already most vulnerable. Yet instead of delivering on its campaign promise to renegotiate the IMF-imposed debt restructuring deal, Dissanayake’s new government has capitulated, pushing through yet another austerity budget in line with IMF dictates. This will only deepen economic hardship —one that women, as always, will be among the first to suffer.
So the problem goes far beyond a few rotten rulers, “misgovernance”, corrupt officials, security failures or outdated laws—although all these do play a role. At its core, it is about a deeply entrenched structure of gendered inequality, exploitation and control that allows for the systemic recurrence of such crimes throughout society.
Capitalism is a system that commodifies women’s body and labour for profit, while using social discipline and division to reproduce and maintain its rule. The fight against sexual violence cannot be separated from the fight against this inherently unjust and patriarchal system —one that drives millions of women into extreme poverty, unsafe and precarious work at the mercy of exploitative bosses, and unpaid domestic labour on a massive scale— nor from the struggle against its coercive state machinery and against the interwoven oppressions it relies on to keep women subjugated, and working people divided.
This struggle must be tied to the fight for democratic socialism—a society where wealth and resources would not be hoarded by a parasitic elite nor wasted to sustain the increasingly militarized violence of the state, but collectively controlled to meet human needs.
This would notably allow for the full funding of services (healthcare, education, housing, childcare, support and community centers, mental health support, transport, public lighting and road maintenance etc) that capitalist governments consistently neglect but which are essential to liberating women and gender-oppressed people from economic dependence, vulnerability and violence. Crucially, the workplace would no longer be a site of exploitation and harassment. Democratically controlled workplaces, where workers have the power to set conditions collectively, would eliminate the unchecked power of abusive bosses and managers.
Our fight knows no borders
The doctors’ strikes in Sri Lanka and India have proven that the fight against exploitation and the fight against misogyny and gender-based violence are inseparable. Yet they have showcased not just the potential strength, but also the current limitations of the workers’ movement.
When trade unions take up the fight against gender-based oppression and sexual violence —especially in highly feminised sectors like healthcare— they can rapidly lift workers’ confidence and wield significant power. In Sri Lanka, for example, the Anuradhapura hospital director was removed following the doctors’ strike. However, in both Sri Lanka and India, these strikes have largely remained confined to that sector alone.
Had the broader trade union movement in India gone beyond its passive stance and actively thrown its full weight behind the ‘Reclaim the Night’ movement on a national scale, it could have massively amplified the momentum generated in the medical sector. This would have posed a qualitatively different threat to the Indian ruling class—both at the state and central levels— and would have cut in its tracks the cynical efforts of the BJP (the party with the most egregious record of patriarchy, misogyny, and rape apologia in the country) to exploit the issue and pretend to care about the women of West Bengal.
All too often, trade unions and workers’ organizations relegate gender oppression and violence to the sidelines, treating them, at best, as a secondary issue. This must change! Sexual violence is not just a “women’s issue”—it is a societal issue, a class issue, a political issue, and the workers’ movement as a whole should be at the forefront of this battle —along with student, feminist, anticasteist and community organizations.
To win true liberation, the resistance must match the scale of the oppression. These struggles cannot remain sectoral, sporadic, or reactive. They must become a sustained, organized, international and unstoppable force—one that not only punishes individual perpetrators but challenges and overthrows the conditions that sustain their action, the entire edifice that breeds, protects, and profits from this brutality.
We stand in unconditional solidarity with every woman, worker, student, and community that has risen in defiance against this relentless violence. Not one more!