Every year as Navratri approaches, a familiar set of captions floods social media: “They worship goddesses but rape women.” “Nine days of worship, 365 days of misogyny.” “A country that bows before Durga cannot keep its daughters safe.” In October 2020, Deepika Rajawat, a Jammu lawyer, posted a two-panel cartoon: in one, a man bows at a goddess’s feet during Navratri; in the other, he lays hands on a woman. The caption read “Irony”. Defending it, she asked: “Don’t rapes happen?”
They do, and such posts are offered as uncomfortable truths that expose the hypocrisy of Hindu society. The language is provocative and the verdict is delivered before the discussion begins. But when the subject is rape, should we settle for a caption, or should we examine the crime, the perpetrators, the failures of justice and the attitudes that allow sexual violence to persist? The caption does none of this.
It names a festival instead of a culprit.
The caption assumes that worship of the Goddess and contempt for women sit comfortably together in the tradition. The texts that give Navratri its meaning say otherwise. The Devi Bhagavata Purana describes the observance as nine nights of fasting and devotion to the Goddess, including the honouring of young girls through Kumari Puja. In its third book, Rama, guided by Narada, keeps the nine-night vow and the Goddess appears to promise him victory over Ravana, the king who had abducted Sita. Navratri, in this telling, is not a public spectacle but worship directed towards the restoration of dharma.
The Devi Mahatmya, part of the Markandeya Purana and recited across India during Navratri, makes the point more directly. Its central story is about a demon king who decides a woman should be his. Shumbha hears of the Goddess’s beauty and sends a messenger to tell her to become his or his brother’s wife. When she refuses, he orders his general Dhumralochana to bring her by force, dragging her by the hair. She kills the general, then his armies, then Shumbha himself. The Goddess is not powerless, passive or dependent on male authority for her divinity; she is the power before which the gods themselves seek refuge. The festival’s own scripture is the story of a woman who refuses a man’s claim on her and destroys him for pressing it.
It is not a licence for rape. It is a war against it.
The contradiction between worshipping the Goddess and mistreating women is still a legitimate subject. It deserves far more serious attention than social-media mockery allows. If a society honours the feminine as divine, its treatment of living women should withstand scrutiny. What value does reverence have if it disappears when a woman demands dignity, safety and justice? That question applies to every family, institution and community that celebrates women symbolically and fails them in practice.
But the scrutiny must be consistent. If Navratri is the occasion to discuss sexual violence, then discuss sexual violence: who commits it, which institutions fail, which attitudes enable it. India registered 29,670 rape cases in 2023, about 81 a day, according to the National Crime Records Bureau. More than 90 per cent of cases of crimes against women before the courts were still pending at the end of that year. None of this appears in the caption. It swaps those questions for an easier one: what is wrong with people who worship a Goddess?
Criticism is not weakened by being precise. It is weakened when it relies on collective blame.
Why does this argument become so conspicuous during Navratri? Why does the festival become the headline, while the survivor’s pursuit of justice is reduced to a prop in an argument about religion? The timing of a criticism does not make it dishonest. But when the same community is the target of the same sweeping charge every year, it is reasonable to ask whether the purpose is to confront sexual violence or to use it as a weapon against a religious identity.
Those who invoke women’s suffering only to attack Hindu festivals should be asked a straightforward question: what, precisely, are you doing about sexual violence beyond the slogan? What reform are you demanding? Whose accountability are you seeking? If the answer begins and ends with ridiculing the worship of the Goddess, the discussion has drifted away from the woman whose suffering supposedly inspired it.
Rape does not begin with Navratri, and it does not end with Vijayadashami. One recent example is the August 2024 rape and murder of the postgraduate trainee doctor at R.G. Kar Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata. The case triggered nationwide outrage, prolonged doctors’ strikes, massive protests over hospital safety and alleged cover-ups, media coverage and political confrontation. Sanjay Roy was convicted of the rape and murder; investigations into possible conspiracy, financial irregularities, and the hurried cremation continued under the CBI into 2025–2026.
By September–October 2026, newer high-profile cases (particularly the cluster of assaults in Delhi, including the Aastha Kunj/Kalkaji park gang-rape and the Swaroop Nagar rape-murder) had largely shifted the intense public and media focus even while legal proceedings in the R.G. Kar matter remained ongoing.
This pattern—peak outrage followed by attention moving to the next case illustrates that sexual violence is a continuous, year-round problem, not something that begins or is confined to Navratri.
That women need safety at home, in schools, at work, on public transport and on the streets throughout the year. Survivors need protection from intimidation. Complaints need serious investigation. Institutions must be held accountable when they fail. None of this is achieved by nine days of viral outrage followed by a year of indifference.
Durga is worshipped as the destroyer of destructive forces. The least society can do is confront the forces that endanger living women. If the outrage is genuine, let it demand justice in February and May as well as October. Let it challenge perpetrators whatever their identity and institutions whatever their influence.
The question is not whether a society that worships a Goddess can still fail its women. Of course it can. The harder question is whether those who discover that failure every Navratri want to correct it, or merely want another occasion to condemn the civilisation.
