In times of war, the rules of rape change. There is no need for secrecy or concealment. The men, usually soldiers, who rape form a band of brothers; they know they will not be held accountable. Other crimes might come back to haunt them, but not rape.

Darfur, Rwanda, Bosnia: if you drew a map of the world that marked places where crimes had been committed against women, these places would form knots of scar tissue.

In Sudan, the militia known as the ?Janjawid? rape women as a matter of routine. The government claimed recently that Darfur, where the conflict is centred, had seen only two cases of rape. But an Amnesty team recorded 250 cases of rape from just three relief camps in the Darfur area. Women in Sudan are especially vulnerable. They are the chief providers and firewood collectors; many women have been waylaid on their way to the forest, to draw water, to outdoor toilet areas, and even, cruelly, on their way to seek medical help after being raped.

Filing a police case in an area where Islamic law is adhered to strictly, and demands that a raped woman produce four witnesses to the crime, is almost impossible. And there is no support: rape is seen as an act that shames the woman, her family and the entire community. Silence wins over justice.

Then there?s the recent Amnesty report on the Democratic Republic of Congo. It?s estimated in six years of war, over 40,000 women have been raped or used as sex slaves. Like the government in Sudan, the government in the Congo sees rape as a minor, even insignificant, issue: few rapes are recorded. And both arenas of war report that torture is used casually, as a means of forcing women to submit to rape.

From the Geneva Convention onwards, rape has been considered a serious crime of war. In 1998, a tribunal in Rwanda found a former mayor guilty of genocide on nine counts ? including rape. It was the first time in contemporary human history that rape was found to be an act of genocide.

The events of February 2002 in Gujarat have been described as genocide, if not war. Two years after the massacre of Muslims in ?revenge? for the slaughter of train passengers in Godhra, witnesses to what happened in Best Bakery, Naroda Patia and Gulbarga are finally being heard.

As independent human rights groups and scholars like Tanika Sarkar, Martha Nussbaum and Flavia Agnes have testified from March 2002 onwards, the Gujarat riots were marked by unprecedented violence against women. In case after case, they narrated the same story: of torture, abuse and rape, followed by murder. ?Leave no evidence,? said one rioter before setting on fire women who had already been raped.

What separates the mass rapes of women in Gujarat from the those of women in Darfur, in Bosnia, in the Congo? The rapists in those instances have remained unpunished. But in Gujarat, not all the ?evidence? was burnt alive, and India has better courts than Sudan or the Congo. Bring the rapists of Gujarat to book. In times of war, rapists and murderers might escape justice. In times of peace, they shouldn?t be allowed to walk free.