10th January 2025: On Wednesday afternoon, a joint demonstration by students and faculty demanding the suspension of alleged serial offender Assistant Professor Dhani Ram turned violent as several men armed with lathis, two of whom were identified as ABVP (student wing of BJP) members, chased and physically assaulted protesters.
Commerce TIC Dhani Ram, who has repeatedly been reported for harassment and academic abuse, allegedly stalked and assaulted a minor first year student on December 2nd 2024.
The outrage of Ramjas’ students and faculty has escalated since an inquiry by the college’s Internal Complaints Committee (ICC) in response to fresh allegations of sexual assault revealed 3 years worth of recorded complaints against the professor, all of which had been dismissed without official action. Commerce TIC Dhani Ram, who has repeatedly been reported for harassment and academic abuse, allegedly stalked and assaulted a minor first year student on December 2nd 2024.
The day after the assault took place, press releases from the PTI and ANI omitting evidence of ABVP’s involvement and downplaying the incident began circulating through mainstream media, with both also containing misleading claims regarding the professor’s resignation and suspension. Officially, no such announcement has been made from college authorities, and students have confirmed that Dhani Ram is still permitted to move freely through the campus. Ironically, the unofficial announcement that started the rumours was first shared by the Ramjas ABVP itself.
The blatant inaccuracy of the reports, coming from premier news agencies is evidence of the institutional machinery’s failure when it comes to sexual violence; the media’s silence over the last three years and present laxity regarding the assault of a minor by a professor at a central institute is part of a culture of impunity, where perpetrators are aided and emboldened by years of inaction in a complicit and apathetic system. Dhani Ram’s case is not an isolated incident, but part of a larger culture of impunity that has metastasized over the last few years in the Bharatiya Janata Party’s national rule.
Dhani Ram’s case is not an isolated incident, but part of a larger culture of impunity that has metastasized over the last few years in the Bharatiya Janata Party’s national rule.
The role of the Sangh Parivar in all components of what can only be described as a grand systems’ failure—from the release of influential serial rapists to the selective silence of central news agencies, the judicial protection of MPs and electoral candidates with assault cases against them, and the ABVP’s consistent presence in similar incidents of campus violence—raises a simple question: at what point does the political defence of abusers, become a defence of abuse itself?
At what point does impunity become an ideology?
Ramjas, IIT-BHU and the wrestlers’ protest—the gratuitous love story of BJP, ABVP and institutional predators
Despite identification, those responsible for the assault of 8th January at Ramjas, faced no official consequences. The prolonged inaction, added to the fact that they were comfortable carrying out the assault despite being significantly outnumbered and in the presence of several bystanders, has led students to allege the administration’s complicity.
‘Whenever the administration is incapable of directly suppressing these movements, it has time and again made use of goons to intimidate student organising, an example of which we also saw last year in the protests in BHU. ABVP and people aligned with it, in attacking the students today have proved that they stand with the perpetrators, the harassers, and all their claims of gender justice is a farce,’ said a student to DU Beat, one of the university’s independent student-run newspapers.
Ramjas Vice President Stanzin raised similar concerns: ‘We wish to ask why the ABVP is protecting sexual harassers and perpetrators. We further ask why the administration is complicit in the organised violence against common students?‘
‘This is not the first time this has happened,’ said Collective’s Arundhati Rajeev, who was present at the protest. Over the past few years, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad has made a habit of coming to the—frequently violent—defence of those accused or convicted of sexual crimes. ‘They are very few in number, but they can continue this [violence] because they have backing from the state, administration and BJP. And this is not the case with Delhi University alone. They did the same thing at IIT-BHU and also a while back with Brij Bhushan.’
In both cases, protests by outraged citizens and students were disrupted by the ABVP. Ramjas followed the same formula.
The cases referred to above are the shocking IIT-BHU gang rape and mass abuse of female wrestlers by former BJP MP Brij Bhushan. In both cases, protests by outraged citizens and students were disrupted by the ABVP. Ramjas followed the same formula.
Police interference was necessitated due to the disorder in Varanasi in November 2023 at a protest against the former, and in May earlier that year, similar scuffles disrupted the 2023 Wrestlers’ protest. Both instances, and now the violence at Ramjas, followed the same formula: the organisation parallelly held its own demonstrations against the perpetrators, while simultaneously assaulting protestors at primary locations.
From Dhani Ram to Ram Rahim—the Sangh Parivar’s politics of rape
As of 2024, more than a third of sitting MP’s with declared cases of rape, sexual assault, and abduction of women against them belong to the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party alone. One such MLA back in 2017 was Kuldeep Singh Sengar, whose conviction in the Unnao case had little effect on the victim’s family, whom the Yogi Adityanath government spared no expense massacring without consequence.
In 2025, the legacy that 2017’s Unnao victim and her relentless fight for justice have left behind is this: there are now two more ‘Unnao rape cases’ that need to be suffixed by year to tell apart, one victim burnt alive by her rapists out on bail, another’s mother shot dead by her rapists out on bail.
BJP MP Manoj Tiwari criticised the support Sengar received within the party in an interview with Samdish Bhatia for Scoopwhoop back in 2020. In the same interview, he defended former cabinet minister for Narendra Modi and current BJP MP MJ Akbar, who has been accused of sexual abuse and rape by more than a dozen women, including journalists Pallavi Gogoi and Priya Ramani. Tiwari called Gogoi’s accusations ‘made up‘, and said he believed that, ‘maximum rape cases are false.’ The video was deleted by Scoopwhoop.
In 2013, when two BJP leaders publicly tweeted their support to Asaram Bapu, Narendra Modi and then BJP president Rajnath Singh were left patching up the wounds on their campaign, establishing rules for spokespersons to prevent further embarrassments.
In 2013, when two BJP leaders publicly tweeted their support to Asaram Bapu, Narendra Modi and then BJP president Rajnath Singh were left patching up the wounds on their campaign, establishing rules for spokespersons to prevent further embarrassments. In 2018, two BJP ministers’ attendance of a rally in support of the Kathua rape accused became the subject of widespread criticism and controversy. Seven years later, the party no longer bothers to fraternise with rapists in secret, but garlands them in public as they walk out of jail, confident that the mainstream media will look the other way.
In the horrific rape and murder of a 19-year-old Dalit girl in Yogi Adityanath’s Uttar Pradesh back in 2020, while no action was taken against the BJP–ruled state’s police who forcibly cremated her, the journalist and eyewitness who broke the story was quietly dismissed from her job. Ramnath Goenka recipient Tanushree Pandey was taken off-air and called “stupid” by her editors at India Today for the same story that got her the prestigious award for investigative journalism. Three years later, three of the Hathras victim’s four rapists have been acquitted and released.
In April last year, nearly 3,000 videos of then Hassan MP Prajwal Revanna—who’d been endorsed for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections by Narendra Modi himself—raping countless women were circulated throughout the district the day it went to the polls. Two months later, his brother Suraj was arrested for sexually assaulting a man. Both were members of the JD(S), a legacy party and integral component of the BJP-led NDA’s campaign in Karnataka.
In October 2024, convicted rapist and accused murderer Ram Rahim Singh was released from jail under the ruling BJP government 4 days ahead of Haryana’s assembly elections, hoping to secure the votes of the Dera Sachcha Sauda Chief’s following as they did in 2014. Soon after his release, Sunil Sangwan, the ex-jailer under whose tenure Singh received parole a staggering 6 times, joined the BJP and was announced their candidate for Charkhi Dadri; he won.
Coming full circle in 2025, Asaram Bapu is out of jail.
In many of the marches against the inaction of Bengal’s TMC government, were BJP workers themselves, joining hands and even leading the way.
Briefly last year, protests against India’s rampant rape culture—for it surely is India’s, not BJP’s alone—shook the nation after the brutal gang rape and murder of a young doctor named Moumita Debnath at her place of work, Kolkata’s RG Kar Hospital. In many of the marches against the inaction of Bengal’s TMC government, were BJP workers themselves, joining hands and even leading the way.
Even then, right wing counter–protestors stalked the marches not organised by the Sangh, yelling obscenities and sloganeering for Brahminism and patriarchy to live long and well. One such protest took place at DU’s north campus itself, marching right past the gates of Ramjas, where unbeknownst to student protestors, Dhani Ram called up female students in the night they were trying to reclaim, and made them clear out the call records and pornography on his phone the following day.
Dhani Ram is no more than another in a long list of abusers in positions of power—in addition to being the former Dean of Student Welfare, and the tenured TIC of his department, Edex also stated that he was the warden of a girls’ hostel and part of the Teacher’s Association despite his notoriety—whose alleged connections with the incumbent government and RSS seem to bring India’s right scrambling to their defence.
