On Monday, Bharatiya Janata Party leader Kailash Vijayvargiya said that the stalking and sexual harassment of two members of the Australian women’s cricket team in Madhya Pradesh’s Indore was a “lesson” for the authorities and the players.

On October 23, the two cricketers had stepped out of the hotel to visit a café when a man on a motorcycle started following them. He molested one of them before riding away.

To this, Vijayvargiya said: “Whenever a player steps out, just like when we step out, we tell a local. The players will also realise that in the future, if we step out, then we should tell the security or the local administration.”

The former BJP national general secretary said that the cricketers “should have been more careful”, adding that it was a “mistake” on their part as well, NDTV reported.

Similar iterations of this statement are rehashed over and over again by people in power in India whenever such an incident takes place. We have heard it before and we will hear it again: women’s safety lies in compliance with these unsaid rules.

Because, what Vijayvargiya said is what many women already live by.

We tell people where we are going. We share live locations. We dress “right”. We keep quiet and hope that we return home. Even when it is “just a first date”, we text our friends the name of the restaurant or share the man’s number.

When I was interning in Gurugram and living in Lajpat Nagar in Delhi, my mother would track my metro stops in real time. Later, when I worked in a Delhi newsroom where the shift ended at 1 am, she would stay awake in Bhopal until the office cab dropped me home.

One Sunday evening, I left my old office on Kasturba Gandhi Marg in central Delhi to take a walk. A man came near me and touched my stomach. I screamed at him and he ran away. Everyone in my office knew where I was, in the same place I would be most evenings – sometimes alone, sometimes with a friend.

I went back inside, cried in the washroom and took off my earrings and necklace, worried that someone might say I had been dressed “attractively”.

A friend in Mumbai, driving at night on Atal Setu, the “safer city”, we say, was stalked by two men in a brand new high-end car down the entire length of the bridge. When we asked a police constable about whether to file a complaint, he said we could, “but nothing will happen to them” since they were inside a car and “nothing really” had happened.

This, despite the fact that most of us follow the script and send “text me when you get home” as a kind of prayer. Without even realising it, going out becomes a performance: we choreograph our moves and rehearse our reactions, or rather, how not to react.

In an interview on The Graham Norton Show earlier this year when, after two male actors joked about self-defence, actress Saoirse Ronan said: “That’s what girls have to think about all the time.”

In 2018-’19, when I was working in Bhopal a male colleague on a bike was stopped late at night by a man who pulled out a knife.

He managed to speed away, unharmed.

The next day, when he narrated the story in the office, I remember that a group of us five or six women instinctively shared self-defence tricks with him, which we had learned without even meaning to.

Carry your key between your fingers as a sharp object. Do not open the car remotely if you are not right next to your vehicle. Lock your car as soon as you sit in it. Change your route if you notice someone unknown twice, there is nothing like coincidence.

The men were worried about how he had escaped such a situation, the women already knew what was needed to escape. The conversation ended with us letting him in on one basic rule: keep looking over your shoulder, smell the trouble before it finds you.

This conditioning starts early: toe the line, be a “good” girl, do not stay out too late, do not “attract attention”, do not laugh too loud.

The constant policing is unsolicited, everywhere and it becomes internalised.

We hear the same comments from politicians to perpetrators.

One of the convicts in the 2012 Delhi gangrape and murder case, Mukesh Singh, said in a BBC interview: “A decent girl won’t roam around at 9 o’clock at night. A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy is.”

But we know that sexual harassment is not about desire. It is about domination.

Indian courts have said this repeatedly that sexual harassment is an expression of power and not attraction. It is meant to humiliate, intimidate and remind women who controls the space.

The Vishaka Prevention of Sexual Harassment in Workplace guidelines came out of Bhanwari Devi’s case in 1997.

She was a saathin, a community worker, for Rajasthan government’s Women’s Development Programme and had tried to stop a child marriage when she was gangraped by upper caste men in her village. She was punished for defying social hierarchy. And this is not a fringe example, it is just one of the few stories we remember.

That is what this is really about: the power to make women feel small, to make them question their right to exist in public, to make their independence conditional.

Because in that same BBC interview, Mukesh Singh had said that “while being raped, the woman shouldn’t have fought back. She should have just remained silent and allowed the rape.”

I once attended a self-defence class where the trainer, a man with decades of experience and credentials, told us that the key to safety was to make ourselves seem “not worth the trouble”.

“The attacker will move on to someone else,” he said.

My safety, he implied, depended on someone else’s suffering. It was a quiet acceptance that something will happen, just make sure that it does not happen to you.

And I remember thinking of this a couple of years later outside my office in Noida Sector 10. I was crossing the road to take my cab when a man on a bike shouted something obscene and sped away. No touch, no contact, just a reminder that I could be shown my place at any moment. I was 21, happy to be working in a big city office and be independent. It took him three seconds to make me feel small.

I am also writing about it now because there has been a lot of discussion about how and why it happened to the two Australian women who are international players with privilege and protection, with a security detail. But it happens daily to Indian women – across classes and cities – on buses, at colleges, in offices, in markets, in hospitals, in villages, in dhabas, in public toilets, and the normalcy of it is sickening. We talk about it only when, suddenly, we are socially allowed to, because it is “trending”.

In all of this, there is a conversation we keep postponing, about the interventions needed at the school level, basic gender sensitisation and training that teaches children, of all genders, about equality, consent, respect and sexual education.

We need laws, yes, but we also need a conversation and cultural intervention that makes this behaviour an anomaly for the next generation.

It is convenient to blame unemployment, overpopulation and lack of education, and they matter, but they are only a part of the story.

The deeper problem is patriarchy, rooted in entitlement rather than ignorance, cutting across class and having its chokehold on the social norms that dictate us.

After the incident, Madhya Pradesh Cricket Association Secretary Sudhir Asnani said it was “truly inspiring to see the players rise above this painful experience and continue to compete with courage”.

Even in “painful experiences”, we admire and teach women resilience, tell them to brush it off, move on and not demand change. We are told to glorify endurance and swallow humiliation and not show anger.

To know that whatever is being allowed to us is an allowance and not a right.

And that if we step out of the line, there will always be a man on a motorcycle to show us our place.

Also read: Has rape outrage brought us to a dead end?

Here is a summary of last week’s top stories.

Nationwide SIR. The Election Commission announced that a special intensive revision of voter rolls will be carried out in 12 states and Union territories. The draft rolls will be published on December 9 and the final one on February 7, 2026.

The exercise will cover Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Goa, Puducherry, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Lakshadweep, Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar said.

Assembly polls are scheduled for Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Kerala, Assam and Puducherry next year.

Kumar said a separate order will be issued later for Assam, as the Citizenship Act has separate provisions for the state.

The Opposition has described the exercise as an “attempt to undermine democracy”.

The exercise was conducted in Bihar in recent months ahead of the Assembly elections in the state. At least 47 lakh voters in Bihar were excluded from the final electoral roll published by the Election Commission on September 30 after the revision of the list.

Jail, no bail? The Delhi Police alleged that the 2020 riots in the national capital were part of a coordinated “regime change operation” carried out under the guise of civil dissent. In an affidavit filed before the Supreme Court, the police opposed the bail pleas of activists Umar Khalid, Sharjeel Imam, Meeran Haider, Gulfisha Fatima and Shifa Ur Rehman.

The jailed activists had challenged a Delhi High Court judgement from September 2 that dismissed their bail applications. The police have alleged in their affidavit that Khalid was the chief conspirator and had mentored Imam in planning the first phase of the violence.

The affidavit also alleged that the accused sought to ignite communal tensions during the visit of United States President Donald Trump to “internationalise” the unrest.

On Friday, Khalid, Imam and Fatima told the court that they did not make calls for violence and had been behind bars for more than five years. The bench will continue hearing the matter next week.

Ghazala Jamil asks: are students and activists being punished for invoking their faith in the Constitution?

Also on Scroll last week

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