Agency, Harm, And Criminal Responsibility: A Feminist Re-Reading Of Govindaswamy V. State Of Kerala

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Ikshoo Jain, B.Com. LL.B. (Hons.), O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, Haryana

ABSTRACT

The Supreme Court’s decision in Govindaswamy v. State of Kerala, (2016) 14 SCC 222, arose from the rape, robbery, and death of Soumya, a young woman assaulted and thrown from a moving train. While the Court upheld convictions for rape and robbery, it acquitted the accused of murder on the ground that the prosecution had failed to establish a direct and proximate causal link between the sexual assault and the victim’s death. This paper offers a feminist jurisprudential critique of that reasoning. It argues that the Court’s insistence on strict evidentiary causation fragments what was, in reality, a single continuum of gendered violence. Through engagement with the scholarship of Catharine MacKinnon, Martha Nussbaum, and Kimberlé Crenshaw, and with Indian feminist legal scholars including Flavia Agnes, Ratna Kapur, Pratiksha Baxi, and Nivedita Menon, the paper demonstrates how patriarchal assumptions shape judicial understandings of agency, culpability, and victimhood. The analysis situates the judgment within India’s constitutional commitments to dignity and equality under Articles 14 and 21 and its international obligations under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). The paper concludes by proposing a contextual causation framework for sexual- violence homicide cases, drawing on comparative jurisprudence from South Africa and Canada, and calling for gender-sensitive judicial training and deeper constitutional integration in criminal adjudication.

Keywords: Causation, Feminist Jurisprudence, Sexual Violence, Govindaswamy, Article 21, CEDAW, Indian Criminal Law, Gender- Sensitive Adjudication.

83. AGENCY, HARM, AND CRIMINAL RESPONSIBILITY- A FEMINIST RE-READING OF GOVINDASWAMY V. ST

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