India’s leading rights activist seeks to connect with advocates experienced in cases handling female perpetrators of legal abuse

by Piyush Mathur

Deepika Narayan Bhardwaj, India’s famed legal-rights activist and proponent of gender-neutral laws, has issued an open call asking other advocates to get in touch with her directly if they have been party to cases in which a woman or girl was revealed to have intentionally brought false accusations of rape, molestation, or child-sexual abuse against a person or persons.

Bhardwaj’s appeal was posted earlier today, July 14, 2026, on her LinkedIn profile—and the email address she included in it is as follows:

contactdeepikabhardwaj@gmail.com

This is a screenshot of Deepika Narayan Bhardwaj’s photo uploaded to her Facebook page.
(Photo credit: Public Domain)

The language in her appeal appears to focus on advocates who would have come across repeat female offenders in their cases: i.e., those women or girls who would have been determined to have ‘filed multiple rape/molestation/posco cases’ to extort money or cause pain to the falsely accused. However, she may end up being contacted by several advocates who would have handled cases involving women or girls who might be one-time offenders of the crime of filing and pursuing a fake gender-crime complaint.

Over the course of more than a decade, Bhardwaj has intermittently posted on her social media handles about several repeat offenders and the consequences of their actions on those on the receiving end. Along the way, partly because of her influential documentaries on related themes, she has painstakingly developed a substantial audience and collaborative network in India from pretty much all walks of life, including from élite echelons of India’s police establishment as well as among judges and politicians, aside from engineers, journalists, and lower-middle-class men (predominantly from quasi-‘vernacular’ quarters of an English-dominated India). Many women whose male relatives have been victimised by fake cases brought on by other women or girls have also come to support her.

Bhardwaj, who is the founding director of Ekam Nyaay Foundation, has not had great luck yet winning the confidence of India’s socio-humanistic academics, who tend to be uncomfortable with empirical facts challenging their ideological convictions or falling outside their discipline-entrenched and dominant interpretative frameworks. A software engineer by training, she appears to have had better luck finding receptive audience on the so-called ‘professional’ campuses, such as those of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) system.

This is a clickable screenshot of Deepika Narayan Bhardwaj’s LinkedIn post dated July 14, 2026.

India’s social-justice movement, especially in relation to gender, is evolving fast, however; it is gaining more and more transparency owing to social media and Close Circuit Television (CCTV), coupled with the efforts of Bhardwaj and some other like-minded activists and advocates. She is thus well-poised to garner greater support from Indians in the years ahead for her gender-neutral agenda in gender-related crimes. Her open call for networking with fellow advocates involved in these matters may turn out to be a key step in that direction.