In 2002 a woman living inside one of the most powerful religious organisations in north India wrote an anonymous letter. She said the man at the top was raping his female followers. Every big newspaper refused to print it. A man who ran a small evening paper in Sirsa printed it. His name was Ram Chander Chhatrapati. He was 53. His paper was called Poora Sach, which means the whole truth. It was a local Hindi evening daily, a few pages, in the same town as the headquarters of Dera Sacha Sauda. The head of that Dera was Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh. He had millions of followers. Politicians visited him before elections. On 31st May 2002, Poora Sach published the letter. The threats started almost immediately. He kept publishing. On 23rd October 2002 he ran another report on the sexual exploitation of women at the Dera. The next evening, 24th October, 2 men came to his house on a scooter and shot him 4 times from close range. He died of his injuries on 21st November, in a hospital in Delhi. Most national newspapers barely noticed. His son Anshul was a young man. He went to court and asked for the case to be taken away from the local police and given to the CBI. The High Court agreed. Then came 16 years. In August 2017 Ram Rahim was convicted of raping 2 of his followers and sentenced to 20 years. His followers rioted across Haryana and Punjab. People died. In January 2019, a special CBI court in Panchkula convicted Ram Rahim and 3 others of Chhatrapati's murder and sentenced them all to life. His former driver had testified that he heard Ram Rahim order it. Anshul said afterwards that they had been waiting 16 or 17 years, and that they had suffered a great deal because the man they were fighting was so powerful. That should have been the end. It was not. On 7th March 2026, the Punjab and Haryana High Court acquitted Ram Rahim in the murder case. It upheld the life sentences of the 3 other men, including the man who fired the shots. So the people who pulled the trigger are guilty. The court did not find it proved who sent them. Ram Rahim is still in prison, serving his sentence for rape. Anshul has taken the case to the Supreme Court. In August 2026 the court issued notice to Ram Rahim. He has been fighting it since he was a young man. He is still fighting it. His father printed one letter that nobody else would touch. Everything that happened to Ram Rahim afterwards began with that page.

She noticed that you could go online and find out which restaurant to eat at. But if you had just been sexually assaulted in India, there was nowhere to look up what to do next. Not what to feel. What to actually do. Which police station. Which section of law. Whether a hospital could refuse you. Her name is Trisha Shetty. She was born in Mumbai on 16th September 1990. Her mother encouraged her, as a child, to speak up when she saw something unfair. She studied political science and psychology at Jai Hind College, then took a law degree at the University of Mumbai. In 2015 she started an organisation called SheSays. The idea was deliberately unglamorous. Not a march. Not a hashtag. A website that explains, in plain language and in several Indian languages, what the law actually says and what a survivor can do next. Which sections apply. What a police station is legally obliged to do. What a hospital cannot refuse. What happens at each stage if you file. That information existed before. It was scattered across legal databases and government documents written for lawyers. She put it in one place, in language a frightened 19 year old could read at 2 in the morning. Then the organisation went further. Staff started physically accompanying survivors and their families to police stations, hospitals and courts. Anyone who has been to an Indian police station to report something difficult knows why that matters more than any amount of legal text. A person sitting beside you changes how you are treated. SheSays also runs sexual violence prevention sessions in schools and workplaces, built around bystander intervention. What to do when you see something, rather than what to do after it has happened to you. The numbers she works against are grim. Fewer than 6% of incidents of sexual violence against women in India are reported to the police. She has been open about what the work has cost her personally. After she spoke publicly about marital rape, she has said people threatened to kill her, and said that this curly haired girl should be gang raped and thrown out of India. She kept going. She was an inaugural Obama Foundation Scholar at Columbia University. She has been named a United Nations Young Leader for the Sustainable Development Goals, and a Queen's Young Leader. Forbes put her on its 30 under 30 list. Vogue India named her Woman of the Year. In 2018 she became vice president of the steering committee of the Paris Peace Forum, and the following year its president. She turns 36 this week. She did not build a campaign. She built the thing that was missing, which was an instruction manual.