A CRUSADE FOR JUSTICE
IN 2017, KARUNA NUNDY WROTE AN OPEN LETTER TO INDIAN WOMEN, LAYING out the protections in the country’s constitution if they are raped, assaulted, seeking an abortion, or demanding fair treatment from an employer. “I write to you today so you will know your power,” she wrote. “The State must enforce your basic rights, but you are in charge of your flourishing. Promise me you’ll back yourself when nobody else will.”
“I was thinking about my niece, my friend, my cousin, my client,” recalls the 45-year-old lawyer at the Supreme Court of India, sitting on her leafy green balcony in South Delhi in March. “What I wanted to say to them is that they deserve to be who they are, without having to fit into a box.”
Her readers seemed to take that message to heart. A month after the letter was published in a 26-year-old woman in Delhi found Nundy’s number online and called her. She told Nundy she had been raped by her husband every night since their arranged marriage two years earlier. “In India, people don’t see it as rape if you’re married,” she tells TIME over the phone five years on, requesting anonymity to speak freely about her experiences. Facing immense pressure from her family to make things work, she felt she had two options:
