Diya Sharma was twenty-three, the eldest daughter of a lower-middle-class family in a small Uttar Pradesh town. Her father’s small kirana shop struggled under mounting debts after a bad monsoon season, and her younger brother needed money for engineering college. Diya herself had dreams — she wanted to complete her Masters in Political Science and maybe even crack the civil services one day. Ambitious, soft-spoken, and innocent in the ways of the world, she still wore simple cotton salwar kameez, tied her long black hair in a neat braid, and blushed deeply at anything remotely improper.

That changed the day she attended a local political rally.