Self-immolation: The last petition
A 20-year-old B.Ed student from Odisha’s Fakir Mohan (Autonomous) College is dead. She burned. Herself. Outside the principal's office. In full view of the institution that failed her. She suffered 95% burns after setting herself on fire on July 12 during a student protest. She had reported sexual harassment by the Head of her Department. She followed institutional protocol. She filed complaints. She knocked on every door that was supposed to protect her. Every one of them closed. The college principal did not act. The system did not listen. The government remained indifferent until the girl turned herself into a torch, an indictment in flames. She died at AIIMS Bhubaneswar on July 14.
Please know that this is not an isolated tragedy. It is a failure by design. What drove a young woman to pour petrol over her own body and strike a match was not only the act of harassment. It was the cold impunity that followed. The silence. The gaslighting. The bureaucratic inertia wrapped in academic titles. She did everything a 'good victim' is supposed to do: complain, report, wait. What she received in return was humiliation. Delay and dismissal.
Let me be clear. This is not a story of individual guilt alone. This is a story of structural rot. When survivors are forced to die in protest, the system should not be considered broken. It should be understood as "actively complicit". The law criminalizes sexual harassment. Institutions trivialize it.
Under India's POSH Act and BNS, sexual harassment is a punishable offense. But statutes mean nothing if internal complaints committees are a sham, and if college administrators treat complaints like smears on their reputation instead of red flags demanding redressal. We must stop pretending that compliance on paper equals justice in practice. And let’s not ignore the geography here. This happened in Balasore, Odisha. In a state where women from marginalized regions routinely face multiple layers of discrimination. Where access to power structures is restricted not only by gender, but by class, caste, and rural dislocation. Not only was she fighting the predator of power, but she was also fighting a culture that trains women to be silent, polite, and endlessly patient in the face of abuse.
And. Her body was the final petition. In patriarchal societies, the female body is always in negotiation... subsumed by rape culture, owned by institutions, scrutinized by communities, and violated by those in power. When no space remains for language, for law, for justice; the body becomes the last remaining medium to speak through. This is not madness. This is a response to maddening conditions.
Self-immolation is not just despair. It is a scream written in fire. A radical, horrifying refusal to be erased quietly. To be a woman in India, especially a young woman in a power-imbalanced institution, is to live in a state of constant psychic tension. You're expected to endure, adjust, preserve “dignity,” even as your body is objectified, your voice invalidated. And when you resist? You’re labeled unstable, attention-seeking, dramatic. Until you set yourself on fire. Then they believe you. But it’s too late. Too late for the woman whose body bore the burden of proof. Too convenient for the system that only listens when silence is shattered by fire. By the time institutions act, the girl is already ashes, and the paperwork begins.
In India, a woman’s suffering must become spectacular before it is believed. The quiet endurance of everyday violence in lewd remarks, leering glances, coercive touches is dismissed as exaggeration. But when her body becomes the battleground, when pain spills into public space, only then does society take notice. This is not justice. This is necropolitics. The state doesn’t protect women; it manages and registers their deaths. It responds only when her trauma becomes uncontainable, when her body is charred, her story impossible to bury under red tape. And even then, the institution does not weep. It calculates. It commodifies her pain into press statements, committee hearings, election debates. Turns her plight and struggles into props to win arguments. Her death becomes a spectacle. Her life remains unheard.
“Too tragic to ignore, too disruptive to admit blame.”
Please remember all the other girls and women who have self-immolated themselves as a final act of their relentless pursuit of justice. We owe this girl justice. And all other girls and women who were pushed to the point of setting themselves ablaze by the system.
Not just symbolic. Not just procedural. But real accountability, structural overhaul, and institutional repentance. Her death is a scar on all of us. And no condolence note will cauterize it.
When women dare to speak or seek justice, this "unnameable" system hands them the matchstick, then begins the business of justice over their ashes.
[The end.]