Four districts. Four girls. One week in which they all surfaced. In each case, the same scene: a girl stopped in an open public space, in daylight, by men who decided they had the right to question her, touch her and hold her there. In three of the four, somebody filmed it.
In Jamui, a Class X girl and her classmate were allegedly stopped on September 19 on their way back from coaching, then abused and assaulted. In Darbhanga, two men on a motorcycle allegedly tried to pull a schoolgirl’s dupatta off as she walked to school. In Samastipur, a girl was surrounded on a village road and dragged back every time she tried to walk away. At Banka’s Mandar Hill, police say three youths grabbed a young woman’s hand, abused and threatened her, then made her friend pay ₹1,500 online before letting the group go.
So the straight question: How safe is a girl on a Bihar road today?
Times Now Digital put the same question to Bihar Chief Minister Samrat Choudhary. Response AWAITED.
A father’s verdict
The most damning answer so far has come from a home in Jamui. The girl’s father told Times Now Digital that a “half encounter” is not enough, a reference to the main accused being shot in the leg, and that now the video has gone viral, it has become difficult for his daughter to study in the district at all. The men who stopped her are in custody. She, in effect, is the one who has lost her freedom of movement.
The opposition has seized on exactly that. Rahul Gandhi demanded the Bihar government explain “why a girl is not safe on a public road at 7 pm.” Priyanka Gandhi Vadra said there is “no point talking about big schemes and programmes” if women are not safe on the streets. Tejashwi Yadav called the Chief Minister “foolish and inept”. The RJD’s Sarika Paswan, in a statement to Times Now Digital, turned the NDA’s oldest weapon back on it: “What kind of environment is the present government creating where such men feel empowered to openly violate the dignity and safety of women? When perpetrators believe that they can act with impunity, it reflects not merely an individual failure but a failure of deterrence, policing and governance. The government must answer why women and girls are repeatedly being subjected to such incidents in public spaces.
“If this is not Jungleraaj what is?”
The promise of 2005
It is a fair question, because Jungleraj was never just an insult. In November 2005, the Nitish Kumar-led NDA ended 15 years of Lalu-Rabri rule on that one word. It promised ‘sushasan’: criminals behind bars, roads you could use after dark, and girls who could leave home without fear. Its most powerful symbol was a schoolgirl on a government-issued bicycle, pedalling to class.
Two decades on, the NDA still governs, under Samrat Choudhary, Bihar’s first BJP Chief Minister, who has kept the Home department for himself. He cannot call the record inherited. He was Deputy Chief Minister from 2024 and held Home in the Nitish cabinet dissolved in April. The police answer to him. So do the numbers.
NCRB’s Crime in India 2024 recorded 27,359 crimes against women in Bihar, up from 20,222 in 2022, a rise of more than a third in two years. At the end of 2024, 1,44,844 such cases were pending in Bihar’s courts, a pendency rate of 97.9 per cent.
The India Justice Report 2025 finds Bihar spends less per head on police and judiciary than any other state. More FIRs can mean more women are daring to report. A 97.9 per cent pendency rate cannot be explained that way. It tells a victim that justice, if it comes, will come late.
What the ruling side has offered
Faced with this, the Chief Minister took aim at “reel heroes” on September 22 and promised that anyone who challenges his police will get a response within 24 hours. Two days later, after meeting the Jamui girl and her family in Patna, he posted a photograph of himself with the minor and her family on X, then deleted it. Yes, Team CM posted photo, violating the POCSO Act, which shields child victims’ identities.
My “head is held with shame as a Bihari,” Dr Nikhil Anand, the state BJP leader and national general secretary of the party’s OBC Morcha, told Times Now Digital. He blamed the mindset of ordinary citizens and a feudal, patriarchal, casteist social order. Then he offered his remedy: the accused should be “openly paraded and beaten mercilessly in the local vicinity where the incident took place,” and “their houses must be bulldozed.”
Pause on that. Twenty years after the NDA won power by promising the rule of law, a ruling-party leader’s answer to mob harassment is a mob. The Supreme Court ruled in November 2024 that demolishing an accused person’s home as punishment, without due process, is unconstitutional. And in Jamui, three of the five people held are minors.
Anand said that the “Bihar government has taken swift action, and all the culprits involved involved in the incident have been caught, and a speedy trial is being initiated by the state government.”
A data check here.
Bihar’s real failure shows up after the arrests. At the end of 2024, 1,44,844 cases of crimes against women were pending in its courts, a pendency rate of 97.9 per cent. Another 24,782 were still awaiting police investigation, according to National Crime Records Bureau data.
The India Justice Report 2025 found that 71 per cent of Bihar’s district court cases had been pending for more than three years, the worst in India, and that Bihar spends less per head on police and the judiciary than any other state. An encounter makes a headline. A conviction takes years, if it comes at all.
Police Action = Viral Video?
Arrests did follow quickly once each clip surfaced. That is precisely the problem. Police say the Samastipur assault happened on September 15; the arrests came after the video went viral eight days later. The Banka incident, by the police’s own date, happened on June 3 and reached them only on September 22, on WhatsApp. Darbhanga, the one case with no viral video, was cracked within hours because passersby raised the alarm, not because the state was watching.
“Arrests after videos go viral cannot be the government’s definition of women’s safety,” Paswan said. On this point, the evidence is on her side. If a girl’s safety becomes a priority only once a clip goes viral, the system is not preventing crime. It is managing outrage.”
In 2005, Bihar voted for a promise that a girl could cycle to school and come home safe. In 2026, a Class X girl in Jamui cannot comfortably go to school in her own district, and a ruling-party leader wants the answer written in bruises and rubble.
That is not ‘sushasan’. It is the thing ‘sushasan’ was elected to end.